Will Wright had several classics under his belt and tremendous clout in the games industry when he unveiled Spore in 2005. While the Sim series of games had certainly had some rough, or, at best, eclectic titles under its moniker by this point, what permeated the gaming consciousness was the classics. Sim City and Sim City 2000 were mega hits, and their follow up, The Sims, was the best selling game of all time. Only a year after the release of The Sims 2, it looked like Will Wright and co. at Maxis were about to release another game changer: a game where you get to evolve an organism from single-cell to galactic colonizer. Admirably dubbed "Sim Everything" by fans, the hype for Spore was intense. Early showings of the game showed a rather robust and easy-to-use creature creator that promised to be inspired by real biology. The game boasted about its educational uses, its creative freedom, and its new(ish) sense of multiplayer interaction, where your creations and those of everyone registered with EA would be automatically loaded into every new world, allowing community creation to fill out your game. Stats could be read online to see how well your species fared in other players' games, and you could download other creators' creatures to toy with, play as, or place within your world. Likewise, the game promised to use copious amounts of procedural generation, an exciting concept in games at the time. The promise for Spore, in retrospect, was obviously too good to be true. Despite nearly a decade of being spurned by the silver-tongued promises from the likes of Peter Molyneux, the gaming public was ready to trust Will Wright at his word, even if some doubts hung lightly in the air, dissipating almost as soon as their utterances ceased. Spore was going to be a Big Deal, and everyone thirsted for every drip of news.
But the news wasn't always good. The different "phases" of the game took multiple shapes over the years. Phases would be deleted outright before release, such as the water stage between cellular life and the creature stage on land. Initially, the single-cell phase looked far more realistic, but by the latter half of its pre-release ramp up, it looked rather cutesy, showcasing large human eyes on your microbial life and softer curves to its shape. Incrementally over time the game was looking less and less like the realistic "Sim Everything" that had sold everyone at early showings, and more like a cartoony amalgamation of those ideas, something more akin to the The Sims. This wasn't the worst news, but it was certainly a dampener in hype to some degree. Still, Spore found itself among many players' most anticipated titles, and when Maxis revealed they would be releasing a pay demo - the entire Creature Creator, so players could get a head start making stuff and uploading them to EA's servers for play upon release - people were a lot more thrilled than you would expect with our modern disposition on the gaming industry. The game was no longer the potentially educational life simulator, but surely it still had that goofy, fantasy fulfillment simulation character that The Sims had.
Well, sort of. Spore doesn't so much skirt over the realistic angle as it does entirely throw it out the window and down the fire escape. Creatures created in Spore's engine have a Jim Henson like quality to them, where their spines can't seem to adjust their weight, preferring instead to flail their extenuating bits around wildly as the game's odd physics engine does, honestly, whatever the hell it wants. Eyes bulge off of cheap looking clay bodies. Limited options in limbs, feet/hooves, hands/claws, and odd articles of individualism such as feathers, horns, or weird, alien feelers give a somewhat samey feel to a lot of what you are going to make at first. Goofy it is, but there is a permeating feeling that maybe this is all a bit too goofy, that it may be getting in the way of your creativity by limiting the character you're wishing to give your odd abomination (making something that looks remotely natural in this game is a form of alchemy -- certainly possible, as I've seen evidence of it, but at the cost of seriously abusing the creator to obey aesthetic over stats, an issue we will get to later). Later content packs like the Creepy and Cute pack offer a little more in the menacing monster category, but also double down on the cartoonish abandonment of realism.
Realism however, as most artistic types will tell you, really isn't all that important. The truth of the matter is that, although the creature creator is certainly limiting in character, it is a hell of a lot of fun to use. Shaping the bodies like clay, elongating the spine for a tail or neck or adding fat in odd places is like shaping your canvas. Mouths don't have to go in a natural place, nor does there have to be one. Put a herbivore mouth on the tail (how about something with a snout?) and a carnivorous mouth on the stomach (what about the mouth of a tapeworm?). Horns can be placed on the knees, but you can bend them back in a halo around the animal's mid-drift. Objects require symmetry in Spore, meaning if you place a mouth away from the longitudinal center, it will mirror itself on the other side of this vertical equator. You could build a neck and place a mouth on either side of it, rather than the end. This likewise works for eyes, so placing one in the center is viable. You can increase the size of anything added to the body by scrolling the mouse wheel, but I found most useful shrinking things down. Noticeable features on an animal are often rather small in relation to its size, and so making a less goofy looking creature sometimes comes down to shrinking the eyes to a more realistic look. But just as much fun can come out of the opposite, giving your dinosaur looking dude a massive head with even bigger eyes, and a tiny little body.
The creature creator is surprisingly easy to use, even if some of its functionality (such as positioning the arms and legs) seem to disagree with the 3D nature of the creature model. At best, positioning your creatures arms is annoying, and at worst you'll give up and exclaim "fine, hold out your arms like a crazy person, see if I care". Positioning the arms and legs doesn't allow you to move the camera around the model, which means your two axis of movement -- up and down, left and right -- are incredibly misleading, as you unknowingly move them on the third axis you have no control over. Thus, fine tuning your adjustments has you making moves from one angle, turning the model, making adjustments from another angle, then turning the model back to see you've gotten closer to what you intended, but in some ways also over corrected on the absent axis from the last position. It is certainly small potatoes as far as the creator's overall quality is, but something that is difficult to overlook after playing around with it for anything more than an hour.
