Ah, Darkspore. Allow me to tell a thematically-relevant story about this game. I've followed production on this since I was six and it's traumatized me. It's haunted me.
Spore was going to be the best game of all time. I do not mean that people said it was going to be the best game of all time. I mean that it was actually destined to be the best game of all time. Barely a game, really (ie, something with a win condition), but more of a creative open-ended narrative experience. The Sims for people who like science documentaries instead of soap operas, Sim City for people who can picture greater ambitions than micro-managing New York, the freaking Holodeck manifested in the earliest years of the twenty first century. People like to talk about how games are hyped beyond all reason, and Spore is often presented as an example alongside the likes of Peter Molyneux. But it wasn't. All of the potential Spore had - it was all real. The alpha was on a great track, and it didn't overly rely on prerendered tricks, ie, it was real. If the alpha had continued on the path that it should have - that it could have - I wouldn't be a functional human being today. I would have spent my teenage years playing Spore and would have become more invested in it than I was in reality.
So what happened? EA wanted to murder the SHIT out of this game in the crib. I'm guessing that they were scared that it would raise the bar and, seeing its awesome scope, gamers wouldn't let them get away with their crappy shovelware games anymore. EA knew that they couldn't explicitly kill it, because it had already been demo'd in public and gamers wanted it badly. So instead they stirred up conflicts amongst the developers; a small splinter group formed inside Maxis who wanted to reenvision the game in a heavily neutered fashion; more on that in the next paragraph. EA empowered that group and basically engineered its takeover of the project. Spore was delayed many times, and ultimately came out several years later than it was expected to come out. It's often assumed that that was because there was a lot of work to do on it. The work was actually involved in neutering the game.
Spore as originally envisioned - and as originally made - is an experience where you take a single cell, progenitor of all life on a planet, and guide a single line of organisms through their evolution to an intelligent race, then guide a single line within that race through their development to the dominant group, and then guide the entire civilization through their exploration of space. Spore as released, post-neutering, is superficially similar, but is aimed squarely as the nine-year-old demographic, and I don't mean nine-year-old me, either, I mean a nine-year-old as envisioned by a marketing executive. Amoebas and, to an extent, animals, look more like plastic figurines than life forms. Herbivorism is presented not as an ecological niche but as a pacifist moral choice, like a rabid vegetarian's take on a video game morality system. There are exactly three technology levels, primitive, modern, and futuristic, and advancing from one era to the next happens all at once and is occasion for a loading screen. This is just scratching the surface - in general, the running theme is that scientific realism is stripped away to appeal to the Pokemon crowd and the experience is stripped away and replaced with a half-baked series of minigames. None of these things were true of the originally-intended game which, I reiterate, is not a fantasy but rather an actual thing that was fully possible and that almost existed.
When Spore finally came out, it was a flop. This was often blamed on the game's terrible DRM, and though the DRM was indeed terrible and a harbinger of things to come, I actually think it's just a scapegoat here. The game sold two million copies in its first three weeks, breaking a lot of records and whatever, but the sales dropped off when word of mouth got around, and the game's servers tell the real story: the game is online-only, and online activity for the game dropped very, very early, because the replay value - hell, the indefinite play value - had all been stripped out of the game in favor of making it more palatable to executives, ie, shallow and inoffensive. I think EA was, on some level, genuinely surprised that their neutered Spore didn't succeed with the public, because they had all kinds of movie deals and spinoff games lined up, which have naturally died off. Darkspore is the only spinoff game of Spore that was conceived after Spore's failure, and I think it was an attempt to fix the problems with Spore, based on player feedback that EA didn't really understand. They put real violence and a somewhat less cartoony approach to science fiction back in, but they also made it a standard action adventure game, ie, not Spore.
TL;DR, Darkspore is a deformed bastard baby chewing its way out of a eunuch that doesn't know it's a eunuch.
R You should treat people within the operation as if they were on a forum(like this one). Establish some rules and ban people for breaking those rules.