Make your heroes truly unique and deeply customized in an enhanced version of the award-winning Spore Creature Editor.
...
Sounds decent at least. We shall see. I'm not getting my hopes up after what Spore did, though. Only part of Spore I used after playing through the entire collection of minigames once was the Creature Creator. Hopefully that's the only thing this brings back.
I do hope they don't make the story too much of a focus of the game. It sounds terrible and generic.
I also hope they don't try and make people buy parts for the new creature creator like they did with the original, and instead just release new parts in patches. But I already know that hope is futile.
[PPE:] Just realized Overview was not the only part of the Learn More section. Going to Planets, and clicking on the only one viewable, I see that in that planet's page, they have "gameplay" listed. ANOTHER COLLECTION OF MINIGAMES AHOY! Why else would each planet have Gameplay listed? If it's not minigames then it's static missions (it's already apparently static planets) which would mean the story does play a large role.
Going to the "Editor" page, I see that there are "Levels" for the Creatures. I can't decide how I feel about this without more information on what increasing in levels entails. For each level, it just shows different parts on the creature and higher stats.
Also, the "Living Weapons" page. The skills (or whatever those are) listed there seem to me like this will be akin to DotA, or some other Hero-based game. A DotA clone where you make your own Heroes doesn't sound too bad, though.
Perhaps EA/Maxis is trying to
actually avoid getting people's hopes up too high for the game by announcing it less than a year before it's supposed to release, which would mean they learned at least a partial lesson from the backlash to Spore.
Meh. Sword of the Stars 2 will probably get my money before this if I can't afford both, as they're meant to release at about the same time.