Since another thread in this forum reminded me of E3... thought I'd post this. This game was introducted at the convention. Looks friggin' awesome as hell!
Here's a
video from Google of Will Wright presentation of the game at E3... it's a little long (roughly 36 minutes), but well worht the look. Below is a preview/review of the game.
Spore PC Preview by
Jeremy Parish of
1up.com
What do you do when you've created the most popular PC game of all time? If you're Sims designer Will Wright, you set your sights even higher. His latest project, revealed today at Game Developers Conference 2005, is nothing less than a game about the past and the future, the evolution of life, the development of intergalactic civilization. It's a game that pays tribute to his favorite titles while blending their diverse concepts into a single cohesive whole. A game that addresses some of the most crucial questions of finances and economics facing developers as they head into a new hardware generation.
Entitled
Spore, Wright's latest creation spans the rise of a space-faring civilization from its humble beginnings in the primordial soup. "It's actually a lot like WarioWare," he says. "It features a wide variety of game types as a sort of homage to my favorite games."
Spore touches upon a wide array of gameplay concepts as the action evolves alongside the player's creature. Wright revealed six different themes of gameplay: tidepool, evolution, tribal, city, civilization and invasion. Each of these modes draws upon its influences while remaining stylistically consistent with the rest of the game.
- Tidepool phase: In the game's initial state, the action most resembles a sort of free-form Pac-Man. There's also a strong hint of Super NES classic E.V.O. and quirky GameCube cult favorite Cubivore; fighting and consuming other creatures allows you to adjust the form and abilities of your creature.
- Evolution phase: Once your creature begins to grow and take on a distinct physical form, the game switches to a more Diablo-like feel. With its emphasis on battling other creatures to strengthen yourself while making forays away from your safe haven, this section is very much about growth and development.
- Tribal phase: When your creation has achieved a satisfying level of physical development, you can focus on its mental acuity. At this point, you relinquish control of an individual and instead move to a streamlined RTS interface, caring for an entire tribe of your homebrewed beasties, giving them tools, food and slowly upgrading their state of existence. Think Populous.
- City phase: Here the game becomes more like Wright's own SimCity, with emphasis resting primarily on building up the technology, architecture and infrastructure of your race's dwellings.
- Civ phase: Once your city is established, you can zoom out to the global scale. Here your people begin seeking out other cultures in a Civilization-style experience. Interfacing with the rest of the world can be tackled in many ways, be it militaristically or diplomatically; on foot, in boats or by airship. Ultimately, however, the goal is for your creatures to conquer the planet.
- Invasion phase: Once the world is your oyster, you can move on to other worlds in your solar system to colonize or terraform. And beyond that you'll find other solar systems, scattered throughout a beautifully-rendered galaxy in which planets lurk among dust clouds and black holes spew ejecta. Here you set forth to make contact with other planets.
The Invasion section of the game is enormous, potentially endless. After hunting for other populated worlds, players can venture into the universe in the manner they think best fits their personality: Whether using the diplomacy of
Star Trek or the destructive fury of
War of the Worlds. Some races will welcome players, while others will greet instellar visitors with hostility.
Ultimately, the goal is to help players' comfort with and understanding of the gameplay and tools scale up and evolve in tandem with their virtual progeny. "This is very much contrary to the usual game design," Wright says. "Usually you get the sandbox gameplay as training wheels for the goal-oriented content. Here, the goal-oriented game is training you for the open-ended sandbox." By the time players are ready to conquer the galaxy, they'll have mastered every element of the game interface and will be ready to tackle the rest of the universe on their own terms.
What makes Spore unique despite its obvious use of game concepts that have come before, Wright claims, is the flexibility offered by the character editing tools. Rather than simply assigning a few pre-defined body bits to a monster, characters are allowed to work with an interface that the creator describes as part Mr. Potato Head, part Etch-A-Sketch, part modeling clay.
Perhaps more significantly, the player's imagination becomes an integral part of his or her game... as well as a part of others' experiences as well. Not unlike the upcoming
Infected for PSP, Spore will make use of online connectivity to share each player's creations with a central database while simultaneously retrieving others' work to help populate his own game world. The game's community will be an essential element of the overall experience; although the networked aspect of the title is asynchronous -- that is, no simultaneous multiplayer -- other gamers will influence each player's experience in many ways. Each person's game environment will feature creatures, structures, vehicles and ultimately entire
worlds created by their peers and exchanged seamlessly over the Internet.
The potential for variety of design is astonishing; the editor seemingly offers players amazing freedom in creating the creatures and objects that populate their worlds. Wright describes it as an "artist in the box" style, with the flexibility to produce objects and creatures to satisfy anyone's tastes. Buildings on exhibit ranged from fluid Roger Dean-like architecture to grim mechanical fortresses; hideous monsters and picture-perfect Care Bears (really) existed side-by-side.
Although the game demoed this morning was clearly running on PC hardware, the prospect of ports to consoles (and handhelds, now that both PSP and DS have clear online strategies in place) is hardly unthinkable. The data transferred between games is minuscule in size; Wright has teamed up with European demo coders to assist the game's design, capitalizing on their reputation for putting together amazing amounts of content in the smallest data space possible. As a result, Wright claims the data shared among users is incredibly compact and should be no trouble to store or transfer, meaning that even a DS game card could potentially store an entire galaxy of content.
There's a pragmatic side to this approach beyond bandwith, as well. Wright began his presentation with a discussion of the rising costs of development and the dimishing returns offered to players by investing an enormous amount of energy in creating trivial content. The crux of Spore is a game world generated "procedurally" -- that is, on the fly. Gamers can design any kind of creature they want; the game then uses built-in algorithms to determine the animations and attributes of their creations. In effect, Wright and his team have established a framework for a game, but it's the responsibility of the player and the community to populate that framework with content -- or as Wright says, to provide their own stories.
Impressively, the game seems to be in an advanced state of development; although there were moments of slowdown during some of the later portions of the adventure (particularly when Wright's UFO annihilated a hostile planet downloaded from another user) both the adventure and the editors demonstrate a high level of polish. Additionally, Wright demonstrated every phase of the game, as well as the transitions from one state to another -- making Spore less a pipe dream or act of bold chicanery than a looming reality.
Given the popularity of The Sims and the impressive level of polish and humor customary in Wright's work, Spore clearly has amazing potential to become every bit as huge as its predecessor. (And as entertaining -- when your primitive creature mates, the deed is accompanied by romantic guitar and saxophone music.) Spore's ambitious design will allow it to take advantage of whatever success it achieves; the more people who play and create, the more variety other users will experience.
Wright will be revealing more information on the game at E3, and presumably images and other handy details as well. (Platform, requirements, release date, etc.) We'll pass along whatever tidbits we can find as Spore blooms into a completed product.
Spore
