Spore (preview)

[A Black Falcon]

I worry that they did this because they got in over their head when they described the sheer number of features and were forced to scale things back just to get things done by deadline.

That is, as I think ASM said, "Molyneux-itis"?

It does sound like that is exactly what happened. The 'cell' stage is supposed to take 15 minutes? The game is heavily balanced towards character design? But what about the actual gameplay?

I'm not sure what I was expecting because as I said I've never looked really closely into what Spore actually is, besides 'huge life sim game', but if it really is just about creature design... well, that's too bad. That certainly doesn't sound much like what I remember, whatever it was I remember. :D

I mean... shouldn't it be like some kind of broader, yet more approachable, SimEarth game or something?

It makes sense that they're taking it this way -- Maxis has, after all, reached its greatest success with The Sims, a very mass-market oriented game almost entirely about content creation -- but still... SimCity and SimCity 2000 were their best games. Those were about building, and creating... but also about being very solid, very well developed games. But they gradually lost that, SimCity 4 perhaps aside... I was hoping Spore might be Maxis getting back on track, but it seems not, sadly.