Spore: 7-day cooling off period?

[pg]

Given many parts of the game you'd expect things to go much deeper to match the underlying technology which is fantastic. Maybe Spore 2 or an expansion pack will fix things but the core gameplay is lacking. The creature phase seems ripe for so much more. Why aren't there herds and predators(they do attack but mostly just sit around) and varying populations and deeper environments, etc? Many things which you'd see over and over in nature don't exist at all in Spore. Just thinking of the impact of winter and food supplies and all that would change things a lot. Instead you find food everywhere and creature populations are basically limited to their "camps"(where you'll find like 5 of them sitting there 23 hour a day).

[Dale]

Originally posted by FrostyBoy
$90!? I got it for $56 and came with a cool Spore T-Shirt.

Game is good, I have only done Cell and Creature (I like to play slowly), but I agree with Dale.

AI needs to be significantly improved.
Creatures should be affected by their design as well as their addons.
Addons points should be additive.

Notice I said AUD.

I've been told a number of things in the GE are US only. Like the t-shirt.

[FrostyBoy]

Yes, but my $56 is in Singapore Dollars!

I had to wait in a massive queue though, about 500 people I think. Just as I was about to finally reach the counter, they ran out of stock and told me to come back at 4pm. which of course I did.


edit: SGD56 = AUD47 Half your price!

[Dale]

Software is notoriously double to triple the price over here due to Govt taxes.

[Jon Miller]

Maybe I should just dig out simearth instead.

JM

[FrostyBoy]

Originally posted by Dale
Software is notoriously double to triple the price over here due to Govt taxes.

Which your govt uses to pay their tithing.

[Dale]

Originally posted by FrostyBoy


Which your govt uses to pay their own superannuation.

Edited for correctness.

[FrostyBoy]

Which they will end up paying tithing with.

[Adagio]

I agree with Dale here. The game does have a lot of great stuff, but it also falls short in other areas

It's impressive how they could make a game where the choices you make in the cell phase could effect the civilization and space phase
It's impressive how they could make a game that goes from cell phase to space phase in a matter of hours
It's impressive how they could make each phase very different
It's impressive how the animations work
It's impressive how the different phases actually can be fun, even though how simple they are

The game is more addictive than I thought it would be. I've had a hard time stopping playing. Instead of "one more turn" it's "one more creature extinction" or "one more ally" (or whatever phase you're in)

Am I disappointed? So far the gameplay is almost as what I expected it to be. Only thing I was shocked at was the AI, everything else was more or less what I thought it would be

The AI is quite bad though. At least until Civilization phase (where the AI actually shows how an AI should act... more on that later) :

Cell phase:
Sometimes no matter how fast you go, you can't outrun the enemy (when they are much bigger/advanced) than you. The AI fails at making these enemies more realistic. I often find myself being chased by these bigger creatures, spending minutes trying to escape, when he slowly gets closer. But annoys me here is that this enemy is only thinking about getting me, pushing all other enemies to the sides just to get to me, thereby saying no to a lot of easy pray. The time spent chasing me could have been spent eating 10x as many cells

Creature phase:
All creatures more or less stay at their nest. Apparently the other creatures doesn't need food at all. I almost never see other creatures hunt other creatures (with the exception when the nests are too close), but I never actually see them eat their pray
I've also never seen the AI charge

Tribe phase:
The AI plays a completely different game here. The goal for the AI is to kill the human player. The AI's are always allies (or so it seems), they never attack each other
Also they don't play with the same rules as the player. We start the tribe phase with a small camp, with a limit of 6 creatures. After destroying/allying the first other tribe we grow a larger hut (now with a limit of 9 creatures). If they had played with the same rules, then the tribe I allied with should also grow it's hut bigger, but they stay at having a limit of 6 creatures. The other tribes has apparently a random number of max creatures. Some starts with 6, others with 9 and the rest with 12. They don't grow, they start like that

Civilization phase:
Finally an AI that plays with the same rules (or at least so it seems). The AI's have a relationship between them. AI 1 can ask you to stop trading with AI 2, because they are busy killing them
Where all other phases are easy on hard, this phase is hard on hard

Space phase:
Not played enough to talk about the AI here

Originally posted by Solver
Same actually goes for the Cell stage, which is a very simple arcade. Do it once as a carnivore, once as a herbivore, is there any value or fun to playing it a third time?

