SPORE: Chris "Cute" Hecker, remember him.

[racofer]

http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/8555.page

Chris Hecker was having strong misgivings about how appealing all this hard science would be to the wider world. "I was the founding member of the 'cute' team," he says with pride. "Ocean [Quigley, Spore's art director] and Will were really the founding members of the 'science' team. Ocean would make the cell game look exactly like a petri dish with all these to-scale animals and Will would say, 'That's the greatest thing I've ever seen!' and some of us were thinking, 'I'm not sure about that.'"

Shield you eyes, the compressed stupidity inside this topic is beyond anything even Bethesda could do (yet). Behold, dumbing down taken to EXTREME levels.

 

[bossjimbob]

Hardcore science sims don't sell squat. If anything, Hecker's counterbalance helped give the game mass appeal. Bad for the supergeeks, good for the average consumer. Now that the game is generating lots of cash, they'll at least have the option of making something a bit deeper, should the market support it.

 

[Destroid]

It could still have been cute while retaining the relevence of creature morphology and other gameplay elemenents that were removed.

 

[bossjimbob]

...creature morphology and other gameplay elements that were removed.

It was a compromise. They could have stuck to strict science and possibly alienated the broader audience by making it an obvious form of edutainment, or recouped the tens of millions of dollars of development making a game that appealed to a wider audience with the possibility of making a "real creatures" expansion later on. You can't get that far into development and then sink the ship by skewing it to the smallest market segment imaginable.

I can totally see the value in making a spinoff that sticks to scientific rules, but not the initial release. This is the best part:

"As said in the Seed article, apparently poor Hecker was having "Strong misgivings about how all this hard science would appeal to the wider world." The poll on the official forums currently suggests that 75% of the forum users would have preferred a "Science-Spore" while only 6% dislike such an idea. (16 people, compared to the 192 wanting Science-Spore)"

I am betting the breakdown of actual Spore purchasers feels differently. Gotta love it when an insular forum community thinks that it represents the entire fan base.

 

[J1M]

Making the game about "intelligent" design instead of evolution lost them at least one sale (me).

 

[Destroid]

I don't see how a more realistic take is incompatible with a fulfilling gameplay experience?

 

[Dire Roach]

If Spore looked more scientific rather than cute, then:

*Religious zealots would try to get the game banned from their country.
*Next-gen casual gamers would avoid it because it looks like boring edutainment for nerdfags.
*Parents would not buy it for their children because it looks very complicated and probably deals with mature themes.
*Girls would avoid it because it looks too serious or lacks emotional involvement potential.

Cute, cartoony, colorful art direction draws more sales than realism, or so it would seem. Is there any historical example that would prove otherwise?

 

[Destroid]

*Next-gen casual gamers would avoid it because it looks like boring edutainment for nerdfags.

The current trends for action and racing games aiming for photorealism contradict this. In fact the two biggest racing sim franchises (Forza and GT) are probably two of the more realistic titles available.

 

[RandomLurker]

So hey, how did making what could possibly have been the greatest game to date into a collection of fucktardedly simple and shallow collection of minigames (each of which worse or at best at a similar level as a free flash game) topped with this lovely "this will fuck them pirates fo' sho'!" DRM (which, as usual, assraped the paying customers while the pirates didn't even notice it) work out for them Spore guys in terms of getting that "'The Sims 2' metacritic score"?

Source: http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/sims2

Source: http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/spore

Ayup. Also, this picture is a pretty solid argument in the "Are the gaming journos cockguzzling whores?" debate, but I don't think this is a place where anybody would make any serious argument that they aren't .

 

[Shannow]

A compromise is meeting in the middleground. Removing any kind of scientific relevance the game may have had and making it into teletubby wonderland is not.
I could have lived without a solid scientific backround if it had improved gameplay and if I had had the possibility to build some gruesome monsters. Their teletubby "cute" design lost at least two customers.

But it was a great hit and half the customers like it, so their "compromise" was obviously a good one...

 

[spectre]

Oh, so it turns out that this spore thing actualy might have had decent gameplay? Nice.

 

[DraQ]

Yet again, PBF provides us with brilliant insight, this time about cutesy.

 

[bossjimbob]

But it was a great hit and half the customers like it, so their "compromise" was obviously a good one...

And that's all I'm trying to say. Sure, the game could've have deeper gameplay and stuck to hard science, but my guess is that EA threw a crap-ton of money into usability and market research and found that something a little cuddlier and a lot simpler would result in something with Wii level sales.

If you check the user review scores on GameSpot and IGN, they are a lot closer to the reviewer averages (around 7.5). Methinks Metacritic has been the focus of a lot of fanboy rage these days, what with the LBP and GoW2 nonsense going 'round.

I'm not defending the gameplay. I haven't even played the game because I refuse to purchase something with SecuROM DRM. I'm just saying that it's not surprising at all. If EA had some sense they'd offer up an expansion (free would be nice, but even for five or ten bucks it'd be worth it) to make it more relevant to the science minded fans who've been excited for this game for years and are now disappointed.

 

[Drakron]

I doubt it, Spore sold on hype alone.

EA simply pushed the game to be completed since development was taking too long, that dumbass might talk about how "cute won" but it seems for me they simply wrap up what they done and send it to be pressed.

 

[RandomLurker]

If you check the user review scores on GameSpot and IGN, they are a lot closer to the reviewer averages (around 7.5). Methinks Metacritic has been the focus of a lot of fanboy rage these days, what with the LBP and GoW2 nonsense going 'round.

Well, there's also the Amazon reviews, which are even worse on average than those at Metacritic (1.5/5 stars):

Source: http://www.amazon.com/review/produc...cm_cr_acr_txt?_encoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

As for IGN and GameSpot, they are as mainstream sites as they come, and Spore was a massively hyped mainstream game. If we keep that in mind then 7.5 means "mediocre at best", so yeah, I'd call that a failure.

(I do concede that it's probably a financial success, all thanks to the hype and that casual gamer that everybody loves - the actual gameplay rarely enters into such equation though)

 

[Hory]

Wow, I've never seen something so badly rated on Amazon.

 

[Ashery]

Wow, I've never seen something so badly rated on Amazon.

There was a very strong DRM backlash that helped cause a flood of one star Amazon reviews. The other factor being how dumbed down the game was. It was posted about earlier on the Codex.

And I counter your PBF with this.

 

[TheWesDude]

one thing to remember about amazon, within a day of release it had like 1500-1600 reviews all with 1 star, and a lot of the people admitted they hadnt even bought the game.

 

[HanoverF]

Almost everyone of those 1 star Amazon reviews boils down to "DRM sux!!!1 I'm considering not even pirating this know!!1"

But Spore does deserve a 2 or maybe 3 if you've suffered a head injury.

 

[MetalCraze]

not every. Actually like every 2nd review on amazon contains bashing of dumbing down - besides DRM.

 

[RuneLancer]

Bah. I haven't been following Spore much recently, so this is news to me. DIsappointing news.

Conway's game of Life can be coded on a TI-80 graphing calculator in 5 minutes and features self-organization. I think I'll stick to that.

 

[HanoverF]

Actually, of the 3,107 reviews dumbed down is only mentioned in 95 of them (dumbing down only in 7), and it's in some positive reviews (falsely) countering the claim. Hence the Almost

DRM is mentioned in 2,409 reviews.

 

[DraQ]

Conway's game of Life

++

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Almost everyone of those 1 star Amazon reviews boils down to "DRM sux!!!1 I'm considering not even pirating this know!!1"

But Spore does deserve a 2 or maybe 3 if you've suffered a head injury.

The concept of Spore was great. The problem is that the execution falls terribly short. The Creature Stage is my favorite part because I'm running around collecting parts I want to make the critter I want. However, by the time I collect everything I want, the stage is pretty much over and nearly everything I did don't seem to do much later on in the game. There's not a hell of a lot of continuation of what all you did from one stage to the next when it comes to the main purposes of the Creature Stage.

Spore is a big "Could've Been, Should've Been".

 

[Destroid]

Also would have been interesting if they had explored more possibilities with internal systems such as differing systems of circulation, endo/exo skeletons, low/high gravity worlds, different atmosphere composition and the consequences of these changes on your creature and it's society.

Everything I have read indicates that the 'game' aspects of spore are rudimentary at best so being more of a science toy likely would have worked in the games favour.

To be honest, as it stands, Master of Orion 2 has a more comprehensive creature creator in terms of what actually matters.