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."

Comments

These first couple won't be worth it.

[WDot]

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. ;)

Re:These first couple won't be worth it.

[Goldberg's Pants]

EA announces "Rest of the game we deliberately removed so we could charge you for an expansion pack to be released." Barely a month after it was released.

NO SALE! I'm done with mainstream gaming. I'm tired of being treated like a 24/7 ATM by these people.

Re:These first couple won't be worth it.

[alvinrod]

Pft... I'd actually like to get Spore working before before I get any expansion. I bought the game and it played fine for three days without a hitch and then decided to give up on life and refuses to run for long before running into issues and crashing. EA's customer support has been dreadful and haven't even come close to a working resolution. I haven't played the game in over a month now and even though it wasn't the most enjoyable experience I managed to have a decent time with it. I'll probably never bother with it again.

I can't foresee myself picking up any EA games in the future, even if it means missing out on some good titles. I might be tempted to pick up used copies of the console versions. It's probably the first time I've actually gone out of my way to buy used simply to deprive a company of any of my money. The antics they've been pulling recently and their horrible support have pissed me off to that point. Sure they're finally getting around to releasing some new and original games like Dead Space or Mirror's Edge, but they still come off as a soul-crushing corporation that's a pain in the ass to deal with in any capacity other than letting them pillage my pocketbook.

What's really sad is idea that consoles will be moving away from disc-based media. I can understand that there are a lot of reasons to support that move, but I want a disc copy of the game that I can insert and play on any machine without having to deal with any additional bullshit DRM or that I can sell back to a store if the game turns out to be a disappointment in my eyes. Anything less will probably only turn me away from gaming even more than I've been in the last few months.

The gaming industry may be growing significantly as new generations of people start to get into gaming, but how fast are they going to start pushing customers away with all the crap they've been pulling lately? Right now I don't think it will make a huge impact, but has anyone considered what the impact will be in ten years? The DRM just seems to get more draconian coupled with a decrease in consumer rights. Eventually enough people are going to get fed up and just take their entertainment money elsewhere. How long until the industry actually will have to respond to their crap policies due to negative growth?

Let me guess

[chord.wav]

Rootkit?

Predictable.

[Nemyst]

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.

I played it

[nawcom]

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.

Re:They broke the game with a patch last month

[JimboFBX]

yeah I looked it up online, on your desktop shortcut add "-jobPriority:0" to the path and it fixes everything the newest patch broke.

And yet, their casual audience will never find that nor understand what I just said meant.

Re:I want the stuff shown in the demos...

[canajin56]

They also nixed the Plant Editor that they showed off at E3 so it can be sold later as a $20 add-on.

hey, remember when maxis was cool?

[syrinx]

EA is the anti-Midas: they touch gold and it turns to shit.

Re:I want the stuff shown in the demos...

[eleuthero]

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.