Is there any replay value in Pacman?

The cell phase is like an advanced Pacman game

Originally posted by Solver
Mind you, I'm playing the devil's advocate here with this negativity. I have the sense not to call it a bad game if I haven't played it, so I'm just taking this pessimistic stance.

Good, we need people like that

Originally posted by FrostyBoy
AI needs to be significantly improved.
Creatures should be affected by their design as well as their addons.
Addons points should be additive.

I hope they make an expansion pack that makes one phase more advanced. Like take the tribe phase in one XP, makes the AI more difficult, add more gameplay options, etc. Then later they do the same for the Civ phase, etc

I don't get why they changed the way the different items effects the creatures. In the released Creature Creator you could add five items of level 1 to make a dangerous creature (for some reason it only goes to level 5... should have been a higher maximum IMHO), but in the full game adding more of one type of item makes no difference

Take a look at Dusteater. In the released editor it had level 5 charge (each horn added 1 to charge... the extra I've added is just for fun to make it look cool), now this previously somewhat dangerous creature is easy pray as it only has 1 in charge (and 1 in biting, but that's besides the point)
Now adding more than one of each type of item is pointless. Real creatures just doesn't work in this game. Take a horse for example. According to the rules in this game, the horse should just remove a pair of legs as the other pair doesn't add to speed

[OneFootInTheGrave]

just my first comment:

It is impressive given with width of the game and that it is the first true "multi-game" game, I guess this is something showing us the future of gaming... and it is a fun hybrid...

given the width, and the scale of the attempt it is pretty amazing that the game works as well as it did, and doesn't crash (too much - it did once at tribe stage), and that the gameplay flows as well as it did (quite brilliant actually)...

now since they pulled all that off from start, I would think that some more complexity in the stages themselves is asking a wee bit too much from the game as it is, because that would have introduced who knows what game imbalances and it had potential to infinitely increase development times etc... perhaps now that they managed to launch they could focus on improving stage elements themselves with feedback from players/seeing how the concept actually playes out in the real world...

so all in all - brilliant - but than again limited in some aspects (ie how AI behaves + not soo hot RTS element), but given that the game is such an amalgamation of several gaming concepts as it is, I'd say it is great for what it is, and hope they will make it even better with further development.

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by Solver
I'm of the opinion that the AI is of utmost importance, inadequate AI can destroy good gameplay, while a game with good gameplay is held together by a strong AI. So your perspective scares me somewhat.

Based on what you've said I don't think you will enjoy this game. My son, the true Civ'r in the family, is already bored with the Space phase (this after playing it a couple of hours). He's gone back and started a new game from Cell phase.

Originally posted by Adagio
It's impressive how they could make a game where the choices you make in the cell phase could effect the civilization and space phase
It's impressive how they could make a game that goes from cell phase to space phase in a matter of hours
It's impressive how they could make each phase very different
It's impressive how the animations work
It's impressive how the different phases actually can be fun, even though how simple they are

The game is more addictive than I thought it would be. I've had a hard time stopping playing. Instead of "one more turn" it's "one more creature extinction" or "one more ally" (or whatever phase you're in)

From what I've seen of the game so far, yeah, this pretty well summarizes it. I can see my son and I playing a lot of this game, especially for the "one more extinction" at Creature phase.


D

[OneFootInTheGrave]

and yes - give us the adding ability in creature creation stage as well... at least as an option for some "non-standard" gameplay somewhere, even as a hidden checkbox on the options menu, I'd love to see that one at work...

[Adagio]

Why does your post say "quote:
Originally posted by Solver" when it why me who posted it?

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by Adagio
Why does your post say "quote:
Originally posted by Solver" when it why me who posted it?

Sorry - fixed.

[Metaliturtle]

SPORE wasn't a disappointment to me. I'll agree with Dale that the AI needs some work (Where's Blake when you need him?) but the game had everything I expected and more so far. The early stages don't "feel" deep, but they don't last long either, the seeming goal being to get to the space stage and cruise around.

What I would like to see in the future:
-A way to turn off pirates (barbarians) They don't attack until space, they could at least not raid the homeworld.
-An option to auto socialize, some of the tribal/creature games got repetetive.
-Like dale said and the original creature creator did, let the parts build on each other so if I have 5 +1 spikey bits I get strike at 5.