by Gunther » Fri Feb 03, 2006 11:50 pm
Spore
From a one-celled blob to technological conqueror of the galaxy? Where do we sign up!?
Not a lot of titles in development have the potential to change the way we think about games. Spore is one of those happy exceptions, an experiment presided over by longtime game design guru Will Wright. What makes it different? The trend in recent years, as hardware gets more and more advanced, is for game developers to hire armies of artists and animators to handcraft every level and animate every creature. Games are taking longer to develop and costing more -- way more. To the tune of $100 million to create a next-generation game. That's got publishers tightening up the clamps, afraid to experiment on new ideas -- which is why the shelves of your local game store look like an alphabet soup of sequels with numbers or roman numerals after every title.
One of the reasons Spore is relevant is because it flies in the face of convention. Instead of hiring an army of artists to create the content, Spore is a blank slate -- you, the player, create the content as part of playing the game. You'll create a strange creature and the game will animate it for you. If you give it five feet and a hand for a nose, the procedural programming techniques in Spore will figure out how to make your creature walk and grab things with its face. Meanwhile, players share their creations within a giant Internet community -- the content you'll run across is virtually infinite, limited only by the creativity of the other players.
Those are some interesting ideas, but fortunately Spore is a game to play and not just a weird grad-student experiment. Players will start as little one-celled creatures in the primordial soup of their home world. You'll have to eat food and avoid predators in simple, Pac-Man style gameplay until your character can reproduce -- giving yourself a chance to evolve, by attaching extra extremities, mouths, or weapons to your critter. Once you evolve legs you can walk out of the ocean and on to solid land, possibly evolving wings from there.
It gets even more interesting once your creatures develop brains enough to form their own civilization. Now, instead of evolving animals, you evolve their society, by sculpting buildings and vehicles in the in-game editor. Before long you can build spaceships capable of exploring other planets in your solar system, and then you can roam out to other stars, visiting other planets with other creatures. There's no "end goal" in Spore -- you can try to conquer the galaxy, terraform planets, create zoos of interesting creatures, or try to make friends with all the intelligent life in the universe. Most of which will have been created by other players. As with Will Wright's other big gaming hits, The Sims and SimCity, how you play the game is all up to you.
Current schedules have Spore penciled in as a 2006 title, although we won't know if it'll ship this year for sure until announcements prior to this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo. Either way, this is one of the most interesting titles in development.
GuntertE, Lv 1, NC on Waterson
GunthertE, Lv3, TR on Mattherson
Landain, Lv3, TR on Jaeger