Spore, Darkly So

I bought the Galactic Edition day one. I had waited three years for the Spore to be released. My friend doesn’t live in the same house that I first watched the hour-long promo in. The wait was totally going to be worth it. It was Sim Everything: the game that would let you create a virtual life form and take it from cell to more advanced than us. It was also one of the most ambitious games ever to say the least; easily in the top 3. Unfortunately for us all, it was a colossal let-down. The graphics were cartoonified (yes, that is now a word), the animations were clunky, and the game was too divided for its own good. The adage “more than the sum of its parts” doesn’t apply here; the game was its many parts. I was disappointed (and out $80) when I picked it up, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying it for several weeks, and every few months. I just picked it up again very recently, and I absolutely love the game now. I had jumped on the Spore hate train like everyone else, and that blinded me to what was actually a good game if you can see it for what it is.

Spore is good. It’s just not the Spore that Will Wright set out to make, and certainly not the one he promised us in 2005. It’s a great first try, much like The Sims was nowhere near as good as The Sims 2. Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you about Darkspore.

“Darkspore” has been submitted for three different copyrights by EA, each covering multiple areas. These include “providing on-line computer games”, “motion picture film production”, “action figures”, “board games”, “playing cards”, “modeled plastic toy figurines”, and of course “computer game software” and “video game software”. This sounds like they’re ready to flood the gaming market with the Darkspore brand. EA’s recent financial statement lists “Spore Title TBA” under Q4 2011 for both PC and Console, which means that there’s another Spore product on the way. It’s very unlikely that this is another Spore Heroes-like product because it’s for both PC and Console, and it can’t be a port of the PC version for the same reasons. Coupled with the recent trademarking of “Darkspore”, it looks like there’s a full-fledged sequel on the way for both PC and console. This is great news for the game, which has so much it can improve upon. Rather than give you a laundry list of things off the top of my head that could be in the sequel…actually, I think I’ll do that:

• Aquatic stage
• Flora and Planet editors
• Parts editors; a utility to create parts for the editors
• Improved creature animations; the system right now is choppy and suffers at times from 3d mesh glitches when limbs overlap
• Quasi-realistic graphics, hearkening back to the GDC 2005 showing
• Co-operative multiplayer

But like I said, Spore isn’t the sum of its many parts. A truly good sequel worthy of the Spore name wouldn’t simply add more bullet points to the already large list, it would refine the game and tackle the real problem. The main issue with the game is that it’s spread too thin; it doesn’t offer enough depth or length in the earlier levels to make them meaningful. The space stage is deeper, but suffers from repetition. By imposing artificial limits on the stages, a finite beginning and end, it breaks the illusion that there is actually a meaningful progression from cell to space.

What the game needs to do to ultimately succeed in what it was meant to be is to eliminate the stages altogether. There needs to be no “Congratulations, you’ve advanced to the next stage!” interruption, but rather a seamless progression from bacterial to larger cell to small sea creature to larger sea creature and then optionally land-based, all the while growing in intelligence and sentience. Tribal and Civilization stages are achieved through progressively building up intelligence to the point where a social system is developed, and tools can be built. At any time, you can assume control of a creature at a stage lower than you and control the way that its development shapes out, so that the game is truly a “Sim” game worthy of Wright’s mark and not just a “simulation”. Fly to another planet, step into another creature’s story for a while, go back to your original species, and so on.

It may be a pipe dream, but I believe that this main design piece is required if Darkspore is to be what Spore was supposed to be. Then again, it could just be EA grabbing for cash. Lord knows it would be classic EA to minutely improve the game and sell it as “2.0″.

Sources:
investor.ea.com
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