The creature creator is by far and away Spore's greatest accomplishment, and it is unfortunate that the game seems to get in the way of you using it in any sort of fulfilling way. Spore's structure has you passing through five stages or phases to beat the game. The cellular stage is a 2D collect-a-thon, where you seek out food (plantlife if you chose herbivore, other creatures if you chose carnivore) until you've collected enough to evolve to the next stage. Eating in the cellular stage gains you DNA points that you can spend on new features to add to your creature. Creature parts can be collected by picking up random pieces of asteroid in the water. Evolving to the next stage gets you to the creature stage, where you are tasked with either friending other creatures or hunting a bunch of them down in order to gain DNA points. Either way you go about it, you're going to have something of a bad time. Friending people amounts to you copying one of four friendly actions after your would-be-friends do it, virtually "Simon Says" with World of Warcraft type keyboard inputs and controls. If you want to hunt others down, not only does it take far longer to do, but gameplay amounts to an extremely simplified MMO control scheme, tapping abilities and waiting for them to cool down. Your ability to perform friendly actions or attacks are determined by your creature parts equipped, which is were the game really restricts you. It turns out your creativity isn't really worth that much if it means you cant do a good enough dance move to befriend your neighbors and progress. Granted, one could look at this as living with the consequences of your creativity, and attempting to force you to problem solve within your own limitations, but that would require a much more robust game.
Spore, if it is anything at all, is simple. Your ability to choose at any point of the game almost always rides along the binary option, with a third choice if you squint by choosing an even amount of both options allowed of you. Do you hunt or befriend? Do you attack or convert? Do you eat meat or plants? Granted, in some stages, that third option is far wider than others, but the game scarcely gets any more complicated than that. In the creature stage, you either build your creature optimally, attempting to be creative with a mechanically limited pool of options (which, credit to the creature creator, is still at least some fun), or you say "fuck it" and build what you want and hope its enough to do either of your options for progression.
This simplicity permeates the next two stages as well. The tribal stage morphs the game into a RTS, only one of very few options. You have six or so slots for buildings in your tribe, each able to house one of three types of musical buildings (all required for the "conversion" victory), one of three weapon buildings (same for "war" victory), and one or two for economic stuff such as gathering. You must gather food as your resource, and you must convert or dominate several other cultures nearby in order to proceed to the next stage. You can get an economic victory as well by giving gifts until everyone likes you enough, which will gain you the economic society in the next stage, but is even simpler than the other two options. Conquest is as it is in any RTS at its most basic level: click the enemy and watch them fight. To convert other tribes to your religion and attain the "conversion" victory, you will need to do the Simon Says bit from earlier once again, only this time making sure you play the correct instruments. The one complication added to this stage is that you need to equip gathering equipment, weapons, or musical instruments in order to use them, adding a mild level of annoying maintenance (there is one hot key for selecting units, and it is to select them all; ctrl+click will also work, however, making things a little easier, but not any more appealing).
Once you've dealt with enough societies, you go to the civilization phase, which has you adding buildings to your newly found city to increase productivity and happiness in your citizens (of which there is a whopping three kinds), and your goal has become either conquest every city on the planet, convert them to your religion, or buy them outright. Your options on how you can approach this section of the game are entirely dependent on how you finished the last stage. If you were economic, you are now an economic society. If you were war hungry, you are a war-like society, etc. When you gain a new city, you are given the option to retain that city's original "type" or convert to yours, so your options are still sort of open, but rely heavily on RNG as to how the other societies generated in.
Once done with that, you enter the galactic phase, which is by far and away the largest. The galactic phase seems to be endless, or nearly so. You have a sort of goal in finding the center of the universe, if you can be bothered, but along the way you will colonize planets, do quests for other nations, and generally run amok between the stars. This part is kind of cool, being able to fly over other planets -- including your own, looking down at those shallow waters you once waded in forever ago from your interstellar ship that now grants you access to the entire cosmos -- and do simple, chore-like tasks on different planets, but hardly makes for a full-bodied gaming experience.
Spore's biggest failures are that of design, and can be oft referenced as warning or argument for temperance whenever anyone begins spouting too loudly about threading genres together. Spore wanted to be everything in one, and ended up as basic mechanics bridging disparate parts that wanted so heartily to be something whole. It was ambitious, it was an exciting idea, and the glints here and there of true inspiration leave a sense of longing for what could of been, even though I'm not really sure it could have been anything. From a design perspective, the concept just doesn't really work. As a Europa Universalis type strategy game, I could imagine, but as a constantly morphing odyssey of genres as scope dictates it will always be clumsy in execution. The ghost of what Spore was supposed to be was simply an idea that could never exist precisely on their level, and that is okay. Sometimes I look at how Crusader Kings II can be imported into Europa Universalis IV and I think, "yeah, if someone made a full-fledged game for each stage, and let you import up, this could work", but the practicality of that is nigh impossible. The scope of skills required to develop not just multiple games, but games that span complex genres that often take some specialization in means that a unifying vision would be difficult at best to maintain. Add to that 3D models of custom creatures that can be imported up games when these games would necessitate over a decade's worth of development and, thusly, over a decade's worth of technological advancements, and what you have is something attractive, sure, but ultimately worthy only of a forlorn sigh.
Spore is most certainly a failure on multiple promises, but that can be lived with. Games like Fable showed that, even through disappointment, good games could shine through and find a substantial player base. The issue is that Spore isn't really a good game. My dirty secret is that, even though I wholeheartedly see Spore as a sub-par game, I can't help but love the thing. Spore has a certain charm to it, shallow as it may be in that charm and in its mechanics. It's a goofy romp that asks creativity of you, even if it doesn't outright encourage it. Seeing your odd creations come to puppet-like life before your eyes is usually a laugh, and I can't help but find myself coming back to the thing once every couple of years. Spore is eager for life, wishing to make the impossible possible, and wishing for play to make its systems whole. You can't make it whole, but you'll at least admire it trying.
6.5
No comments:
Post a Comment