DarkSpore

[Asia Kali Yusufzai]

A year before release, a Spore tech demo was shown. It was probably one of the most innovative and ambitious mainstream projects in the last five years. Everyone was blown away. But because their main audience (The Sims audience) did not have powerful computers, it got scaled back massively, until it became a shell of a game. Most people did not enjoy it, except for the Character creator which was one of the few things that remained mostly intact from that first demonstration.

Now DarkSpore comes out, and instead of being the ambitious mega-project that actually FULFILLS its promises, DarkSpore is the safest it could possibly be, jumping on every bandwagon going. The only thing that is still uniquely spore is the character creator. It's like the difference between the Hulk film by Ang Li, and the other Hulk film that wasn't by Ang Li. One was ambitious and tried to do loads of new and strange things, and the follow up was so cliche and average that it was almost parody.

Let me give a rundown of what DarkSpore is:
It's a fast paced Action RPG (Mass Effect) about a hero saving the galaxy from a mutated enemy called the DarkSpore (A million other games). It will be 4 player co-op (Gears of war, Halo, Borderlands, Left4Dead) in a full single player campaign. There will also be "intense multiplayer battles" (A requirement of any generic shooter.) The hero will have to gather heroes together and upgrade them with random loot, including body parts.

Now I'm not saying that such a game would be bad, but considering what spore used to be, this game might as well not be spore at all. It even has a dark and growly trailer on youtube. I'm a fan of shooters, but this all tastes of extreme safety, with no attempt to do anything interesting or daring.

But then I obviously haven't seen anything of the actual game yet. Who knows what they might do with the genre.
But then I did hate that second Hulk film.

[White Wolf Guardian]

If it has more DRM and it's not in the way Steam does it, then I won't buy it

[Harlequin_Felis]

I don't mind games that don't try to reinvent their genre, or add enough new features to be unique as long as they implement the 'vanilla' requirements of their genre well.

It seems too much stock is put on innovation these days when the key to success is to perfect what's already there. I think that's why games like Blood 2, Shogo Mobile Armor Division and Starcraft are still being played years on - they were damned good at what they did and were fun to play. They didn't have much that hadn't been done already, but the gameplay was spot on.

Then again, those examples were crafted with love and attention - I'm not too fond of formulaic genre games that were just thrown together to sell copies of whatever type of game is popular at the moment...

[Asia Kali Yusufzai]

Turns out I judged too soon!

No, I'm not going to say it actually looks interesting, but it's not a shooter... it's more an isometric diablo-esque hack n' slash. That interests me even less, but will appeal to other people more, and lets face it, we're not exactly swimming in these types of games.

By the way, the PR for this game really isn't selling it, but then people were saying the same for Dragon Age, and they fixed that into a PR monster in the run up to it coming out.

As for if DarkSpore (hate that name. It's lazy.) will have good gameplay for that genre... well there's only a few images out right now. Nothing to dig into just yet.