SHADOWTEXT'S PROFILE

author=Karsuman link=topic=1866.msg31668#msg31668 date=1221423419

author=Shadowtext link=topic=1866.msg31664#msg31664 date=1221422735
Realism at the cost of fun is a sin that should be punishable by flogging. I do not want to play a medieval setting where my characters are constantly covered in dung and you stand a 60% chance of contracting the plague and getting a game over. I do not want to have to walk the entire distance of whatever world you've built just because you can't figure out a way to sensibly give me an airship. And I do not want to be stuck with no other options in battle than "attack" because you don't like wizards.

And when I say "I do not want," what I mean to say is "I will stop playing pretty quickly."

I am 100% sure this is not what Ocean was talking about when he said 'realism', ST.

Every time I hear someone trot out realism as a selling point or a thing to be aimed for in a video game, it's always for some amazingly innovative new feature like "Your character can have sudden heart attacks without warning" that makes a game fifty times more terrible. Forgive me if I tend to assume the worst when I hear people talking about it.

author=Darken link=topic=1860.msg31635#msg31635 date=1221412488
I'm also a person who has not been hyped. I just saw the presentation a few years ago and didn't get interested in getting spore til it came out. To put it in a non tl:dr way:

Imagine Civ without hotkeys, decent controls, or any depth whatsoever. Spore is just a bunch of mini games that could have been coded in flash, except 3D. The only good thing about the game as most people say, is the creature design. However, no matter how strange or cool you'll make your creature, it will have almost NO effect on the gameplay. Having large wings will not make it fly faster, having a large mouth will not make it eat slower or w/e.

Saying Spore will be good cause of expansions is just a way of saying "Yeah, you just bought a beta."

Spore already is good. The expansions will make it better. The creature creator and the ability to see the creatures, vehicles and buildings in action and trade them with other players is the entire point of the game, and you're acting like those are side elements. Spore is not a 4X game with a creature creator and social network on top of it. It's a creature creator and social network with some limited 4x elements.

Ultimately the distinction is going to come down this way: gamers will hate Spore, content creators will love it.

And GRS--the cell stage lasts all of thirty minutes(if you even bother to try to get all the parts) and is more of a tutorial than anything else. I'm not too concerned about the lack of user-generated content there.

author=narcodis link=topic=1860.msg31571#msg31571 date=1221371469
Spore is actually pretty damn cool. I don't see the reason for all the hate.

It's mostly hype backlash. Spore is at the very least an above average sim game with some really ambitious and well-implemented concepts in it that doesn't quite live up to being what everyone was hoping it would be, or what it has the potential to be.

I think a lot of the people who are so upset with it were honestly expecting something like Civ 4 or EVO, and it's not as strong a game as either of those in terms of the options of what you can do in-game, even though it gives you oodles more options in terms of what you can be in game.

...but unfortunately, for all the options of what you can be, most of them don't make much of a difference.

I'm looking forward to the inevitable expansion packs because I think Spore could be a lot more than what it is (which, at the moment, is a robust content-creation environment that gives you a handful of options about what to do with the content you create). But I can't help but wonder if an even better option wouldn't be if someone could take the Spore engine and creation tools and use them to make a better game out of them.

author=GreatRedSpirit link=topic=1860.msg31041#msg31041 date=1221197178
Ever go to those pages with torrents? Every seed, every downloading peer, is A LOST CUSTOMER TO PIRACY! So DRM is used so that it can't be pirated and EACH SEED/PEER WILL BUY THE GAME INSTEAD! It's SUPER PROFITS!

While this is more or less what the publishers believe, the fact that I have never heard of a DRM scheme that kept the hackers from getting out a cracked version within a week of release of the game (Spore's actually came out a week or two before the retail version, because of some stores in Australia breaking the street date), it's a big case of shenanigans. It's like that Terry Pratchett quote: "We got a cat because our garden had become contested territory for neighborhood cats, and we were told that our own cat would prevent the fighting. A moment's thought reveals the flaw in this line of thought."

Yeah, the Civ stage has become a road block for me largely because of how shallow it is. As a longtime Civ 4 player, it's hard to deal with something that has so much more potential than that...

...but this is Maxis. I'm sure an expansion pack will come along eventually, and hopefully that'll add some depth. Which doesn't make up for the lack of a fun experience in the Civ stage now, but might make up for it later.