I'm thinking of the Spore equivalent of the one-room houses in the Sims, which minimised floor-space so Sims could move from job to job with unrealistic efficiency. At worst, they'll be hyper-optimum solutions which bear no relation to anything in a conceivable life. At best, this means that there'll be a universe full of creatures with a certain specific arm arrangement that proves terribly brutal. Secondly, there would be certain optimum solutions to a problem. Firstly, a whole load of novel-looking creatures would simply be impractical in-game - if you made something look cool, you were unlikely to be able to compete with a more efficiently-designed creature. The second you make every decision functional, you have two effects. You can see why Maxis took this approach. In other words, while the Spore Creature Creator lets you play god, it doesn't let you be god. You don't get to do things like - say - play with novel limb lengths to create a creature with more range, or add muscle in areas to make a weapon stronger. If it's got the same number of legs, it'll move as fast. No matter whether one character is enormously fat with tiny stumpy arms and another is a spindly, long-limbed giant as long as it's got the same claws at the end of its body, it'll strike as hard. Add more armour parts to add more health. If you add a jaw, no matter how much you change its dimensions, it'll bite at the same strength. The problem is that while the game's capable of enormous variety, that variety is really solely aesthetic. That the concept seemed so vague - what is it you do exactly? - that people have been spinning out their own concepts, and this is the first point where those beliefs are going to be confounded.
From its initial announcement, people have been cementing their idea of how Spore should work.
But these are small fry - the biggest problems with the Creature Creator are those of expectations.
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