@jellyfish3232
Remarkable disappointment, yes.
It was a collection of minigames, nothing more. The only good thing about it was the creature creator.
The cell stage was a minigame, hunt, eat and upgrade your little amoeba. Then suddenly you sprout two legs and you are on land.
The creature stage, a minigame. You control one single animal and then all you do is collect skeletons and kill or convert other animals.
The tribal stage is equally bland and shallow. You either convert or kill other tribes. The same for the “civilisation stage”. There is no depth to any of it.
The space stage is equally crap. All you have is one single ship with which you just colonise planets or annihilate other civilisations. The trade system is equally rudimentary.
Here is what I think Spore should have been to qualify as “remarkable”.
You start out with a selection of random amoeba that start to evolve on their own. After a few generation you are presented with statistics about the survivability of the different lines of amoeba. You select the one that you think is the most promising. You are allowed to make limited genetic modification to optimise them as you see fit. Then the game continues to simulate evolution and you watch your choice either becoming dominant, or extinct, how the modifications you make influence the subsequent autonomous evolution in changing environments, which would then influence your thinking when the next selections come along. You would have to anticipate how your choices and modifications play out in the long run. It would be more of a manager style game, not a simplistic hunt and collect minigame. You can even switch to one of the competing species that evolved without any of your involvement.
Where spore’s tribal stage starts, here is what I would envision. Once your species has evolved sufficiently to invent fire on its own, you are given direct control over one small stoneage village and have to expand, build, collect resources and research new technologies, and compete with other villages (that may or may not be of your species). My game would not have purged the other species from the planet.
What is also important is that the choices you made earlier in the game directly influence how well you do in the tribal stage. Depending on your choices, your species would have distinctive properties, like speed, strength, size, food consumption, resilience to environmental conditions and disease, or how well they cooperate in groups. Speed, strenght and size directly influence your species combat capabilites, how fast you can gather resources, how fast you can build and expand your settlements, what environments you can settle in, how much food you have to gather to support your settlement. Intelligence also directly influences how fast you can research new technologies, or what technologies you can research. Whether you have hands with fingers or are some spider like creature with legs only, also influence the speed of research, building and creating new technology.
Your choices in that tribal stage would also influence the continued evolution of your species.
Focus on combat and neglecting research, and your species will get stronger , faster, deadlier, at the expense of intelligence and social cohesion. Focus on research and your species gets smarter at the expense of physical strength. Doing this you proceed through the ages like in Empire Earth or Civilisation, but without hard separators. Combat would be on the same scope of Supreme Commander, City building would be like Sim City.
Once you get to the space age, gameplay would be like Galactic Civilisation mixed with Sins of a Solar Empire, in a full 3D Galaxy. Researching new technologies, designing your own ship styles, trading with other civilisations, combat involving hundreds if not thousands of starships. At any point in the space stage you can go back to micro-managing your cities if you like, while the game does the rest automatically until you get back.
THAT would have been a remarkable game.
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