Hey everyone thanks for watching! I'm putting Spore down for now; but this isn't the last part in the series. I'll pick it back up in the future. Next time we'll talk about the lore and maybe do some theory crafting I like doing theory videos from time to time so it'll be fun to do one about this game. Working on a few projects that I have been wanting to do for a while. Hope you enjoy them!
Spore is one of my defining childhood games, and the only one with tangible evidence of it. My dad and I played it, and he made a bunch of creations with me in mind, with at least one bearing my name. Unfortunately, he passed away before I hit my teens, but I still see his creations and they always remind me of him.
I was in 8th grade when Spore came out. My best friend and I played it excessively and got some much joy from it. Now, I am a middle school science teacher (now teaching the same age group as when I first played Spore) after study biology in my undergrad. My best friend is an actual rocket scientist. It’s funny how things work out!
The reason some adventures give more is because the points given used to be based on the difficulty of the adventure. In the last version released for the game, adventure rating and difficulty was broken, so adventures with more than 15 points are no longer possible as their difficulty no longer can be changed.
When you feel the urge to come back to this topic, it might be worth doing a tour of all the games made by people who said they were inspired by Spore: Elysian Eclipse Thrive The Sapling Adapt etc It's interesting to see what a generation of people take with a core idea when they get to re-imagine it. (full disclosure, I worked on Thrive as well as my own game, Atoms and Time, from the ideas of Spore, so I'm not entirely unbiased on this)
Yay! Part 2 is out, can't wait to see how this goes. Spore is one of my all time favourites and I still play it from time to time and I love playing Space Stage the most and love exploring massive universes with lots of unknowns to find and collect. While also balancing the needs of my people, but I so want to not be the only guy in my entire empire outside of Turrets and Uber Turrets. I am so glad you took our feedback on your research and the video presentation. Hippos, Tapirs, and Kangaroos are examples of agreessive herbivores. I am so playing it with mods next time.
Anytime I see an in depth video on Spore, it scratches an itch in my brain. It's flawed and could have been way different (arguably better) but I love it to bits. And your videos so far are pretty great, and even thought provoking. You definitely should do more!
One thing that annoys me is that there isn't a toggle that makes it so that buildings and creatures you made for your own adventures doesn't show up in the base game, it's quite jarring to have the railing you designed for a mission to show up as a capitol building or the cannon fodder you made to be a galactic empire all of a sudden
I'm pretty sure that the points you get for adventures is based on the difficulty of that adventure. The Spore server should calculate the points based on the success rate of the players, but adventures are now stuck on 15 points because that system stopped working long ago.
Very nice, Spore was a rare case for me making a childlike and foolish younger version of myself in awe at what games Could be given the amount of love and defiantly made me a lot more interested in space and Mod/ user generated content. If you ever do make a third video might I recommend you cover the importance of user generated content more deeply, and how it interacts in game, as an example speedrunders can edit future save games by phisicly flying to a save and manipulating the planet with terraforming tools to make the planet more easy, or how this kind of game doesn't need any input to download and generate what is essentially endless amounts of DLC for free, and how the system itself helps itself by each player creating content other players can enjoy that content and vice versa. There is also the fact that Galactic adventures was not the Only dlc, there was Creepy and cute pack which added some new abilitys as well as the all exclusive Dr-pepper DLC pack that let you use cybernetic parts used in the Grox. I guess you could also talk aobut mods... its not a strong moding scene, but there are indeed mods that can make the game more easy or expand on 'Spore' if you want that kind of experience. Also if it were to be a complete analysis I do think you should say something to the effect of how when people ask for a new spore game that they did Deliver, with Darkspore and various other Spore media which lead EA to decide that the spore games are just not worth investing into considering how easy it is to make content for Apex lends and fifa.
I remember the featured adventure fondly. The author was definitely not afraid to explore darker themes with his adventures such as decline and cosmic horror, and this is not the first time the concept of White Spice as a malevolent entity mistaken for a valuable resource appeared in his adventures either. Dude had a cool style when it came to skyscraper design and apunkalypse/used future creations. Just one of many talented creators back in the heyday of this game
Something I don't hear a lot. The cartoon art style IMO makes creature creation "easier", and it allows stuff made by different creators to look more like it "fits" in the same world. I still have my issues with certain aesthetic choices in the game for sure.
@grantfomin6829 and even then you can still make some damn cool and mean looking creatures There's more to it then "cartoon = childish" It more like cartoon = more universally compatible Imagine if spore ended up super realistic and you wanted to make something cute
That's a very interesting look at Spore's history and the expansion. I never had the chance to play the expansion, but if it's possible to create such compelling stories with its tools then it must be worth trying!
