What the 2008 game Spore should have been like

Like with so many other examples, the 2008 video game "Spore" generated quite some hype prior to its launch, but ended up with a rather lukewarm reception at the end. Unsurprisingly, the end product was nowhere near as exciting and as expansive as the prelaunch marketing hype made you believe.

It was supposed to be one of those "everything" games: It would simulate the development of life from unicellular organisms to galaxy-spanning civilizations, and everything in between, giving players complete freedom on how the species would evolve in between, building entire planetary and galactic civilizations!

The hype was greatly enhanced by the creature editor from the game being published as an independent application prior to launch, giving a picture of what would be possible within the game. And, indeed, by 2008 standards the creature editor was quite ahead of its time, and literally millions of players made their own creations, some of them absolutely astonishing and awesome, and likely better than even the game developers themselves could ever imagine. (For example, people were creating full-sized Tyrannosaurs Rex-like fully animated creatures, which seemed impossible when you first started using the editor, but players found tricks and ways around the limitations to create absolutely stunning results.)

Unsurprisingly, the game proper didn't live up to the hype at all.

Instead of an "everything" game, a "life simulator" encompassing all stages of life from unicellular organisms to galaxy-spanning civilizations, it was essentially just a collection of mini-games that you had to play completely linearly in sequence (with no other options!) until you got to the actual "meat" of the game, the most well-developed part of it, ie. the final "space stage", which is essentially a space civilization simulator.

The game kind of delivered the "simulate life from the very beginning" aspect, but pretty much in name only. Turns out that the game consists of five "stages":

1. Cell stage, where you control a unicellular creature trying to feed, survive and grow.
2. Creature stage, where you jump to a multi-cellular creature, where the creature editing possibilities start kicking in.
3. Tribal stage, at the beginning of which the final form of the creature is finalized and locked, and which is a very small-scale "tribal warfare" simulator of sorts.
4. Civilization stage, which now has turned into a somewhat simplistic, well, "Civilization" clone, where you manage cities and their interactions with other cities (trading, wars, etc.)
5. And finally the actual game proper: The space stage, where you'll be spending 90+ % of your playthrough time. This is essentially a galaxy civilization simulator, and by far the most developed and most feature-rich part of the game.

The major problem with all of this is that every single stage is completely independent of every previous stage. Indeed, it literally doesn't matter what you do in any of the previous stages: It has pretty much no effect on the next stage. The only major lasting effect is a purely cosmetic one: The creature design you created at the transition between the creature and tribal stages will be the design shown during the rest of the game. And that's it. That's pretty much the only thing where one stage affects the next ones. And it is indeed 100% cosmetic (ie. it's not like your creature design affects eg. how strong or aggressive the creatures are, for example.)

The other major problem is that the first four stages are relatively short, they have to be played in linear order, and are pretty much completely inconsequential. While each stage is longer than the previous ones, the first four are still quite short (you could probably play through all four of them in an hour or two at most, even if you aren't outright speedrunning the game.)

In other words, Spore is essentially a galactic civilization simulator with some mandatory mini-games slapped at the start. In no way does it live up to the "everything" hype it was marketed as.

Ironically, the developers originally planned for the game to have even more stages than those five (including an "aquatic stage", which I assume would have been between the cell and creature stages, as well as a "city stage" which would have been between the tribal and civilization stages.)

How I think it should have been done instead:

Rather than have a mandatory and strictly linear progression between the stages (which is a horrible idea), start directly at the galactic simulator stage.

In this stage there could be hundreds or even thousands of planets with life forms at different stages (including those that were planned but not implemented). The player could "zoom in" into any of these planets and observe what's happening there and even start playing the current stage on that planet, in order to affect and speed up the advancement of that particular civilization, and create all kinds of different-looking creatures on different planets.

In fact, the player could "seed" a suitable planet by adding single-celled organisms there, which would start the "cell stage" on that planet (which the player could play or just allow to be automatically simulated on its own). If the planet isn't suitable, then he could have one of his existing civilizations terraform it.

The stages themselves should have been developed more, made longer and more engaging and fun, which would entice the player to play them again and again, on different planets.

Moreover, and more importantly: Every stage should have strong effects on the next stages on that particular planet: The choices that the player makes in one stage should have an effect on the next stages. For example certain choices could make the final civilization very intelligent and peaceful, and very good at trading. Other choices made during the different earlier stages could make the civilization very aggressive and prone to conquer other civilizations and go to war with them. And myriads of other choices. (These traits shouldn't be too random and unpredictable: The player should be allowed to make conscious choices about which direction the species goes towards. There could be, for example, trait percentages or progress bars, and every player choice will display how much it affects each trait.)

That would actually make the "mini-games" meaningful and impactful: You shape a particular civilization by how you play those mini-games! The choices you make in the earlier stages have an actual impact and strongly shape what the final civilization will be like, what it's good at, and how it behaves.