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Maxis, Evil company run by the liar Will Wright.

Started by Harvest, January 27, 2009, 08:02:25 PM

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Harvest

So back in 2005 a long video was shown at GDC.  Will Wright, the head of Maxis and mind behind the Sim franchises, displayed his new project called Spore.  From the video, seen here: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8dvMDFOFnA

So, take a look at that video.  It looks amazing doesn't it?  This video probably caused me several orgasms back in the day and I watched it multiple times, fantasizing about the day I would be to play Spore.  That day never came.

Over the years, Spore was delayed several times to the dismay of the gamers following Spore.  However, since this game was seen as extremely ambitious everyone knew this was necessary to make sure it didn't turn out to be a buggy pile of shit.  So I continued to wait patiently forever.  I watched Will Wright make several more presentations where he would say "um" and "procedural" a million times.  At the time, he may not have been lying, but at one time during the development...something odd happened...

There was another delay and suddenly...the videos...were different.  There wasn't any blood and the graphics were suddenly cartoony...ok, well, this sucks, but the gameplay we were promised should be there.  So I remained optimistic and began to like the graphics.

Now, Will Wright continued with his presentations, he even made one at NASA. 

Then, Spore was announced to be released on September 7th, 2008.  Great news, but still several months.  In June 2008, the creature creator was released, a free version, and a full version that costs $10.  I was so excited that I went out and bought the $10 version so I could upload my creatures.  It was pretty good.  Despite some animation flaws, the game still looked promising and I remained excited.

The reviews started coming out and the 8 range scores weren't what I was expecting, but an 8 is still good.  So I downloaded the game for free.  It was fun, actually it was amazing.  So, wanting to share my creatures with my friends, I bought it.  I soon realized, Spore was a big piece of shit.  A big lie, a hoax, a dumbed down money whore.  The gameplay was fun for a little bit, but its so shallow that its impossible to pretend this is the game you were waiting for.

I never planned to play the cell stage for long and I think that is the way it was intended but its actually pretty exciting and gets you pumped for the main game.  When you get on land, you realize the graphics are shit.  They're just terrible.  Worse than you could have imagined.  They say it was designed so anyone could play it on their shit PCs.  Fine, ok, but at least give us the fucking option to have a textures that aren't a cesspool of BLUR.  And creatures and buildings that are smooth.  Nope, there is no option for AF or Anti Aliasing.  Whatever, graphics don't matter unless the gameplay is GOOD.

Wait!

THE GAMEPLAY SUCKS.

Every stage sucks.  Its all terrible.  Its all barely fun, not at all what was promised.  You can't do shit in the space phase.  You fly around from generic planet to generic planet talking to creatures that give you the same tedious shitty missions.  You're constantly getting attacked and you can't even walk on the planets.  What a disappointment.

Its so dumbed down.  It was designed for casual gamers.  A Quote from Will Wright:

    We were very focused, if anything, on making a game for more casual players. Spore has more depth than, let’s say, The Sims did. But we looked at the Metacritic scores for Sims 2, which was around ninety, and something like Half-Life, which was ninety-seven, and we decided â€" quite a while back â€" that we would rather have the Metacritic and sales of Sims 2 than the Metacritic and sales of Half-Life.
    â€"Will Wright

No, Spore does not have more depth than Sims.  The creatures are awesome, I must give you that, but the gameplay is balls.

Now a lot of gamers are upset over this on the Spore forums.  Its been found out that during the development there was the "science side" and the "cute side".  Will Wright was on the science side.  Chris Hecker was on the cute side.  Chris has said that will would bring something that looked like something from a petri dish and he would tell him "yuck" and then redesign it to make it "cute".  What an asshole.

Obviously EA and Maxis are money hungry.  They've already released a terrible "Creepy and Cute" parts pack which is terrible, it costs $20.  I pirated it, it sucks.

Now they plan to release an expansion where you can actually go onto the planets but I expect its just the same repetitive gameplay as creature mode, though it will open the space mode up a bit, I'll probably pirate it.

So for now, I've lost all respect for Will Wright and Maxis.  Their game just plain sucks, and we deserve the Science Spore.  The one that looked good.  The one with a water stage, good animation, good graphics, science based evolution and science based space.  Science based gameplay. 