I think the amount of experience is based on the difficulty, which is determined by how often people fail or succeed. I'm not 100% sure about that though.
adventures give more or less points depending on how many wins and loses happen on them. they seem to need a lot of either for the score to be weighted.
All stages lacked A LOT of scale, depth and complexity for me (and seriousness...Spore is entirely too goofy for me, even more so than other Wright-titles), and the aquatic stage is sorely missed (could've even had a horror element to it, looking down into the dark depths), but I think the only stage I'd really actually take into an entirely different direction is the space stage. The whole vibe of the game is that as your species grows, you have to look at an increasingly bigger and bigger picture - the individual becomes less and less important, which is only logical. You're not just controlling yourself and your pack anymore, but billions of your people. But then, in the final stage that is so gigantic in scope, you shrink the gameplay down to controlling a single ship again? Why? What's the point? Sure, you can recruit a small "pack" of other ships to support you like in the creature stage, but being degraded to such a limited role like that just feels disappointing. It feels like you're just an errand boy for the Empire that you yourself built - seriously disheartening, at least to me. What I'd envision is more akin to games like Sins Of A Solar Empire or Stellaris, a highly complex grand strategy game of galactic, maybe later on even intergalactic scope and almost terrifying depth. Creating and commanding fleets, handling colonies, dealing with warfare, politics and interstellar economics. You know...actual Galactic Empire stuff. Oh well. Pondering what could've been just makes me sad. What I DID really like though was that as soon as you reach the creature stage, your entire present star system is mapped pretty much in real time - meaning that not only does the day-night-cycle feel like the real deal and watching neighboring planets pass across the sky is a sight to behold, but also that if you leave the planet into orbit, the relative positions of the stellar bodies in the system match those you just saw from down on the ground. I quite enjoyed that, makes everything feel much more like a coherent experience.
Spore's mechanics and design are still very very strange, even with the understanding that it could never be as big and complex as the mechanics the demo demonstrated. Why is the staff-of-life a limited one-time resource? why are the grox so insanely massive? why are there so many bugs? why no plant editor? why such artificial limits on the creature editor? (you are locked into one mouth type for the entire creature stage) (you can't modify your own species's anatomy even in the space stage where it makes sense to be able to do so) Why only 3 colonies per planet, only 10 if taking over an alien's homeworld? Why are the planets so tiny? Why is the cell stage exclusively filled with maxis cells? Why were all the extra cell parts in the cell stage cut out? Why do you need a hologram scout instead of just... being able to beam down to planets normally? Why can an individual city in civilization stage ONLY do one thing (religious, military, economic) instead of being able to be multi-approach? You're kind of locked in once civilization stage starts and it's very hard to switch approaches. Even without the demo in mind, each stage feels half-baked and has a ton of latent features available that are just... not utilized even though it would have been very doable to do so.
The whole "The Spore we got was butchered" narrative that some people have has always confused me, for some reason they treat the 2005 demo like its Spore in its purest unfiltered form and that the final game we got was sabotaged by the Cute camp of devs, but when you actually ask them what they miss about the 2005 demo all they can muster up is the Aquatic Stage and blood. The Aquatic stage sounds really cool on paper, but when you actually think about it it would have boiled down to being the Creature stage but underwater, which would have just made the gameplay more repetitive. And I really dont see how someone's love for this game can actually ride or die on whether or not it has blood, when theres already plenty of games on the market that does have it. If anyone reading this felt disappointed with the final version of Spore for similar reasons, could you explain why?
Hey everyone thanks for watching! I'm putting Spore down for now; but this isn't the last part in the series. I'll pick it back up in the future. Next time we'll talk about the lore and maybe do some theory crafting I like doing theory videos from time to time so it'll be fun to do one about this game. Working on a few projects that I have been wanting to do for a while. Hope you enjoy them!
Spore is one of my defining childhood games, and the only one with tangible evidence of it. My dad and I played it, and he made a bunch of creations with me in mind, with at least one bearing my name. Unfortunately, he passed away before I hit my teens, but I still see his creations and they always remind me of him.
you should do an episode on the lore of spore next!
I was in 8th grade when Spore came out. My best friend and I played it excessively and got some much joy from it. Now, I am a middle school science teacher (now teaching the same age group as when I first played Spore) after study biology in my undergrad. My best friend is an actual rocket scientist. It’s funny how things work out!
"Where's the blood?"
