8 Things Spore Needs to Do Better
Spore was never meant to be all things to all people, and it's a hoot reading the mea culpas marching in from the folks who did the game such a disservice by hyping it so unreasonably. They're now calling Spore "different from what they expected." Well, what did they expect? The Sims meets Master of Orion? Dawn of War meets Impossible Creatures? Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking and Shigeru Miyamoto in a box? Will Wright (the game's creator) was never coy about his intentions here, calling Spore a casual game for casual players right from the start.
That said, and much as it's a pleasure for me to say I get it (see for yourself in my PC World review), the game's still a few chromosomes short of a genome. So I've pulled together the following list of eight mildly irritating imperfections. None were even close to deal-breakers (okay, point #1 was a three-time teeth-gnasher, but with PCs it's always a toughie to say whether crash-bugs are the game or your system) and a few probably reveal my own shortcomings as a traditional (read: not casual) PC gamer. But they're at least the kinds of things Maxis needs to be thinking about as the game's sixth and uncredited "Patch Stage" gets underway.
1. No autosave. That's right, the game doesn't automatically save your progress, which causes mass panic each time Spore crashes. Crashes? Not often. But in all of two weeks playing through multiple worlds and stages, it did crash three times, at one point dragging me back from the beginning of the Civilization Stage (after a very successful and pleasing run through Tribal) to the end of Creature -- from fourth to second, in other words. Fortunately you can restart from any stage you've already visited and import your creature, but you'll sacrifice your history timeline in the process.
2. No labels on already-assigned creature body parts. Mouse over the body parts currently attached to your cell or creature (or building, or vehicle) and all you can do it change their size or positioning. No labels, no pop-up info windows, no attribute reminders, nothing. A lot of parts like horns and bony protrusions, hands and feet, often look a lot alike. Or wildly different from their original form after you've done some creative geometric tweaking. Several of the pieces and appendages you're slapping on your weird-eyed wonders or funky strobing love shacks have performance ratings. Being able to compare what you have equipped therefore matters when you get new, more complex, more expensive options. A mouse over pop-up label or level-up indicator showing the attribute going up (green) or down (red) would shore up this info-deficiency.
3. Most of the adornments in Tribal Phase clash wildly with the creature anatomy. My creatures all ended up with face masks clapped to their backsides and loin-skirts dangling from their spindly legs or arms because the parts don't jibe with your creature's physiology. I realize there's no easy way to make one-size-fits-all regalia for such a potentially multifarious range of critters, which is why skirts and shields and masks ought to go, and smaller bits like a whole range of shamanic jewelry would work better here.
4. I can select and CTRL-assign numbers to mini-squads for easy selection in the Civilization Stage, so why not the Tribal one? Don't say it's part of the management criteria in Tribal, either, because Will Wright knows better than anyone that gaming an interface (making the interface its own challenge in lieu of something more clever) isn't really a game at all.
5. Pathfinding seems (emphasize seems) broken in the Tribal Stage, where your creatures have to wrestle around each other to access structures that let them select weapons or musical instruments. Why "seems"? Because when I interviewed her, Spore's executive producer Lucy Bradshaw suggested that creatures might fare better or worse in this regard based on their evolutionary traits. Pathfinding as an evolutionary matter sounds intriguing, but it's not really clear how -- there's no index to gauge this -- rendering the whole edifice suspect. Players will simply see creatures battling to get around in-the-way siblings and wonder why that last icon in the vertical selection stack (on the right side of the screen) isn't, for instance, switching from "food collector" to "didgeridoo player."
6. Spore has Grand Theft Auto IV's "phone" problem. In GTA4, the protagonist has friendship ratings that soar or plummet based on his proclivity to answer the phone and pick up pals he then has to cart around to watch shows or play mini-games like darts or pool. These chew up a lot of time, repeat themselves frequently, and tend to feel obligatory if you're obsessively completist. Spore's version of this during its final Space Stage involves distress calls about alien invasions, pirate raids, timer-based planetary safaris, and all sort of other wild and wooly activities constantly vying for your attention while you're simply trying to pay the bills by muling around spices or terraforming planets to inaugurate new colonies. An option to reduce the frequency of "help me" nagging would be helpful, especially when your "empire" start to grow into the planetary dozens.
7. Spore's planetary trees are a disaster in the Space Stage. You'll often have to park your UFO around a planet at treetop level -- you can't land or hover near the ground -- and hunt for ant-sized creatures who love to hang out in little otherworldly red and purple glades. Good luck. Trees obfuscate or outright block your view every time you get near a cluster, and the only sort-of workaround -- sucking them into you cargo hold -- chews up too much time. How about an infrared option to see (and shoot accurately) through the trees, and to spare us the misery of floating blindly through bulky branches, trying to tease our miserable victims (while inadvertently and penally slaughtering dozens of others) out into the open?
8. In the later stages, over half the editor parts and pieces lean toward the superficially cosmetic. They let you visually distinguish your creation, in other words, but no matter how dramatically they change its physical appearance, serve no broader function. In fact, Spore's "evolutionary" bits hinge less on procedural physics than a handful of inalterable physical traits mapped statically to this or that body part. Build the least likely creature imaginable and while it may look like an unnaturally selected monstrosity incapable of surviving, it'll move or fight or socialize just as well as a streamlined Newtonian maven, so long as you manage to slap the right trait-parts on. All the extra pieces? Vanity nubs. Consequently Spore ends up with lots of wildly different looking creatures that ultimately perform counter-evolutionarily, i.e. "the same." Can Spore "evolve" to accommodate substantive procedural physics in future iterations? Who knows, but its longevity probably hinges on adding more consequential functionality to its shallower dollhouse parts.
PC World's Marketplace
PC World's Free Whitepapers
tech news tech blogs community & forums laptop prices software reviews downloads
My major complaint actually comes from the camera and movement controls. They are really really really bad.
Each stage makes the camera move differently than it did before and applies new rules. Instead of building on an existing system. BAD design, BAD.
Using W,A,S,D for movement and Q and E for rotation across all modes would have been great. Or better yet, letting the user configure the keys themselves for how they want to control the camera.
Click and Hold left and right mouse buttons at the same time and drag? How is that a good system?
Funny, you nailed all my peeves exactly. I only played one day, but I already hate the Space stage distress calls. And the lack of labels is really bad.