I have always respected Will Wright. This has several reasons. He’s one of those old school game designers who probably think of themselves as some omnipotent gaming deity, much like Peter Molyneux. The difference–the reason for my respect–is that Wright, unlike Molyneux, has something called “clarity of vision”.
Wright’s games usually have a unique premise and simple gameplay mechanics. Most of the time, they are very easy to understand and have addictive qualities. Wright is also one of the few game designers who doesn’t care about narrative at all. His games are more like electronic toys instead of interactive stories. The term “sandbox” is more appropriate for his games than any others.
Naturally I was excited to see his new game Spore. Not because I was particularly impressed by the premise or the bits and pieces of the game shown in several different events, but mostly because I had faith in Wright.
I can sum up everything about spore in one sentence. So everyone who’s looking for a short review is allowed to stop reading after this next sentence:
Spore is not a good game.
There. With that off my chest let us examine the two parts of that statement.
Spore is not a good game.
That is a problem. It is usually a tremendous task to make a single game well. Spore is not a single game but rather five different games bound together by a shiny tin foil which is the sixth game. This sounds like a very good deal. Especially considering that the all-combining omni-present sixth game is pretty good.
It’s not a particularly new idea. Back in the 80’s during the rise of Amiga, many big budget games were actually made of entirely different, smaller games held together by some main game. Sid Meier’s Pirates! had among early RTS and RPG elements also a gun shooting, a sword fighting and a sun sight taking game in it. It was held together by the general map and travel interface/game. Cinemaware’s It Came From The Desert was basically a non-linear adventure game, but it had a top down shooter, a flight game, a driving simulation, a sneaking action game and a first person shooter in it.
The omnipresent game in Spore is the creature designing interface. It’s a great and unique achievement. Sure, other games had visual editors too but Spore has an incredibly intuitive 2D interface which allows you to manipulate a 3D model in real time. It is truly fascinating. You can practically design anything here.
What’s more interesting is the sharing system. Creatures and vehicles you create automatically upload to an online database, from which other players’ clients automatically download them. So the stuff you create can end up in other people’s games. You’ll always be playing a single player game of course. But this creates a unique and weird multiplayer environment in which players do not actively fight against each other but contribute to each other’s single player experiences by creating unique content. Chances are you’ll never see the same creature again.
Spore, in theory, gives you plenty of opportunities to use these creations. It starts as a flOw clone, then turns into a World of Warcraft clone, which leads into a Dune II clone, proceeding to lead to a weird mix between a Dune II and a Civilization clone, and ending up with a Star Control clone. You get to design your own creatures, land vehicles and starships to use in these stages of the game, which is very cool. In theory. I’m sure this all looked good on paper. Especially with a vehicle design system which rivals the one you can find in Galactic Civilizations II. One major difference of course. Unlike in Galactic Civilizations II, the things you do in Spore’s design tool have almost no game play effect at all. Which slowly brings us to the second part of that statement.
Spore is not a good game.
And this is sad. It made me remember the brief time I spent working for Mev Dinc at Vivid Image. For those who are too young to remember, Dinc is an old school designer best known for his innovative First Samurai and his ports of System 3’s Last Ninja 2. Back then I was brought into the company because of my expertise in RPG games. Dinc wanted to make an RPG, vaguely. But he had no idea what an RPG was. He just desperately wanted to make a game. The main reason for this desperation was his new engine called “Actor”. I remember people coming to the company and watching the “Actor” demonstration with awe and wonder in their eyes. See, what “Actor” did was pretty unique back then. It combined a 3D graphics engine with a realistic physics simulation. That’s right. Exactly like Half-Life 2. Only back then, no one had even heard of Half Life 2. It was so impressive that Intel actually chose “Actor” as a demo showing off the capabilities of its brand new Pentium IV processor. Brilliant, isn’t it?
So have you ever heard of the revolutionary game Mev Dinc produced using Actor? No, you have not, because there is no such game. Dinc possessed something brilliant, but couldn’t figure out what to do with it.
It appears that Wright is pretty much in the same position. The creature editor is amazing. But it appears he did not really know what to do with it, so he decided to make not one but five games, put them in the same box and call it Spore. Unfortunately for him none of the games are particularly good. Spore is simply not fun.
As we mentioned before, simple games are good. The Sims was simple. Its premise was easily understandable, its rules and goals were very clear, yet it offered the player countless options, setting the stage for countless different outcomes for every decision the player took. The Sims was a virtual doll house. Spore on the other hand doesn’t really know what it is.
So the problem is not the simplicity. Simple is good. Spore is something else. In trying to appeal to the casual gamer and keeping the game simple, Wright here makes a great mistake.
Spore is shallow. We want to direct the evolution of an entire intelligent species. Therefore we want to see the results of our actions. We want to see our decisions influencing the fate of a world. Sadly neither your decisions nor the creatures you design, however amazing they are, have any actual effect on the game itself. It doesn’t matter what you design or if you want to kill or befriend your neighbours.
And all this makes me sad, because the ingredients are all there. It could have been a great game if only they managed to combine its components somehow. But instead of cooking a delicious meal, Wright just throws a bunch of edibles into a pot full of water, turns up the heat and hopes it will become a feast.
-Fasih Sayin