Patrick Elliott wrote:

> hard to do, for the "cute and easier to play" option. There was 
> basically an internal conflict over direction and the whole design 
> team split into a "cute" team and a "realism and difficulty" team, 
> and the "cute" one won. So.. Take from that what you will. lol

A little bit about this from the designer himself, posted to the Spore
forums:

MaxisWill wrote:





> for me to jump in and clarify a few things from my point of view.
> 

> perspectives in Spore. It is true that during most of the design 
> process we had team members on different sides of this debate. While
>  I was officially on the science side at the same time I always saw 
> this as a crucial tension that I wanted to foster, in other words I 

>  were represented in the game to some degree.
> 

>  the most vocal representatives of what I started calling the cute 
> team but they were by no means the only ones, they represented quite
>  a large portion of the team. And their agenda in our design process
>  was most certainly not to dumb-down the gameplay but rather to
> foster emotional engagement with the players in the game experience.
> An early example of this was the decision to add eyes to the cell
> game which in no way changed the gameplay, but we found for certain 
> players made the cell experience more humorous and personal.
> 
> I see that many of the criticisms about the depth of play in Spore 
> seem to be personally directed to Chris Hecker in particular. This is
>  both ironic and incorrect. Chris was the leading talent behind the 
> voodoo math of the procedural animation system in Spore, the system 
> that brings the creatures you design to life. As the author of this 
> system Chris was quite aware of how flexible and also how 
> unpredictable it could be. I had many discussions with him in 
> particular about how much of the players design decisions would 
> affect the actual performance of your creature in the game world.
> 
> To take a quick tangent let me use the creature design vs. 
> performance as an example. We had competing issues to face. First, we

> Second, we wanted the economics of the editor to be simple and 
> understandable and connected to performance. Third, we wanted a high

> ultimate design direction that the simulator was forcing all the 
> creatures into. In other words if to be fast you had to have long 
> legs that would have met the first goal, conflicted with the third 
> goal and made the second much more complex.
> 
> As the lead designer my goal through most of the project was to make

> simplifying many of the level dynamics and editor consequences. I 
> felt like we were already asking quite a bit from the players as we 
> took them through the various level genres. This was totally my 

>  certainly not the fault of Chris Hecker. So to make a long story 

>  my job on the team.
> 

> to work with in the game industry and he takes his craft quite 

> been unfairly vilified for what were in fact entirely my design 
> decisions.
> 
> A genre-spanning game like Spore is almost by its very nature 
> experimental. Not only do we not have an existing game to learn 

> demographic of our players will be (and hence their expectations for
>  complexity and depth). As we move forward with the franchise we plan
>  to listen closely and learn. Our plans for the first Spore

> from our players so far.
> 

> for the countless, wonderful creations that have been posted to 
> Sporepedia. And I also want to give thanks and encouragement for the
>  discussions here on our forum that will help us make Spore a cooler
>  experience for everyone.
> 
> -Will Wright





-- 
~Mike

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