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Spore: General / Re: The Potential of Spore
« on: June 16, 2005, 01:10:09 pm »
So, distilled down to the basics, you think that there should be a bunch of expansions and genre-defying products, a la Streets of Sim City, for Spore. You'll have to pardon me, but nothing makes me more nervous than the prospect of expansion packs. They're a dangerous trend, replacing actual content with a cheap grab at money.
With expansions people will scream "OMFG TEH SIMS1!!1!" and the game will lose a lot of its appeal to an influential market. With a game as big as Spore (e.g. infinite) nobody's going to want to put down at least twenty bucks for the ability to hang out around deep sea vents or to play with a boomerang.
The thing that concerns me with your idea is that games sell for a certain kind of gameplay and your argument is that such a concept doesn't exist. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you bought Civ II because you wanted a strategy game, if you want to play with horses and spearmen that's fine, but it's still a strategy game. (I prefer the Napoleonic wars myself, Rise of Nations is great for that.) The problem I'm getting at is that if people see the game as a flimsy collection of stabs at genres centered around a dynamic, cool game, they're going to play the dynamic and cool game and feel totally screwed because they paid for some half-assed minigames. Once stuff like this feels tacked on, people will be wary of it. If I just want to play the Bejewelled minigame, I'll just go out and buy Bejewelled, and if I want to play with tanks, I'll go out and buy Command and Conquer.
Some may argue that this belief isn't very progressive and if someone was making my argument about another game I'd disagree with them, but with a game that is essentially a collection of quality concepts from several genres like Spore, this is the most surefire way to ruin sales. Will's giving us a sandbox to play in and be creative with, not a platform for EA to spam expansions.
While your ideas are very well elucidated (I've read a few forum essays in my time and this is one of the better ones), they are, as you admitted, a bit of a pipe dream. There's potential, but I think it's misplaced. Now then, folks, feel free to commence the flaming if you so wish
With expansions people will scream "OMFG TEH SIMS1!!1!" and the game will lose a lot of its appeal to an influential market. With a game as big as Spore (e.g. infinite) nobody's going to want to put down at least twenty bucks for the ability to hang out around deep sea vents or to play with a boomerang.
The thing that concerns me with your idea is that games sell for a certain kind of gameplay and your argument is that such a concept doesn't exist. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you bought Civ II because you wanted a strategy game, if you want to play with horses and spearmen that's fine, but it's still a strategy game. (I prefer the Napoleonic wars myself, Rise of Nations is great for that.) The problem I'm getting at is that if people see the game as a flimsy collection of stabs at genres centered around a dynamic, cool game, they're going to play the dynamic and cool game and feel totally screwed because they paid for some half-assed minigames. Once stuff like this feels tacked on, people will be wary of it. If I just want to play the Bejewelled minigame, I'll just go out and buy Bejewelled, and if I want to play with tanks, I'll go out and buy Command and Conquer.
Some may argue that this belief isn't very progressive and if someone was making my argument about another game I'd disagree with them, but with a game that is essentially a collection of quality concepts from several genres like Spore, this is the most surefire way to ruin sales. Will's giving us a sandbox to play in and be creative with, not a platform for EA to spam expansions.
While your ideas are very well elucidated (I've read a few forum essays in my time and this is one of the better ones), they are, as you admitted, a bit of a pipe dream. There's potential, but I think it's misplaced. Now then, folks, feel free to commence the flaming if you so wish
