That had bugged me too.
Some times I just like to start games fresh, especially if not played for some time & need a refresher.
With Darkspore, you were stuck with one save, but you could remove all of your gear from your characters.

Not perfect, but better than nothing....

Oh wait, that is what we have now. Nothing!

I honestly never played it, I refused to get the original spore game with it's toted limited installs and online requirement (back when I had limited or no internet).

But there are others who go into quite a bit of detail of the singleplayer and game in general.

Besides I don't take EA's side, quite the opposite.

Re 1 and 2, you clearly have no concept of MMOs, MMO *like* games, or for that matter, DRM.

A game that is set up primarily as a multiplayer game relying on server side content, is simply that. An online game. Like an MMO. A game that requires its online server to serve up content for the game. That server is not its DRM. The server was not used to prevent access to the game. It was used as an integral part of severing up and managing the gameworld.

3, World of Warcraft, Matrix Online, Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, Star Wars - The Old Republic, Star Trek Online, Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising... This list could go on for days, given pretty much the majority of MMO games actually allow for its main content to be played solo. And yes, I've also specifically mentioned two MMOs that are no longer playable due to their servers shutting down.

Unlike you, I seem to have a good concept of MMO games.
An MMO game is not only an online multiplayer game, else it would be called MO. How is this game more of an MMO than some standard co-op game or a fighting game with pvp matchmaking or a DOTA clone? Spoiler alert: It is even less of a multi-player game than those examples.

There was absolutely no need for this behaviour. Even if it was just a multiplayer game, they could have easily implemented other means of playing the game with others. The server could be considered DRM in the multiplayer mode as well because it is not an MMO.

I can sell you some hand cuffs and tell you: Look, I've made a table tennis adaptation that you play with two hands and these awesome new bats. What? No! Those aren't hand cuffs, those are bats that we designed for your maximum enjoyment. We can't allow you to use standard bats, though, because we only allow the game to be played as we intended it to be played.

Do these games have a solo-player campaign mode that is advertised on the box? Obviously you can play the typical kind of MMO by yourself.

All of this can be summed up by the simple fact that you do not understand what "MMO-like" means. We're done, until you educate yourself.

You can never believe everything that's included on a box or store page as selling points. The box for Matrix Online proudly claimed that "The entire city, including every room or every building, is in play." That was never the case at any point throughout the time that the Matrix Online was accessible.

Please, "MMO-like" is not some widespread term with a universally recognized definition and it can just as well refer to singleplayer games that share some similarities with MMOs.

Anyway, I'm with 0Grapher on this. Your claims can in my opinion disproven by the ease with which virtually any singleplayer game can be DRMed by moving integral parts which could easily be handled locally to a server and adding some not essential online features on top of it. I mean, was Diablo III's online requirement legitimate? There ARE features that require the game to be run by a central server but the core gameplay obviously does NOT require it (proof being almost every other hack & slay out there, including Diablo II) and THAT'S why people were legitimately pissed. It was the same with Sim City 2013 and to my understanding also Darkspore.

That's actually my biggest concern. Even if a game as a whole fails to rise above mediocrity, it can still contain elements worth preserving. Hundreds of films no longer exist from the early to mid 1900s, and I suspect that's where gaming is heading thanks to organizations like the Entertainment Software Association (of which EA is a member) attempting to block all forms of preservation. Some people think that dark future is impossible as long as someone has a copy of the game and uploads it to the Internet. Unfortunately without the source code that's not always true, and games like Darkspore seem specifically built from the ground up to resist reverse engineering. As Ross Scott put it - 'This game has enjoyed a 0% piracy rate. No one has ever pirated this game, and now, it's going to die.'

Was it F2P? EA shut down 2 other F2P games not long ago also. They were online-only MMOs though that I never actually ended up playing, and since they were free, I was never out anything.

I'm not big on MMOs personally, haven't really done much time with them at all. I wouldn't buy an MMO-only game nor one that requires mandatory online always, at least not consciously. It's just not my favourite style of gameplay. Path of Exile was interesting but I only played it briefly, and I think that was the last MMO I tried.

The thing with MMOs is that they don't exist without online servers, and game companies only keep online servers online as long as the TCO to run and maintain them is rewarded by a big enough ROI to make it worthwhile. If not, pull the plug. That's just business, but it's also why I wont dive into such games or spend any money on them, eventually their plugs are getting yanked and all your gaming experience is but of a memory with nothing more to show for.