I think the overarching concept has remained intact from when it was originally shown. Very nice idea, but the problem was always going to be how are they going to turn this into a game? The answer turns out to be that they turn it into a very shallow game.
There are some very nice things about Spore's mechanics. The various editors are great, if a little limited and clunky to use, the procedural animation is mostly surprisingly good, distributing creatures via data embedded in 25-30KB PNGs is a nice low bandwidth trick, and the ability to visit and terraform a gazillion planets across the galaxy is pretty cool.
The problem comes with the "trying to make it a game" part.
The Cell stage is fine. It's a little limited in scope, but that's basically the point. It's a fairly simple introduction to some of the game's recurring concepts, and serves quite adequately as such.
The Creature stage is ok for the first 10-15 minutes, but it quickly becomes monotonous. The whole finding parts thing makes no sense and is extremely limiting. What they should have done is give you all the parts straight off the bat, but limit availability of the various part ranks at any given point depending on the brain level your creature has achieved. But of course if they did that then there would be even less gameplay then there already is.
The Tribe and Civ sections both try to be an RTS, but are so watered down as to be less challenging than a hand-holding tutorial, and just about as exciting. You could perhaps forgive the Tribe stage for this, as it is meant to be a tutorial for the Civ stage, just as the Cell stage is a tutorial for the Creature stage. There's no real excuse for the Civ stage though. That is possibly the most disappointing element of the whole game.
The Space stage is the real meat of Spore. They do some things reasonably well, but again the whole "trying to make a game out of it" thing spoils it. This stage should be an open sandbox where you can fly around and do whatever you want as a reward for progressing so far through the game. Instead, you're constantly being harassed and restricted. All I want to do is cruise around and terraform planets as I see fit, but I never get five minutes peace because the citizens of the galaxy are plagued with crises that apparently only I can resolve. It's mind-boggling that they ever managed to form sector-spanning empires in the first place without me there to babysit them. The badge idea is interesting (and I have no doubt it foreshadows the inevitable 360 port), but they limit access to the various levels of equipment for far too long. I understand the need to gradually introduce the player to new and more powerful tools, but the manner it's done in here is much too restricting. Again, what I want at this point is freedom to do things as I see fit, not be fenced in by arbitrary limitations.
What it boils down to is that Spore is quite fun for a while, but the novelty soon wears off because of the restrictions and limitations of the gameplay that is foisted on you. I think maybe they just tried to do too much. The Space stage could have been a game in itself. As such, all the sections suffered because their scope had to be kept narrow. As it stands, it seems to me like Spore is more of a technology demo than anything else. It promised quite a lot, but it hasn't really delivered, at least in terms of promise and potential, if not the hype.
[Edited by DarthParametric, 9/10/2008 7:44:36 AM]