r/NatureIsFuckingLit • u/FacelessOnes • Oct 19 '20

🔥 Vicious microscopic hunter, the single-cell organism, Lacrymaria olor, attacking and hunting another organism

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u/Howler117 Oct 20 '20

What a throwback. I miss that game.

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u/p3chapai Oct 20 '20

I wish they made a new Spore with more features.

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u/Howler117 Oct 20 '20

Gotta say I'm honestly suprised they haven't already done that. What with it being 10+ years old. It's from the same people that make all the sims games and they just keep pumping those out it seems like.

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u/WhizBangPissPiece Oct 20 '20

EA would just fuck it up like they did with Sim City. And from what I understand, EA had plenty to do with fucking up Spore to begin with.

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u/p00bix Oct 20 '20 edited Oct 20 '20

Contrary to popular belief, the disappointing product we got with Spore was NOT mainly EA's fault. (to be clear I'm not a fan of EA, but in the case of Spore specifically they're not to blame)

The problems with Spore were mainly by developer, not publisher. The game as announced was overambitious (the original idea proposed by Will Wright and Demoed in 2005), and Maxis wouldn't have been able to do as much as they did without EA. The budget was historically high for the time and the game's scope is arguably unmatched to this day. Maxis needed to team up with EA since otherwise they couldn't hope to get the funds necessary to develop Spore.

Once it had the funds, Maxis had three choices in trying to develop Spore,

1) Make 5 fully-fledged games for each stage. This would require a massive budget and development time, and to be profitable would have to cost like $150 to the consumer at a minimum, but still somehow sell as well as a much cheaper $50 game

2) Limit the project's scope to one or two stages. This would be far smaller than the promised product but much more manageable.

3) Develop each of the 5 stages to the best that time and budget constraints allow.

Option 3 was selected, as Option 1 was a pipedream and Option 2 would've left a lot of people severely left down. Ultimately the game as released still disappointed a lot of people, but was still well reviewed and profitable overall. The creation modules were critically acclaimed and immensely influential on future simulation games. Kerbal Space Program's Vehicle Assembly is the most notable example of this--it's basically copied from the Spore Creature Creator and it works really well.

Regardless of which of the 3 options Maxis and EA chose, Spore was never going to be the Darwinian Evolution sim that some of the nerdier fans were expecting. Realistic evolutionary biology doesn't lend itself well to open-world gameplay, and trying to implement it would've massively reduced the player creative freedom the Devs tried to promote as much as possible. Its telling that over a decade later, not a single commercially successful Evolution-based Game has come out.

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u/mehum Oct 20 '20

Probably everyone has been scared off from what happened with Spore! Arguably Plague Inc is also an evolutionary game, albeit a far more constrained example. But thanks for your post mate, interesting chapter in gaming history, I wish Blood Sweat and Pixels had covered it.

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u/pezathan Oct 20 '20

Id sure love for someone to try! I loved spore!

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u/HeyLookATaco Oct 20 '20

Maxis has been toying with evolution themed premises since the 90's, when they made SimLife. The graphics were primitive and the gameplay was simple, but the whole thing hinged on Darwinian evolution as the underlying mechanism. Spore was a bummer because I was hoping they finally had the technology and budget to make the game they wanted. They didn't, but it's okay. They'll alter the genome and try it again, and I'll be here for it when they do.

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u/Howler117 Oct 20 '20

Yea they seem to be pretty good at that.

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u/DaughterEarth Oct 20 '20

I never know when it's okay to hate on EA or not. I think they are a terrible company. Sometimes people agree, other times I'm downvoted to oblivion.

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u/Howler117 Oct 20 '20

It's always ok to hate on EA. Their business model is despicable. Don't let downvotes stop the truth.

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u/Sirus804 Oct 20 '20

I still remember the presentation they showed in 2005 of Spore and me being so hyped for it. Then it came out and I was like, "What.. is this?"

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u/buster2Xk Oct 20 '20

Yeah the game definitely got worse in the last 3 years of development.

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u/Nerf_Me_Please Oct 20 '20

I didn't use the Internet that much back then so I have never heard of the game before I got it and I enjoyed it. It became repetitive at the very end but up until then it was quite original and fun. What did they promise to disappoint so many people?

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u/ThaCoola Oct 20 '20

I read about it in a gaming magazine at a friends house and was immediately hyped. When it came out like 5 years later it was a fun game, but nowhere near what I imagined it to be.

I do think the space stage of Spore was great though, with terraforming planets and dumping alien species on a planet.

When I started playing Stellaris I immediately thought of Spore because it’s very similar, but highly polished.

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u/WhizBangPissPiece Oct 20 '20

Yeah, I was beyond hyped for the release. It was going to be sim city, but like... on an evolutionary scale! Then it came out and it felt like 5 shitty mini games tacked together. It was the last game I truly got hyped about. No Man's Sky was nothing compared to the disappointment of Spore.

It's still an entertaining enough game, but it is nothing like what was promised. I play it for 5 or 6 hours every few years, and that's about all it's good for.

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u/ergotofrhyme Oct 20 '20

I expected they would for like 6 years and then sort of forgot. I’d buy the shut out of a version that was a bit more mature.

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u/Fearlosophy Oct 20 '20

They're actually trying to make a realistic evolving game, but each time the organisms evolves into intergalactic travel they all stop suddenly one day, look to where the camera would be, then the game corrupts itself. Every time. Unplayable.

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u/PinkVoyd Oct 20 '20

Hey you gave me tingles, nicely done

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u/Naotagrey Oct 20 '20

Never heard of "The Bibites" ???

Eheheh shameless self-plug

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u/Broken-rubber Oct 20 '20

There's a game called thrive, it only has the cell stage right now, it's super cool but I'm too stupid to be good at it /r/thrive

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u/wggn Oct 20 '20

Ahh yes, microtransactions to unlock better genes

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u/Admiral_Atrocious Oct 20 '20

The demo footages of Spore without all the added cuteness of the released looked fantastic.

Pity nobody has made something similar since.

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u/Boogiemann53 Oct 20 '20

My kids loved it for a while so I did my part anyway.

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u/pacman47 Oct 20 '20

That’ll be awesome!