Spore will fail (according to the following article) This article from Gameplayer cracks me up… The author believes that Spore will tank. I don’t believe that for one minute. His reasons? Well, it’s not “The Sims”, lacks multiplayer, and the delays killed it. Spore aims to simulate the entire evolution of life. Gamers are given a planet and asked to play God, customizing, modifying and personalizing a range of critters from their microscopic phase right through to their super-intelligent, anal-probing, space-travelling end. Each user’s planet will be unique, with near limitless design options for their organism creations, not to mention the exponential differentiation that occurs from the ability to interbreed species. Finally, users will be able to upload their planet to a virtual galaxy, where other players can interact with it. Cool stuff, hey? We’ve had an opportunity to sit down with Will Wright and get a personal tour of his vision and it is arguably the most impressive project in development anywhere in the world, on any format. If he pulls it off it truly will be futuristic, mind-blowing stuff. But regardless of whether he hits his goals or not, Spore is a tough sell. Here’s the long and short of it: as a result of many reasons we will detail below, Spore has plonked itself right between the mainstream and the gamer audiences, but could end up attracting neither.
This is news? At least I might have received some credit for having made exactly the same arguments, right down to the details for my reasons for fearing a failure (and I use the word fearing deliberately ... I don't want to see it fail). I am still pretty much on fence as to how badly I want to buy into it when it is eventually released. Just making little critters is not enough to make a game and I have real and well-developed reasons for supposing that most, if not all of the game's phases will be too trivially easy for some players, too mind-numbingly uninteresting to others and simply too difficult for the rest. Please don't try to fool anyone, let alone yourself, that you will find at least one of the phases a bore to be quickly zoomed through. Furthermore, I feel that anyone who has the merest smidgeon of an acquaintance with the principles of evolution will quickly tire of the lack of rhyme and reason to the development of sim life. There can be no point of contact between Spore's mechanics and and mankind's various takes on the development of life on Earth, be it creationism or Darwinisn or some ******* hybrid of the two. It doesn't really matter whether the Creationists have the truth, or whether the Darwinists do. Both would be fully in agreement that their preferred theory is not arbitrary in the way it works. Spore is arbitrary, because the player has to manage a single germ-line; the player has no chance to experiment with four legs or six and see which is the better. I am sure it'll be a good game, but a great one to rival Sim City and The Sims? I, for one will be surprised if it achieves greatness.
Sorry, I'm still trying to learn the curves around here on what is news and what is not. Since I post about any single sim related news on my site, it's hard for me to figure out what is deserving to be posted over here
LOL, I had to hunt around to find my own quotes, to be sure I wasn't talking tommyrot. My comments were buried in the Sims 3 thread I opened a goodly few weeks ago with a poll ... the one that forced Josh to create a Sim 3 Forum ...
