is spore the new daikatana?

after more than 5 years in development, and after seeing some weird gameplay movies, spore is now the number one candidate, for the daikatana award, to the most prominently hyped game deception of the last 5 years.

among the things of the game, that has been shown, there is the “creature editor”. a module in witch you create a repulsive and ugly 3D creature, using a simple interface of buttons and sliders. you have options for setting body, skin, ants, number of leg, etc. among the demo videos released, there is a sequence showing a stupid creature flying on some sort of spaceship, pursuing and laser shooting other ugly creature.
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(here a image of a ugly creature was supposed to go)
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lets enjoy a bit of the hype, from the ign.com previews of the game:
spore preview from ign.com inserts follow, paired with my comment inside parents.

IGN: “The sequence for the mating was procedural as well, and was funny as hell, thanks to the awesome love makin' music playing in the background”.
(can’t wait tho see some cockroaches having sex with the awesome music background.)

IGN: “The awesome thing was, every time that Will placed something near the Tripods, they jumped up in surprised excitement and immediately ran over to it to examine it”.
(a stroke of genius in a.i... ...the awesome thing sound a bit reminiscent of "the sims"?)

IGN: “We had the chance to use the creature creator for ourselves and found it extraordinarily intuitive and belligerently fun. Depending whether you're into crazy creatures and being creative, this will steal your life from you”.
(I see myself rolling on the floor laughing of pure fun, when I can put my hand on this thing. also I visualize some therapeutic possibilities to this awesome invention, to help addicts to forget of drugs. now i plan to enclose myself in a cave with this marvel and a barrel of paste to avoid sttarvation)

IGN: “One of the great features of the creature creator is that after creating the creature, its animations can be previewed at any part of the creation process”.
(wow, a masterpiece of user interface)

IGN: “The completely awesome part about that is that all of the creatures that you encounter will be creatures that someone else designed on his computer”.
(oh, shit!, this game really absolutifuckingly rocks.)

IGN: “Will Wright is a mad genius of gaming”.
(yeah, and the EA execs are mad genius of game companies tactics)
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from the above, its obvious the agreement between EA and IGN, to give a “very favorable opinion” of the game.
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spore project have the respectable merit of trying something new. its concept have certain interest, even if largely limited to biology labs enthusiasts. but what is wrong is the hype, and the budget.
the budget is wrong because its experimental gameplay, and its biology theme don’t make it a mass product. i hardly see this game giving profits to EA. I will venture to say it will hardly sell 300.000 copies, which given the hype and the time it has been in development, will be a failure.
the hype is wrong because in the end will be a massive letdown, when most people realizes that the game is simply boring.
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why the EA directors have spent so much resources on this is unknown, but the reasons, may possibly be near one of these:

1- their understanding of games is so limited, that they really think they have another “the sims” on their hands.
2- they see it as alternative marketing. they don’t mind losing money on it, while the EA brand is repeatedly seen associated with a “cool, innovative game”. in this respect, the longer the development takes, and the higher the hype fly, the better.
3- something of both previous. they see it as a highly probable “the sims”, and also realize the positive effects of the project to their brand.
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to put the game in the same group of daikatana, may be a bit too far. the game really has some merits. but also has many parallelism with the famous ill-fated ion-storm’s title. one of these, is the hype surrounding the lead creator. the one being promoted as “mad genius of gaming”, will wright.

in videogames, there are two kinds of famed designers:

1 - the ones that have created great masterpieces, showing impressive creativity to expand on a premise, and deep understanding of what works and what not in a given gameplay case.
example: miyamoto doing the early Mario games, showing awesome mastery of many techniques of gameplay. its not the single idea of doing a 2D platformer, but constructing so many successful gameplay elements into it, to get a end result that shines in gameplay richness.
example 2: sid meirs doing civilization. its not joust the idea of doing a turn based strategy game based in pieces and squares, but constructing over it many successful gameplay elements, to get a end result that shines in gameplay richenss.

