Noob question - I signed up for beta and then it says 'Stay tuned for more information shortly' but nothing ever reappears. When I revisit that page it asks for my email/country/date of birth again.

Edit:



Like so.

Edit 2: And there's nothing in my gmailz!

You don't instaget it. It makes you wait a bit if you get it at all, and yeah you have to resign every single time. Rather stupid, imo.

I got in beta this weekend. anyone else?

Yep.

I installed the game and was running the patcher thing and at like file 7 or 8 it stopped downloading and changed to some error message. At the bottom it said "Error 6." So I looked at their site and they said error 6 was because you didn't have enough space to run it. It required 10GB so I checked my space and I have way more than 10GB free. I checked my system requirements and everything, and it all matched up. I deleted the 3 darkspore files, 2 in documents+settings, 1 in programs+files, and I ran the installation again. Installation went through, when I opened game and starting patching (or w/e you would call the last download) I then got "Error 19." Darkspore site just says that I got an old launcher or something and to follow same steps that you would do to fix error 6. Once again, I did it all from the start and I got "Error 6" once again.

Ideas?

EDIT: Back to error 19. Ideas?

I've got some keys to give away. First come first serve.

First this:

Then this: (when I try to reopen it)

And that is my 4th time reinstalling everything (which is what their forum tells me to do)

EDIT: Currently I am reinstalling once again, but this time I deleted all the archives in "patches" folder. looked rather suspicious to me.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 5 2011, 12:02 am by Raccoon.

Redownload the installer, delete the patch, get a wipe of EVERYTHING related to DarkSpore.

Anyone know how you can manually install patches? Irrelevant

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 5 2011, 4:51 pm by Raccoon.

Symmetry, those keys still on offer? I'm itching to play this.

Error 6. Passed. Error 19. Passed. Error 102. Occurred. Ideas for error 102? I feel like it is a simple one but I can't find it on forums.

EDIT: And the errors just keep coming. Maybe next weekend...

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 5 2011, 5:38 pm by Raccoon.

Thx to Symm, I'm downloading the beta now, should be done in 30 minutes

If anyone else wants the key, I can give mine to them I don't plan on playing this anymore. Plus my laptopt died. >:C

Eughh. Ugly ugly ugly installer.

They can at least update the installer you download to include the patches. Lazy bastards. So I download a 151MB installer in 20 minutes. Then I have to patch it which is taking stupid amounts of time, and as far as I can tell there is no way to pause the patching process.

[/rant]

What is everyone's IGN

Mine is D7Echo

I think?

Mine: Raitaki :3 CAUTION TO EVERYONE WHO WANNA PLAY DARKSPORE WITH RAI: He lags.

Servers are apparently down?

I'm LionDebt in game.

My thoughts on the beta so far:

Wow.. where to start. Firstly I'm not impressed. They have seemingly taken various hack'n'slash aspects from the Diablo universe, and melded them with the 'customisation' aspects of Spore.

Where they fail hardest is on the storyline. You are a Crogenitor, a DNA manipulator who was placed into cryogenic stasis because of the Darkspore. The Darkspore were created when early Crogenitors attempted to further their understanding and created Exponential DNA or, E-DNA. This 'ravaged' across early planets and assimilated entire races into Darkspore.

So basically you awaken from your cryogenic sleep and have to go fight Darkspore. <--- This is not a plot line, as far as I am aware.

The attempt at categorisation has succumbed to the usual five elements, albeit somewhat altered for the futuristic and sci-fi aspect they try to capitalise upon. So you basically have five 'Genesis DNA' types, which are:
Cyber - technology, lasers, mechanical robots etc...
Bio - power of plants and nature, poisons etc...
Plasma - fire and lightning etc...
Necro - the power of death, souls, darkness etc...
Quantium - gravity and time manipulation etc...

Then another attempt is made (in vain), to try to hide the basic mechanics of this game... Hero classes are subdivided into the three usual suspects.
Ravagers - rogue-like, DPS, dexterity-based heroes.
Sentinels - tank-like, damage absorbing, strength-based heroes.
Tempests - mage-like, spell casting, mind-based heroes.

So with all the basics covered, you then form a 'squad' of 3 heroes. Each Hero has 2 unique skills, an attack and a passive ability. The other 3 skill slots are the fourth skills of each hero shared across the party.