- Gamers for the past 30 years
Owning up to lack of research and misstakes is so incredibly refreshing. Keep it up, guy, downloading this old classic while watching 👍
The reason some adventures give more is because the points given used to be based on the difficulty of the adventure. In the last version released for the game, adventure rating and difficulty was broken, so adventures with more than 15 points are no longer possible as their difficulty no longer can be changed.
specially loved your Galatic Adventure dramatic narration!
When you feel the urge to come back to this topic, it might be worth doing a tour of all the games made by people who said they were inspired by Spore:
Elysian Eclipse
Thrive
The Sapling
Adapt
etc
It's interesting to see what a generation of people take with a core idea when they get to re-imagine it. (full disclosure, I worked on Thrive as well as my own game, Atoms and Time, from the ideas of Spore, so I'm not entirely unbiased on this)
Galactic adventure isn't the only expansion, there's also the cute & creepy parts pack!
That's a part pack not a gameplay expansion
Don’t forget the Robo parts pack which was only available if you were able to get a code from an American bottle of Dr. Pepper
Yay! Part 2 is out, can't wait to see how this goes.
Spore is one of my all time favourites and I still play it from time to time and I love playing Space Stage the most and love exploring massive universes with lots of unknowns to find and collect. While also balancing the needs of my people, but I so want to not be the only guy in my entire empire outside of Turrets and Uber Turrets.
I am so glad you took our feedback on your research and the video presentation. Hippos, Tapirs, and Kangaroos are examples of agreessive herbivores.
I am so playing it with mods next time.
I playing Spore with the Dark Injection mod whiel waiting. It allows you to edit creatures in tribe, civilization and space stages.
That's pretty epik. It also has the dark spore stuff, unused cell stage and the robot parts.
Thank you for keeping the series alive.. I sure do hope you will continue making such great videos and maybe more spore stuff
That high pitch computer voice during the Those Who Were Left section just gave me instant flashbacks to when Extra Credits was good.
Anytime I see an in depth video on Spore, it scratches an itch in my brain. It's flawed and could have been way different (arguably better) but I love it to bits. And your videos so far are pretty great, and even thought provoking. You definitely should do more!
BIG SAME
Yo....... Awesome Video.....
One thing that annoys me is that there isn't a toggle that makes it so that buildings and creatures you made for your own adventures doesn't show up in the base game, it's quite jarring to have the railing you designed for a mission to show up as a capitol building or the cannon fodder you made to be a galactic empire all of a sudden
I'm pretty sure that the points you get for adventures is based on the difficulty of that adventure. The Spore server should calculate the points based on the success rate of the players, but adventures are now stuck on 15 points because that system stopped working long ago.
Though their is a mod you can download that will set the points to 100 so that's nice
Very nice, Spore was a rare case for me making a childlike and foolish younger version of myself in awe at what games Could be given the amount of love and defiantly made me a lot more interested in space and Mod/ user generated content. If you ever do make a third video might I recommend you cover the importance of user generated content more deeply, and how it interacts in game, as an example speedrunders can edit future save games by phisicly flying to a save and manipulating the planet with terraforming tools to make the planet more easy, or how this kind of game doesn't need any input to download and generate what is essentially endless amounts of DLC for free, and how the system itself helps itself by each player creating content other players can enjoy that content and vice versa. There is also the fact that Galactic adventures was not the Only dlc, there was Creepy and cute pack which added some new abilitys as well as the all exclusive Dr-pepper DLC pack that let you use cybernetic parts used in the Grox. I guess you could also talk aobut mods... its not a strong moding scene, but there are indeed mods that can make the game more easy or expand on 'Spore' if you want that kind of experience. Also if it were to be a complete analysis I do think you should say something to the effect of how when people ask for a new spore game that they did Deliver, with Darkspore and various other Spore media which lead EA to decide that the spore games are just not worth investing into considering how easy it is to make content for Apex lends and fifa.
I remember the featured adventure fondly. The author was definitely not afraid to explore darker themes with his adventures such as decline and cosmic horror, and this is not the first time the concept of White Spice as a malevolent entity mistaken for a valuable resource appeared in his adventures either. Dude had a cool style when it came to skyscraper design and apunkalypse/used future creations. Just one of many talented creators back in the heyday of this game
Spore will always hold a special place in my heart as well
Are you going to be talking about spore hero during this series its oddly charming despite not nearly being as big as spore
It definitely won't be my next big video project. I may touch on the spore spinoffs in the future not sure yet.