2 - those that have found an unexplored gameplay case, and have successfully realized it, without showing impressive creativity to expand on it, nor specially deep understanding of what work and what not on it. the merit here, is mostly on identifying the unexplored gameplay case, and realizing it well, more than anything else. after being created, these types of games tend to seem that the getting the idea was not that hard. joust by getting the basic idea, the game creation seem easy, and almost logical.
example: the creation of the first person shooter, by jhon romero or carmack or whatever is supposed to have been created it. I am sure that near that time, when these kind of games where created, many kids already had similar basic prototypes runnings on their computers, I may have been one of these.

the really great designers are the case 1, example miyamoto and meiers. the case 2 are notable designers, but not the same class of 1.
in the case of wright, he has not yet done something that can be situated in the case 1, so he is not in the same class of stellar game designers. his games until now put him more near case 2 than case 1.
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in the end, wright seem destined to fail with spore. his actual prestige will suffer, and will loose importance inside EA. anyway, is likely that EA continue promoting him as a genius, to get the brand benefit of having a “genius” in the company. also, given the incredible market sucess that was “the sims”, even a disappointing spore, is most likely that EA execs will give Will another chance, only telling him to not be so weird next time.
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also, this case show the difference when a management understand games and when don’t. EA got “the sims” by luck more than anything. and now blindly are giving wright full freedom, without a real understanding of the possible results.
this is a sharp contrast of, for example, Nintendo doing wii sports, with a low budget, innovative gameplay, and functional graphics, that reinforce the gameplay rather than detracting of it. in this case, they understand games, and know what they have to do. so success, is much more plausible.
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to indie games, this gives a lesson. the experimental innovative elements that spore bring, while not mass-market appealing, are interesting anyway. this show the need that the actual videogame world has, of medium-budget, innovative games market. only that in this case, the EA noobs did it at full budget.
it is exactly at the center of the interest of gamers, and game creators the rise of this market as a stable and solid sector, and bigger efforts should be done, to the realization of this.

Well, from I've seen of Spore, it looks to me as if a) there's no way it will have the same mass appeal or generate the same level of sales as The Sims, and b) it is surely up my alley, and I suspect I will have a great time with it.

Sure, EA sucks... but they're giving Will rope on this one, and I suspect the results will be brilliant, even if they do not "meet sales expecatations." Not, since I am not EA, that I really care about that.

When I first saw the game demo earlier this year, I thought "cool, a game for game designers." I don't know how appealing it will be for everyone, maybe the community content crossover/sharing will drive it better than expected.

The game will most likely be quite a lot of fun. Will Wright knows his stuff.

I avoid EA games on principle, however, and this game doesn't look so "must-have" that I would go against my principles.

Comparing it to Daikatana is quite the exaggeration, if it applies at all. Will Wright is certainly not strutting about with Romero's former arrogance.

To sum up your post.

Don't innovate.

Oh yeah, and down with capitalism and all that.

Ugh no.

Yeah, but don't forget the Will Wright did an 'Oppenheimer' on us with The Sims. Personally, I though STALKER was the next Daikatana. I bought STALKER for the same reason I've bought other games in the past, and that is that I don't believe the reviews and the hype, but have to see for myself. Obviously, STALKER is nothing like it's original conception, but they've totally screwed the game engine (and therefore the whole game) by badly tacking on a load of DX9 stuff, then releasing it without being given the chance to finish it.

The trend these days seems to be to promise a game, recoup costs on pre-orders and get reviewers into your pocket. Then, by the time the game has gone gold, hope that your lowest paid coders can whip out a few patches in time for release.

There are some good games out there though. After 22 months of owning Guild Wars (and it's to standalone add-ons), I finally got my first character to completer the first chapter - hooray. I've got a lot of time for the people who work on that game. Not only has it kept me entertained for almost 2 years (er, not constantly you understand), but it's updated on a weekly basis with regards to fixes, tweaks, balancing issues, weekend events an all manner of other good stuff. With no online fee either. If other publishers supported their games with similar enthusiasm, they might find themselves in a better position, although it helps to release a good game in the first place.

Also playing Mr Robot still (Alien 8 was one of my fave speccy games), just a few rooms every now and then. Also Rebelstar (GBA) on my DS. Although someone pointed out that I could have just downloaded a GBA emulator and the Rebelstar ROM. However, unlikely as it may seem, if I like something, I want the real thing. Just like music, I like to have the original copy (and MP3's etc... lose a lot of the dynamics in the compression process and also suffer from 'aliasing'. The only way not to notice the aliasing is to play the compressed music on a low quality sound system. And yes, I'm a sound engineering nerd).