Well, hello there! Lately I have been haunted by memories of a certain game made by Maxis: Spore. I will take a deep dive into the reasons why this game left such a mark on me, so be prepared, dear reader. Spore turned ten years old this month, so what better time to talk about it?
So, Spore is a game about evolution, you go from the microscopic scale of a cell to the space age, in a continuous progression split into eras. This is a pretty neat idea by itself, showing the abridged history of a species, but the important part of this whole affair is the tech powering the procedural generation of the universe and everything that inhabits it.
Yes, a randomly generated universe with randomly generated planets, covered in randomly generated atmospheres and inhabited by randomly generated flora and fauna. It is as if No Man's Sky was not that original after all. Thing is, in Spore, this worked better. There were kinks here and there, repetition was a given, because you can generate so much unique content. This is where the user-generated content comes in: the game was connected to a central server, so everything a player created was synched and lo and behold, it could apear in another random player's game! The user generated content integration got even deeper, with Spore: Galactic Adventures, an expansion which let users generate quests for the space age in the game and share them.
The game has endless content, based on an amazing system, sure, but what about the game itself? Well, each age has different gameplay, the cell phase plays like Feeding Frenzy, the creature phase plays like a simplistic survival game, the tribal phase is a very simple RTS, the modern one is a bit more complex than the tribal one and then there is the space age, the meat of the game. It is based on exploration of the galaxy, finding out other civilizations, which also reached the space age or not, tying alliances and eventually discovering an external alien threat to the galaxy...Mass Effect, is that you? Oh, but it goes a step further: you can terraform any planet in the galaxy,making it a paradise or an uninhabitable hellhole.
Now, for the real treat of the game: designing stuff that simply works. You can create any creature you can ever imagine, and its animations will be generated as expected. You can tie body parts together as you wish in any number you wish and they will simply function as intended. Want a leg on you head? You can do it. Make your creature in the shape of a cat? you can do it. A car? You CAN do it. They made it in such a way, it simply works. Was this technology ever used again? Never, it died with Spore, and Maxis died with EA, making sure this innovative stuff never returned.
All in all, I was excited for No Man's Sky, as it reminded me of Spore's godly random generation, but, alas, it was not to be. So, let us remember the innovation that Spore could have brought, if given the chance.
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