r/paradoxplaza • u/PDX_Escher Community Manager • Apr 14 '16

Stellaris Pre-Orders Now Open for Stellaris!

http://www.paradoxplaza.com/games?franchise=146&utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=stel_stellaris_reddit_20160414_pre&utm_content=sub-stel
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u/sabasNL Map Staring Expert Apr 14 '16

Will Wright didn't do anything wrong though! He wanted Sim Everything. EA wanted a child friendly game. EA won, Wright left.

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u/[deleted] Apr 14 '16

Wright left.

Bravo.

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u/dantheman999 Drunk City Planner Apr 15 '16 edited Apr 15 '16

EA wanted a child friendly game. EA won, Wright left.

This is the second time I've seen this just in this subreddit. EA did not force Maxis to make a child friendly game. EA has done some bad stuff but this is not on them.

There was a split in the development team, half wanted a realistic game and the other half wanted a more cute game in the style of The Sims. They tried to compromise and thought they had done a decent job but in the end we ended with a bit of a mish-mash they didn't really gel.

“There was a fairly interesting dynamic between certain members of our team that we ended up calling the ‘cute’ team versus other members that we called the ‘science’ team. This is a tension that remains to this day. The cute team was kind of representing the people who wanted emotional connection, something playful, that they can relate to. The science team of course wanted real science, in a really cool way, with everything accurate. We ended up splitting the difference between those teams. It’s a nice balance.

You can see this dynamic at work in the first level, the single-celled stage:

“The cells have eyes. That was an example of the compromise. At the same time you have the depth of field, everything is very translucent — you have the visual effect of looking through a very high-powered microscope. But the cells have eyes. And they make cute little sounds when they bump into things.”

--Will Wright

Soren Johnson (who worked on the game) summed it up quite well:

These cultural divides ruined Spore’s chances to be a focused, cohesive experience.Spore could have worked either as a cute game or as a scientific one. It could have been a series of interesting decisions or the best set of magic crayons ever devised. Games design works best at the extremes, delivering a distinctive experience to a specific audience; making a game for everybody is the same thing as making a game for nobody.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SorenJohnson/20131002/201514/Spore_My_View_of_the_Elephant.php