So where this fails hardest in my opinion is the ultimate shallowness of gameplay. I appreciate hack'n'slash never really requires much depth, but the 'depth' they've tried to implement is just through sheer number and quantity. The final game will have 100 heroes. What's the use? You can only ever use 3 of them in a mission and even then only 1 at a time.

Any sense of progression is destroyed by the convoluted and bizarre item system they have. You basically get loot for doing missions and put this loot onto your heroes. There are no statistic requirements, the only limiting factor on item-levels is your Crogenitor level and the element-type of the item, or if it is a weapon it is hero-specific. So basically as you play, the numbers just go up and up and you get 'better' heroes, because you are putting better gear on them.

The beta allows you to play the first 10 missions, and caps your Crogenitor level at 10 accordingly. These few missions span across 3 'zones' or 'regions' I suppose you could call them. As you zoom around in your space-ship you just select the mission you want to do and bam. Each mission is basically a map with a few portals and a final region. In the final region you encounter a horde, or on every 4th mission you encounter a Boss.

The three zones so far are Xelem's Nexus, Nocturna and Cryos. And they are all hideously ugly. The movement speed of your hero pretty much inhibits any sense of action or speed involved. Xelem's Nexus is a chain of asteroids suspended in space and connected by bizarre green bridges. Nocturna is some strange jungle world with glass crystaline structures everywhere. And don't even get me started on Cryos. It's a planet undergoing an ice-age but there's lava and fire-creatures everywhere. There is no sense of theme or stylistic involvement on the part of whoever designed these levels, other than the sense of idiocy.

Their attempt to incorporate a 'gem like' system comes in the form of your Catalyst Matrix. It is a 3x3 grid on the bottom left of your UI panel. Only the first 1x3 section is enabled. You find catalysts randomly, they give a flat bonus to all your heroes and can range from attack speed, movement speed and AoE damage to statistic increases and health bonuses. If you put 3 of the same colour or element in a row or column in this matrix, you gain a further bonus. What ruins this seemingly innovative feature is that the occurrence of these catalysts is totally random. On one level for example, I found 8 red (offence) catalysts and had insane attack speed which made the level far too fucking easy. On the other side of this coin, you can go a series of missions without even encountering a single catalyst making you forget about their existence all together.

The only thing I do like about this so far, is the way you can 'chain' together a series of missions. At the end of every mission you are awarded medals on how well you performed... eg. gold medals for finding all the chests (or Obelisks as they are known in the future), gold for killing all the creatures and gold for not using Health Chests. You gain silver or bronze if you complete these objectives with incomplete success. Then the medals awarded will act as a modifier on your chance of gaining a 'Rarefied' item at the end of each level. What is cool however, is that you can forgo the chance to get your rare item this level, and instead get 2 (or 3, or 4 etc) if you decide to go straight into the next mission. Then, all the medals received over your chain act as an average modifier and you can get some nice loot if you kick ass. But, in a bid to try and keep people playing as long as they can - you have to first upgrade your ship's engine level to perform chains larger than 2. And you can only upgrade your engine level when you are at Crogenitor level 9. And while this is a cool feature and is a blatant attempt at creating a 'looting run' - similar to a 'mephisto run' maybe? - it falls flat when the only rewards you get are items, it is unclear how to achieve gold medals on all missions and at least I always ended up receiving rarefied weapons for other heroes which forced me to activate new heroes and use them instead.

So, final verdict, not impressed, infantile and simplistic game-play, no sense of depth. Maybe good for the </16 age bracket. Which is a shame because this game has potential, and Diablo 3 is just going to shit all over it. Whatever happened to Maxis? SimCity was fucking awesome but now they're on to making stuff like this? Eugh.

EDIT: It says a lot about a game review when I completely forget to mention the mobs that I have been fighting for the past few hours. The AI is completely pathetic, they just run up to you and try to hit you. A few of them have abilities such as 'strafe' or 'teleport randomly'... They are mostly bland and pathetic and correspond to the 'DNA Genesis' types mentioned before. At no point during the entire 10 missions was I threatened in any way.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 7 2011, 10:03 am by Cardinal.

Yay, someone agrees with me =D

They take them down and put them back up during the various beta phases.