Fuck you Chris Hecker and the rest of the Fag Team.
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Merlin

#1
Wow.
I guess you're right.
They promised so much and they could have made an awsome game, but for some reason they didn't. I mean, there's so much they could have packed into the game. So much strategic, tactical gameplay. I thought that the civilization and tribal phase would be like Empire Earth... and that you could discover really amazing things during Creature Phase... and that space phase would be endless fun, because you could do everything... So, yes, I was actually looking forward to a scientific game which is fun, though...

Well, when I bought it, I was amazed - at first.
I admit, it was fun at first and I really enjoyed playing the game, though I was disappointed that they didn't make all their promises true. But... well, I reached space phase within a short time and... I actually created 3 other creatures, turned them to tribes and to countries and finally to interstellar empires and tried to play them differently. One empire was very martial, one wavery peaceful and one bought all the planets they could get... But... after sometime it became boring, because there was nothing special. Nothing that made them entirely different from each other. It was just... boring.
I tried it again, with a new creature, but I stopped playing before I reached space phase. Why? Because it was all the same... There was nothing that made me move on, because everything was exactly the same as it was when I played my other creatures. There was no "wow, that's new" and neither was there a "cool, I've never done this before"...

So, after all, I think the game might be fun... if you don't know all the old videos like the one you posted and if you buy it for 20$... But there's simply so much lost potential. They could have made such a great game. But they didn't...

Oh, and I think you overdo things when you say Maxis and Will Wright are evil... You know, Maxis is just another money-craving company, you know, that's how all the companies are. If they weren't, they wouldn't be able to survive in the world of business...
And, maybe I'm a little bit naive, but I think Will Wright didn't mean Spore to be so bad...

Harvest

#2
No, they're all evil.  They stated they rather have the sales instead of the acclaim.  This means they rather make money instead of have something they can be proud of.  They don't realize that you can easily have both.  If a game is deep and has good gameplay you reach a different demographic.  That is the gamer demographic.  If it got 95/100 from most review sites gamers would take notice and most people would buy it.  Look at GTA, it certainly isn't a casual game, yet it sells millions every time AND gets reviewed extremely high ever time.

Also, they HAD the game.  THEY HAD IT IN 05, but somewhere down the line they took it out in the pursuit of money.

There are companies that care about their customers, EA/Maxis is not one of them.  However when Will Wright responded on the forum, he did seem to have some regret and wants to fix it through "expansions".  This looks like their plan all along.  Show amazing content then take it out, release a piece of shit then fix it slightly with expansions but not giving everything (giving us the ability to go on planets but where is our water stage?  Another $40 expansion I suppose) leaving us wanting more.  Too bad Maxis, I will never pay for your games without pirating.  I should never have bought Spore.  I will not buy your expansion either UNLESS it is what is advertised.

http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/19099.page  take a look at that :D

http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/300.page and this

http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/8555.page and this.

I say forget the expansions, just release Spore 2 the way we want it.

Also:  Take a look at this one too http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/4964.page#45040  look at that list of much needed features.  Only two are being added in the expansion.  Also, the ability to get out of your ship was removed because it "wasn't interesting".  This is a huge lie.  They removed it because they were going to put it in an expansion.  Bastards.
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Merlin

#3
Quote from: Harvest on January 28, 2009, 12:23:17 PMThis means they rather make money instead of have something they can be proud of. [...] THEY HAD IT IN 05, but somewhere down the line they took it out in the pursuit of money. [...] he did seem to have some regret and wants to fix it through "expansions".
Just like I said... it's a money-craving company.
I mean, you just said, that they obviously didn't want something to be proud of, because they wanted to make money. Well, why should they sell a great game (Spore '05) for 50$, if they could sell the same game with a boring basic version and a lot of expansions for 200$?

Quote from: Harvest on January 28, 2009, 12:23:17 PMLook at GTA, it certainly isn't a casual game, yet it sells millions every time AND gets reviewed extremely high ever time.
Well, unfortunately almost every game developer wants to make casual games, nowadays... And as you can see in the sales figures of games like Sims2 and its expansions or MySims or Spore, they obviously have a lot of success with this tactic.

EDIT: I just skimmed over the last link you posted... Of course, all those things would make the game better and would gradually turn it into the game it should have been... but there are so many ideas, that Maxis just won't bring all of them into the game, because many people (those who are real casual players and are ever so happy that there's a cute and creepy expansion pack) won't need this... well, maybe they'll make some expansions with the stuff from the list, but, well, expansions... so we'll have to buy them  for 20$ each... And as the list is very long... we'll have to spend an awful lot of money.

Harvest

Hopefully they can add some of the little things through patches.

I'm glad they gave us a bunch of exo skeleton limbs through a patch but I heard they wont be doing that again.
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KefkaticFanatic

I hear they re-added blood to the cell stage and screaming deaths to the space stage with a patch.  Can't confirm this as I haven't played the game in months.



me irl
[close]

ALPRAS

I completely agree with you harvest.
When I saw the game for the 1st time, i just said "Holy crap, the game is genious!"
I never liked t he graphs, but who cares? the game is great!

LIE

When i pirated the game and Ive played it (the graphs in the max possible), i just thought "whats this? a N64 game?"
The graphs terrible (even for cuty graphs are bad), the gameplay is good at the begging, but in the space chapter, it starts too get horrible.
The game is really boring...
i get it for free and Im still sorry for that...

Sir Awesomesauce

Didn't Will Wright recently resign from Maxis?
You should read my post, it's probably above this.

Tranzlater

You're lucky you only have to pay $40 for the game and $20 for expansions. We have to pay £40 and £20. That's about double what americans pay.
Quote from: Arison The Bat
oviosly so far i've only got "little unmature kids" to respond to this thread
After months of mediation and exams, I return.
Probably not for long.

Harvest

I started playing Spore again because I'm bored out of my mind and I've been having some fun with it again.  Whenever I play it though it makes me so sad thinking what the game could have been.  Here is basically what I want summed up by someone else :D

I think many people will claim that although some kind of abstract commitment to science would have been nice in Spore, what they really want is just some decent, engaging and clever gameplay, instead of a rigid pattern of repetitive, simplistic grinding tasks.

But I think these are two very interrelated issues. The gameplay elements that attracted many of us to the game were precisely the "sciencey" parts. Because by science we're not talking about the propounding of abstract theorems or doing calculus problems here--the science parts most of us want are basically just the interesting game mechanics everyone is talking about (e.g. functional consequence to parts placement in Creature, or a more realistic Creature ecosystem and behavior system, or any number of sci-fi features we wanted in Space, etc.).

These are science-related not because of any didactic teaching of facts, but in their basic nature and the mental approach you'd have to take to them. Such as trial and error, experimentation, exploration of the world, problem solving, inducing general principles of how the world works, etc. E.g. figuring out what kinds of creature design would be effective. Figuring out what kinds of creature behaviors and strategies are appropriate for which niche, etc.

So in asking for a "Science Spore," most of us are really asking for a game that actually engages our minds on some level. That's why we play games in the first place.
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Tranzlater

Maxis aren't all bad- I played some Sims 3 at my local EA hub (I live right by the British EA center) and it's great. However, while the Sims 2 was a huge step up from the original, the Sims 3 is just a prettified version of the Sims 2. However, there are little features you really want in the Sims 2 that are in this one, so I might get it, since I didn't buy many Sims 2 expansion packs.

But yeah... all the people I know with spore are generally under 12.
Quote from: Arison The Bat
oviosly so far i've only got "little unmature kids" to respond to this thread
After months of mediation and exams, I return.
Probably not for long.

Cobraroll

I'd say, Sims 3 is way more limited than Sims 2. There's one huge tool that's not in Sims 2, and that makes the game. That alone: The Style Switcher or whatever it's called in English. Had this feature been in Sims 2...

Other than that, shops are limited to pre-made houses you can't see the inside of. You can't swim in the sea. Cars are summoned, so it doesn't matter where you park them. You can't make custom neighbourhoods.

Hopefully, this will be fixed in the expansion packs. At the moment, I'm still preferring The Sims 2.
Emergence - a story exclusive to NSM

Yes, I'm still around from time to time. For quicker response, you can reach me by PM, or drop by Smogon to say hi. I go by "Codraroll" there, because of a bet.

Harvest

The sims 3 looks terrible.  Played a bit of a pirated version and it was really bad.
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KefkaticFanatic

Yep.  Not a fun game.  I love how everyone was all crazy excited for it and then a day or two after release just went totally silent about it.



me irl
[close]

ALPRAS

And once more, the graphs just sucks. MAXIS FAIL