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Spore Expansion Announced, Another Coming In 2009
EA announced this week what many suspected for a while, now: Spore expansions are on their way. The first, due out in November, will be an addition to the creature creator, offering more parts for players to use. The next, due in Spring 2009, will provide new gameplay:
"The expansion will give space-faring species the ability to beam down from their ships to explore other worlds and complete missions. And along with this, the expansion will include an Adventure creator, in which players can build — and then share — their own customized missions."
Personally I'm not interested until my creatures can have IKEA furniture and Starbucks coffee. Then again, given the rate at which EA expansion packs come out, I won't have to wait too long. ;)
. . . How about a reduction? Like in DRM?
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Rootkit?
Just looking at the state of the game out-of-the-box, it was clear that there would be multiple expansions. I believe we'll see at LEAST one expansion for each stage (in order to make them more "complete"), plus an outrageous amount of spare parts. The first expansion's a parts one, since that's easy to do. Second's a space overhaul, which is a given considering this is the game's best aspect right now.
What will we see next? A Spore: Sim City expansion for the Civ stage? A Spore: The Sims expansion for the Creature stage? Either way, I bought the game and now I'm feeling like I got a bit raped there. Was I to want to buy any of those expansions, I'd wait for the Deluxe pack that's bound to appear.
Oh and, what about a DRM-removing expansion? 5 bucks to get a DRM-free game... I'm sure people would buy into this wicked, twisted scheme right now, despite how evil and money-hungry it is.
These are most likely going to comprise mainly of parts that were intentionally stripped out from the game for the sake of selling it for more.
And most likely the "part pack" will be much much cheaper and bundled with future part packs / expansions in the future.
Given the nature of the game I dont see a reason to pay for this. It only rewards the company for basically with-holding something they had already put money into developing. I understand, despite EA's greedy practices, it isn't even making a profit, but that has more to do with the massive amount of money it puts into marketing, its stubborn hiring practices that gives it a very luke-warm talent pool, and its poor management. Thinking about it, I dont understand why spore is lacking so much unless it was simply a lack of programming talent that prevented them from accomplishing what they wanted to within the timeframe they had. Closely looking at the game models when they move and such makes you realize that there isn't as much complexity as you would hope.
To put things in perspective, EA does the equivalent of spending more money on making a car commercial than actually in designing the car itself. I forget where I saw their budget break-down. Maybe that's changed, but seeing who they hired in Red Alert 3 for the cut scenes (that goes towards marketing), I doubt that's turned around.
The patch caused many people's games to not work at all, and many more to have frequent crashes, sound stuttering and delays, invisible graphics and creatures, and more. That was more than a month ago and they've yet to fix any of it. But there's an expansion pack coming yay! I guess that's all that matters to them.
The game is fun the first time through. Unfortunately, it only takes a few hours to get through the game, and then you're out of anything to do. It's basically a bunch of editors tied together with short stages of gameplay and not at all the epic-scale sandbox it looked like in the original presentation video from 2005.
I downloaded the pirated version, played it until i got to the space level - played a few missions in there and felt that i played enough. I personally didn't feel the fun of creation that was expected. The entire game felt quite directed.
The molecular stage i found fun, even though it was quite simple. The creature stage got quite boring since it was quite directed - you wouldn't be going anywhere unless you completed the stupid collection quests. It would be more entertaining if they went a WoW route with that - making other peoples creatures your AI-powered neighbors isn't enough.
The tribal stage was warcraft. Nuff' said.
The civilization stage was frustrating, because depending on the type of society you pick, you are limited with what you get. I picked the capitalism-based one (instead of a militaristic or religious one from what i remember), and i could only buy and sell things; make deals. If someone attacked me I didn't have tanks that could take them out - I would have to buy myself out of a war. Now that I think about it - it definitely made it interesting.
In the end I go to space, get little quests, etc. I felt like I was getting no where. So I finally turn the game off so I can go "browsing" at YouPorn - it was then when I realized that it was 9pm and I didn't go to work that morning.
They also nixed the Plant Editor that they showed off at E3 so it can be sold later as a $20 add-on.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
EA is the anti-Midas: they touch gold and it turns to shit.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
The plant editor apparently can be enabled but isn't worth much: "copy your shortcut to Spore - in the copy of the shortcut, go to "properties" and at the end of the filename (after the -locale:en-us switch), add -state:FloraEditor" I am interested to know if any more is available with the right cmd line whatnot.