Board Thread:Wiki Discussion/@comment-2601:19A:280:5E88:3DBE:DC62:D17:B22F-20170630193824/@comment-1073312-20170630235928

I shall be closing this thread, because rants like this are not news to us and there is nothing to be gained by boarding the disappointment train. But you do pose an answerable question.

Long story short, the consensus is that there was a division in the game development team over realism vs. an appeal to cute, casual players. However, if you watch 2005 demo, Will Wright explicitly states he wanted each stage to be like a toy-box or doll house. Spore was always stylistic, it just went more in the way of cuteness. Another issue is time pressure; many features were cut because having too many can ruin an unbalance a game, as Spore developer Chris Hecker explained on his blog. Furthermore they were running on a tight schedule. Despite this Spore still achieved its core aims of giving the player a sense of scale from the cells to space, and the game emphasises the player's creativity with amazing editors for its time.