See you in part 3!
i love the cartoon artstyle
which is part of the reason why i hate the recent spore knockoffs
Something I don't hear a lot. The cartoon art style IMO makes creature creation "easier", and it allows stuff made by different creators to look more like it "fits" in the same world. I still have my issues with certain aesthetic choices in the game for sure.
@grantfomin6829 and even then you can still make some damn cool and mean looking creatures
There's more to it then "cartoon = childish"
It more like cartoon = more universally compatible
Imagine if spore ended up super realistic and you wanted to make something cute
Spore, side meirs pirates, and minecraft PE were my childhood
Good, now i need another omega video essay to listen to
That's a very interesting look at Spore's history and the expansion. I never had the chance to play the expansion, but if it's possible to create such compelling stories with its tools then it must be worth trying!
Glad to see the second part
Would love a part 3 to this series ❤
_Nice_
wonderful overview man! God bless ya and Jesus loves ya!
this will blow up i can feel it
Cool video.
I think the amount of experience is based on the difficulty, which is determined by how often people fail or succeed. I'm not 100% sure about that though.
Cool
Just have watched the first part, it was great. I'm eager to hear what else would you like to say.
adventures give more or less points depending on how many wins and loses happen on them. they seem to need a lot of either for the score to be weighted.
All stages lacked A LOT of scale, depth and complexity for me (and seriousness...Spore is entirely too goofy for me, even more so than other Wright-titles), and the aquatic stage is sorely missed (could've even had a horror element to it, looking down into the dark depths), but I think the only stage I'd really actually take into an entirely different direction is the space stage. The whole vibe of the game is that as your species grows, you have to look at an increasingly bigger and bigger picture - the individual becomes less and less important, which is only logical. You're not just controlling yourself and your pack anymore, but billions of your people.
But then, in the final stage that is so gigantic in scope, you shrink the gameplay down to controlling a single ship again? Why? What's the point? Sure, you can recruit a small "pack" of other ships to support you like in the creature stage, but being degraded to such a limited role like that just feels disappointing. It feels like you're just an errand boy for the Empire that you yourself built - seriously disheartening, at least to me.
What I'd envision is more akin to games like Sins Of A Solar Empire or Stellaris, a highly complex grand strategy game of galactic, maybe later on even intergalactic scope and almost terrifying depth. Creating and commanding fleets, handling colonies, dealing with warfare, politics and interstellar economics. You know...actual Galactic Empire stuff.
Oh well. Pondering what could've been just makes me sad. What I DID really like though was that as soon as you reach the creature stage, your entire present star system is mapped pretty much in real time - meaning that not only does the day-night-cycle feel like the real deal and watching neighboring planets pass across the sky is a sight to behold, but also that if you leave the planet into orbit, the relative positions of the stellar bodies in the system match those you just saw from down on the ground. I quite enjoyed that, makes everything feel much more like a coherent experience.
Spore's mechanics and design are still very very strange, even with the understanding that it could never be as big and complex as the mechanics the demo demonstrated. Why is the staff-of-life a limited one-time resource? why are the grox so insanely massive? why are there so many bugs? why no plant editor? why such artificial limits on the creature editor? (you are locked into one mouth type for the entire creature stage) (you can't modify your own species's anatomy even in the space stage where it makes sense to be able to do so) Why only 3 colonies per planet, only 10 if taking over an alien's homeworld? Why are the planets so tiny? Why is the cell stage exclusively filled with maxis cells? Why were all the extra cell parts in the cell stage cut out? Why do you need a hologram scout instead of just... being able to beam down to planets normally? Why can an individual city in civilization stage ONLY do one thing (religious, military, economic) instead of being able to be multi-approach? You're kind of locked in once civilization stage starts and it's very hard to switch approaches. Even without the demo in mind, each stage feels half-baked and has a ton of latent features available that are just... not utilized even though it would have been very doable to do so.
The whole "The Spore we got was butchered" narrative that some people have has always confused me, for some reason they treat the 2005 demo like its Spore in its purest unfiltered form and that the final game we got was sabotaged by the Cute camp of devs, but when you actually ask them what they miss about the 2005 demo all they can muster up is the Aquatic Stage and blood. The Aquatic stage sounds really cool on paper, but when you actually think about it it would have boiled down to being the Creature stage but underwater, which would have just made the gameplay more repetitive. And I really dont see how someone's love for this game can actually ride or die on whether or not it has blood, when theres already plenty of games on the market that does have it.
If anyone reading this felt disappointed with the final version of Spore for similar reasons, could you explain why?
25:38
whats new?
lmao