Darkspore

Background Information

Darkspore was a spin-off title of Maxis Software's Spore. Unlike Spore, Darkspore only took place during the space exploration phase. The universe is invaded by a violent horde of species called the Darkspore. Players must recruit species across space and use their unique abilities to strategically take out the Darkspore forces. Creatures can be manually controlled as they are sent to fight Darkspore infested worlds. Weapons and armor can be equipped on creatures to augment their capabilities. The Spore Creature Creator Editor can be used to create unique creatures with their own abilities and can be traded with other players. The game could be played solo or cooperatively up to three players, and there were PvP options for up to eight players.

Servers shut down

In December 2015, EA announced that the servers for Darkspore, which was an online only game, were to be shut down in 2016. On March 1st, 2016, the servers went down and the game was removed from the Origin game library.

Hero types

There are three hero types within Darkspore.The first is the sentinel which are the durable type heroes that wade into the fray with special abilities that deal with groups of darkspore.For example Magnos has an ability that can attract enemies close to him and damages them the more father away they are from him. To accompany this he also has another ability that blasts darkspore away from him which also damages them the more closer they are to Magnos. The second type is the ravager which is a lightly armored high damage class. Ravagers are capable of dealing large amounts of burst damage in a short amount of time. A good example of this is vex, his centerpiece ability is time lapse that damages the enemy but also deal the same amount of damage from the last ten seconds. Lastly the third type is the diverse tempest class hero with ranged damage plus buffs and debuffs. The hero sage can place down a life tree that heal party members near it and when they deal damage within its area, it grows larger and when finished explodes to heal them further. On the other end of the spectrum the hero Arakna can steal enemies souls to increase her damage and power up her abilities for devastating damage.

Loot System

There are seven different levels of loot in Darkspore, which can be divided into 2 categories: drops and rewards. Dropped loot is found in-level, usually as a reward for killing an enemy or opening an obelisk. They vary in rarity from least to most rare as white, green, blue (rarified), or purple (purified). Rewards are later given at the end of each level (1 reward per level). They tend to give a more variety of stats to your hero and vary in rarity from least to most rare as yellow (special), orange (rarified), or brown (purified). The chance to receive rarified or purified rewards are small but can be increased by completing mission objectives. You can also chain missions together, thereby increasing the difficulty, to increase the chance of receiving rarer rewards and increase the level of each reward in the chain to match the level of the last level in the chain. No rewards are given if the player fails to complete any level in a chain, so some risk is involved. Items' stats are randomly generated and often provide a variety of benefits. For example, a sword for Goliath could provide not only attack damage, but virtually any other attribute.

Hero Editor

The editor is where you equip items and personalize your hero. The items you can collect are weapons, hands, feet, defensi ve armor, and a accessory. Weapons and armor usually try to increase the main stat of your hero. Hands increase the attack speed and feet the movement speed. Lastly accessories like weapons and armor, increase the stats of your hero.

You can't change the position of limbs and gait due to recognizability issues within the game but you can change their colors and if you like the look of an armor piece you can classify it as an accessory to further make a unique hero. Also within the editor is where you can equip items, place them anywhere on your hero, and optimize your stats and such.

Soundtrack

The original score for Darkspore was composed by Junkie XL, and is available on the iTunes store.

System Requirements

• • Operating System: Windows XP SP3/Vista SP2/Windows 7
  • Processor: 3.0 GHz P4 or Intel® Core™ 2 Duo 2GHz or equivalent or faster
  • RAM Memory: 2 GB
  • Hard Disk Space: 10 GB
  • Video Card: 256 MB Video Card with support for Shader Model 3.0 containing these chipsets or better:
    NVIDIA GeForce 8800
    ATI X1900
    Intel® HD Graphics
  • DirectX®: DirectX 9, DirectX 10 or DirectX 11 compatible video card
  • Sound: DirectX compatible sound card