Yeah it sucks that the Internet won't let you create your own better posts about more modern games.

Holy shit dude, nobody's forcing you to read it and comment all that drivel.

A website made a recap article about it, including interviews with developers. That's an extremely common practice in journalism. This submission is a recap of that interview. Instead of losing your shit and typing all that out you could have read 4 lines of the article to learn that yourself.

I got the collector edition. Never again.

I bought my first ever PC that was built for and came with spore.

I was happy with the computer, the game was... less than what I thought it was going to be.

I even really liked the cell stage because the gameplay loop was fun and simple, plus you got to eat the bastards who were eating you before you got bigger.

RIP VG Cats!

There were a couple details that mattered.

Whether you were aggressive vs friendly vs neutral at each stage had some consequences for all later stages. Creatures you befriend in the Creature stage could become pets in the Tribal stage, which could include the powerful lone wolf ones.

That's because ~~children~~ adults would get stuck on a path that was untenable, and management didn't like that idea. It would lead to a bad experience and a negative review.

It's just a summary of a recent interview, relax.

SimCity is the last time I was excited for a modern remake of a game, and likely the last. It was such an incredible letdown, you couldn't even open the game at launch because of the always online stuff. Most every remake of a classic has been terrible ever since, I'm happy to be proven wrong though.

The mediocrity as I understand was from the rift that developed in the team about the vision of the game being a sandbox vs a campaign.

However, I witnessed a new divide among the team which was less well-known; as more core game developers (such as myself) were recruited to help finish the game, a cultural gap emerged between the newer ‘gameplay’ team and the older ‘Sim’ team. The former group (which went on to spearhead Darkspore) was primarily concerned with how Spore played as a game. Were the mechanics engaging? Did the player’s choices matter? Was the game replayable? In contrast, the ‘Sim’ team carried the traditional Maxis DNA and was more comfortable with Spore as a toy box. Could the players express themselves? Was sharing one’s creations with other players meaningful? Did the game spark the imagination?

These cultural divides ruined Spore’s chances to be a focused, cohesive experience.

http://www.designer-notes.com/2013/09/

"Closed source" is reaching. As much as I think Doom shows why it should be desirable, let alone not taboo, it's always been the industry standard and applies to 99.99% of games.

Same here, I remember being 15 and sharing the video around school on this amazing new website called Google Videos. I watched that demo multiple times and ate the hype big time, and then we know what happened next.

A few years later, EA ruined Battlefield and I've never bought a game from them since.

I know this is a dirty thing to say, but this feels like one of the few actual genuine use cases for AI in games.

Animations are extremely finicky and requires a lot of manual tweaking and adjusting to get right, it doesn't surprise me that they struggled to make a procedural animation system because if they could solve that, they'd actually solve a well known industry challenge.

If you were building spore today, you could train a little local model that purely creates reasonably good animations for arbitrary creature designs. It wouldn't be perfect, but for a game like Spore it would be good enough.