They want a game? Let THEM make it: Spore Galactic Adventure

Looks oddly like the Sims in Spore!

My friend Jayzen messaged to clue me in on the next Spore expack, which turns out to be a quest design tool.

Spore. So full of promise. Such a disappointment to so many. What was odd about it was that the tech which players were looking forward to so eagerly was all there, and worked pretty well: the creature editor, the random worlds, and especially the ultra-long zoom from creature to planet to solar system to galaxy. The social aspect (which consists of automatic content sharing) worked well and was fun too — my friends and I enjoyed running into each others’ creations and blowing em up or cozying up and comparing notes.

But the gameplay felt patched together and shallow: a series of four quick and simple mini-games strung together, followed by Space… which was bigger and deeper, but not enough to compete with real games in the space sim/strategy/trading/combat genres.

Some of it was fun nonetheless. Creature design was entertaining, civ phase could be a blast, and I for one particularly enjoyed the terraforming aspect of space phase, where you can transform a lifeless rock into a Garden of Eden with the application of heat, moisture and life. Got a good couple weeks of enjoyable gameplay out of it, but Spore was a game we’d hoped we could play for months or years, and it came nowhere close to that.

The first expack was a disappointment as well: what the game desperately needed was more gameplay, and instead, we got decorations in the Creepy and Cute parts pack.

Expack two, however, is taking a new approach. It’s an in-game level editor that lets you transform a planet into a new minigame, something like a quest in an RPG, which will be shared via Sporepedia like your critters, buildings and vehicles. You get new goals, new obstacles and new special abilities you can use to overcome them. The quests will be available from Space Stage, apparently given by alien races you’re trying to impress. And you’ll carry them out by landing on a planet and playing your creature up close and personal, like Creature Stage all over again.

Clearly, the success of this expansion is going to depend on both the skill and creativity of the player community and on the versatility of the building blocks that EA provides them. We already know the concept is a winner — games as diverse as Half-life and Morrowind and the Sims proved how much life a mod toolset could add to a game with a devoted following, and more recently, Little Big Planet proved that a game built around its level editor could be a huge seller. The concept goes back much further than that, of course; as Jayzen said (in response to a Spore dev comment on  a video that this is “a first”):

*cough* adventureconstructionset *cough*
*cough* from the 80s *cough*

This is a first in one way, however. While lots of games have offered modding tools after the core game’s release, as far as I know they’ve always been free. Selling a level editor as an expansion is novel, and it makes you wonder whether it sets a trend for other games… especially, Sims 3 ;)

Anyway, if the quest-building tools are rich and varied enough to support players’ ideas, we may have a winner. If they’re as thin as Spore’s earlier gameplay, maybe not. Though even in that case, there’s a thriving mod scene that may be able to extend the tools; if so, the community may yet be able to rescue the title from the twin demons of thin content and repetitive gameplay.

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