Darkspore, an action RPG that took elements from Spore and Diablo, has been officially abandoned by Maxis and EA, as indicated on their official forums. The game has also been pulled from Steam, although it remains available on EA's own Origin service.
Released April 2011, the game is essentially a Diablo clone utilizing the Spore engine for character creation. The game mechanics were simplified and story elements cleaned up to make it marketable to a younger crowd. Your playable characters are not customizable and instead premade unlockables. The Spore Creature Creator was instead utilized to let you choose what abilities these characters can upgrade to and under what conditions. It was essentially light gaming fare, receiving mixed reception upon release.
What has come to light today is that the game suffered from bugs almost since release, some of which can be attributed to the game's DRM. By design, the game required you to register a product key, have a persistent online connection and make an EA account.
An issue labeled Error Code 3 did not allow players to save their games. Another Error Code 73003 subsequently did not allow players to log in, which was exacerbated by its DRM. Many players had to wait days before they could be allowed to try logging in again.
Today a message on the forums' main page indicates that no further development will be made to the game and it is, to all intents and purposes, an abandoned game. It confirms that Error Code 73003 was never resolved, and that Error Code 3 has appeared for most players, possibly all of them. These errors will remain an issue with the.
It's an undignified end to a game many seemed to enjoy, based on Metacritic user ratings. This is, of course, all very reminiscent of EA's problems with SimCity, which they were able to resolve. It's possible this game simply fell by the wayside to focus support on their more recent games.
In case it gets taken down, the message is screencapped below:
