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Comment by kaashif

17 hours ago

Spore had that but I kind of liked it. I guess that was 20 years ago almost, maybe my standards were lower. It felt charming seeing others' animals, some of them looked pretty cool.

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kaashif

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DonHopkins  16 hours ago

There's a fundamental difference between procedurally generated worlds and how Spore actually works.

The creatures, vehicles, and buildings weren't generated -- they were created by other players and exchanged asynchronously, then seeded into your procedurally generated galaxy.

Spore is a Massively Single Player Online Game: no real-time multiplayer, but your galaxy fills with other people's content.

That's the opposite of the oatmeal problem. Procgen gives you infinite bowls that all taste the same. Spore gave you a finite but large set of bowls, each made by someone who cared about it. Different tradeoff, different failure mode -- but not the one this thread is about.

GDC 2005, Will Wright, The Future Of Content:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280275

>Here are my notes and summary of the GDC 2005 talk where Will Wright first revealed Spore, which I asked Will to review and check for accuracy. It's interesting to compare the design he described in the talk with what Maxis eventually shipped. Video of the hour long talk:

>And that is the whole point, how you win the game: become involved with the content creation community!

>The powerful but easy to use direct manipulation editor tools, the automatic content sharing system, and the online community around user created content, were together the most innovative and successful things about Spore. (As contrasted with the not as well realized gameplay and storytelling design goals.) [...]

>Chaim Gingold, A Brief History of Spore:

  • thaumasiotes  11 hours ago

    But this doesn't look like it's making any new observations. Spore has some 3D modeling tools and abysmal gameplay that could never persuade anyone to start up a game of Spore.

    But the models are fun, sure. And other people can find your models, and you can find theirs.

    So if we recognize that the "gameplay" part of Spore never worked... we're left with Second Life, a much, much older thing. It hasn't been much of a success.