Spore devs say the evolution game's previews were more ambitious than what they were actually making, and they 'built a fantasy in people's minds that was unachievable'

I think they are referring to one of the showcased demos of Spore, of which the most prominent is the 2005 GDC one.

[url]https://spore.fandom.com/wiki/Removed_features#Creature_Stage[/url]

### Behavior of creatures

> The behavior of the creatures also had more depth than the final game. In today's Spore creatures rarely leave the perimeter of their nest, and possibly has a simpler ecosystem (until Space Stage). This feature was prominent in earlier versions, as in the footage of the 2005 version, small creatures hopped around, grazed, or simply wandered off with no nests for them.

I love Spore, but replaying it today I see how much is missing from making each stage really fleshed-out. Being honest, the Creature Stage is clearly what received the most attention, while subsequent Stages are not as fun.
A lot of it is to be attributed to Maxis and Will Wright: apparently much of what was shown in 2005 and 2006 was never really playable.
But things like this suggest a heavy involvement of the publisher as well:

During the SXSW 2007 demo, Will Wright said that the Aquatic Stage was on the verge of being cut. He also said that, if cut, the Aquatic Stage would be one of the first things to add via an expansion pack, though ultimately no such expansion was released.

> There was a plan to add the Aquatic Stage into the full game via an expansion pack titled "The Depths", although it was never publicly announced. except for one advertisement.

Have you played it? The main setting of Spore is the Creature Stage. So far, in Thrive, only the microbe stage is available.

Spore taught me a lesson on not trusting hype.

It was my first experience with a hyped disappointing game.

Also I do not think it was something technical. It was just EA evilness to their marketing team though that a more child oriented game would sell better than the hardcore simulation the devs wanted to make.

I still remember that E3 trailer with the willowsaur, it showed more advanced characteristics that the final product. They straight up downgraded their game.

The thing that really bugged me about Spore was how lame the “evolution” was.

If early developments in your creatures set certain things in motion that then played out differently that would be great and add replay value.

But nothing was meaningful at all, you could completely change stuff back and forth. Very little in your evolutionary history actually mattered, at all.

it depends on what you want out of it

I’m 33, I played it when it came out and I played it again last year.

The game is still pretty fun if you like designing dumb alien animals with its weird mechanics for the creature stage, making a weird little tribe/society, and get to the space stage and want to terraform little planets and then go find earth, and the center of the Milky Way.

I wasn’t even particularly young when I played it the first time, I was a post Halo 3 16 year old lol.

It's just a summary of a recent interview, relax.

Certainly. I probably should have said “extensible” or “mod-able”.

I know this is a dirty thing to say, but this feels like one of the few actual genuine use cases for AI in games.

Animations are extremely finicky and requires a lot of manual tweaking and adjusting to get right, it doesn't surprise me that they struggled to make a procedural animation system because if they could solve that, they'd actually solve a well known industry challenge.

If you were building spore today, you could train a little local model that purely creates reasonably good animations for arbitrary creature designs. It wouldn't be perfect, but for a game like Spore it would be good enough.

Yes, but:

Buddy, take a breath.

You'd think someone whose username complains about reddit would exhibit less reddit-like behaviour

Chill out, you're not on reddit anymore

It might be worth to link to the original source: https://www.designroom.site/spore-an-oral-history/

Design Room is a new online magazine authored by one of the writers laid-off by Vox Media when it acquired Polygon.
You can read the Oral Histories after a free subscription.

Oh I remember this game. I'm still irritated at the fraudulent claims. The game was not at all what I expected. Marketing can eat me for this one.

I loved Spore, but I'm easily pleased with video game. I liked creature stage the most, but also liked space and puttering around!