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Will Wright's Next Game: Spore
1up.com has a look at Will Wright's newest game, revealed today at the Game Developer's conference. Entitled Spore, the game promises to be (in a word) unique. From the article: "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...It features a wide variety of game types as a sort of homage to my favorite games.'" PC Magazine has details as well, as does Gamasutra.
"It's actually a lot like WarioWare"
Unique:
1. Being the only one of its kind: the unique existing example of Donne's handwriting.
2. Without an equal or equivalent; unparalleled.
3.
a. Characteristic of a particular category, condition, or locality: a problem unique to coastal areas.
b. Informal. Unusual; extraordinary: spoke with a unique accent.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
I hope that doesn't mean the more conservative protozoa will try to give it an AO rating.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
This game sounds like a combination of several types of games that I love. However, what sounds great on paper doesn't necessarily translate into a good final product. Any screenshots anybody? Is this vapor or are we really going to see a unique game on the PC for once, as opposed to yet another tactical first person shooter?
It's a dangerous gambit making a game like was described. Not that it's not intreaguing and has great potential, but rather it will be far to easy for this game to come short in it's attempt to appeal to all people. All the phases of the game have all been successful games in their own right: a diablo style kill-spree type game, a civilation style game, a space-colonization game, etc. I fear that they're going to have to cheap out on all these "mini" games because it's simply not possible to develop 6 good games in the development schedule that'll be given for one game, unless of course it becomes the next DNF. Thus it will be a crappy pac-man game strung to a crappy diablo game strung to a crappy civ game strung to a crappy sim city game, and so on.
The game goes in phases:
1) Freeform Pac-man (with E.V.O. and Cubivore leanings, with consuming other things to change the abilities of your own creature)
2) Diablo-like
3) RTS-like (think Populous)
4) City Phase (think Sim City)
5) Civilization Phase (think Civilization *)
6) Invasion Phase (go forth into the universe, colonizing, invading, and terraforming)
At that:
"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."
No screen shots (sorry!)
Game had a toon feel to it, but not completely toon rendered - sort of a mix.
Seemless, though slow in places, with Wright interacting with the character as he talked. From this, think it was playing in real time, and hence a fairly polished pre-alpha.
Presentation was at 10:30. At 12pm, it was due to be reshown at a theater open to Expo attendees. This was CANCELLED at the last minute, after some people had been packed in for half an hour. An official stood up and said it had been pulled, as EA said it contained confidential info. Kinda dumb, as 90 minutes before they'd shown it in a room with at least 500 people, cameras flashing all the time!!
One thing some articles I've read misscharacterized, from being at the conference myself. They say Wrights title of "The Future of Game Content" was a guise under which he presented Spore. I really don't think that is completely true. Wright made good points about game content and time to develop. His solution was demonstrated by Spore. Spore uses user shared content and procesdural content to overcome the current limits.
With other EA divisions claiming 150 person teams, Wright showed their was another way, keeping teams smaller, and allowing user driven and procedural content to fill the gap.
This was a theme at the GDC this year. In his talk a couple of days ago, Tim Sweeny talked about how good tools can also keep team size down, to a max of 50 in his case. 50 is still large, but if it gets a 25 mil $ game down to 10, thats much more profit to the studio and developer.
I was there for the talk, he showed a demo of the game. It really was amazing. It's the first universe simulator that I have ever seen. All procedurally generated, I am sure there are some limitations to it. He will be showing it at E3, so execpt a xmas release. This is a game unlike any others, if you like sandbox games.
What is there to talk about with this? The fact that Will Wright came up with a new game idea? I don't find that very shocking since, well, he has a history of them...
There's almost no details here other than Will Wright saying he wants to try to make a very complex game with massive scope--but it is just talk at this point, right? When it comes to talk, I think the game industry is especially well known for it.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Sounds a lot like the old Apple ][ game called Evolution. So, even though it sounds cool and all, I wouldn't call it too revolutionary.
Sig? What sig? Do I have to have a sig!?!?
Excuse the type, I'm using a tablet.
Will Wright said it was like WarioWare, but that was a huge stretch (even for him). It is like WW only in the fact that it is made up of lots of game types. Most of those game types have been done before (RTS, God Games, Risk, etc.) but never combined like this before.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
Given EA's media lockdown, you might just have to trust us. It was cool as hell. Not only did he give a good talk (with ninjas!) but he showed an amazing demo. The game looks done. I have a feeling it is already in QA.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
The Future of Content:
...and why it's driven me to procedural methods.
...And what I now plan to do with them.
What I learned about content from the Sims.
Will Wright
Game Developers Conference
3/11/2005
Wired asked for an illustration to print in the magazine, anything he wanted. So he made a diagram of Spore that Wired published, but he didn't tell them what it was. The design docs for Spore have been out in Wired Magazine for a year now. (It's in the Feb 2004 issue of Wired.)
Here's a link to the web site where you can find out What Kind of Care Bear Are You?
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Wired asked Will for an illustration to print in the magazine, anything he wanted. So he made a diagram of Spore that Wired published, but he didn't tell them what it was. The design docs for Spore have been out in Wired Magazine for a year now. (It's in the Feb 2004 issue of Wired.)
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
I do wonder a bit about how play balance will work. In such strategy games a series of small time saving maneuvers early on cascades into a huge advantage in the late game. In this situation you're increasing that process by another order of magnitude. There are crazy-good people who can hit spaceflight in Civ in the BCs or something similarly insane. The space portion would be a cake-walk if they got to start a couple hundred turns before everyone else. There is of course the time honored tradition of having the AI "cheat" and just starting them all going whenever the humans hit space. Or arranging the storyline so that it seems reasonable that the aliens stayed at home until the humans started expanding, but Galactic Civilizations is the only 4x space game i've seen that has had even a semi-reasonable explanation for such a thing.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I was in attendance at the talk, and boy was it good. Jon Hopkins did a very good job above taking notes on both the demo and Will's slides and lecture. OK, so here are some answers to some questions that have come up in the previous comments:
:)
- Will didn't just talk about it, he gave a 45-minute in-game live demo of all aspects of the game, from bacteria to galactic god.
- Although I'm sure Will had practiced what he was going to demonstrate to us at the talk, there were times when things didn't go perfectly (example: he was trying to get ships from his town to attack a neighboring city's tanks, and they didn't attack and flew right by), and Will's an honest guy, so I'm pretty sure he really was playing it live and it they weren't playing any tricks on us like the HL2 E3 2003 demo.
- The game has a nice visual feel to it, but the graphics were about as revolutionary as the graphics in Sims 2 are. People aren't drooling over the graphics, but the gameplay. That's key.
- Will isn't introducing any revolutionary type of gameplay with Spore. Instead he's trying to take the best 10%-20% of exisiting genres/toys/games that he likes, including previous Maxis titles, and successfully combine them into one game. He said that it's a rule not to combine genres, and he wants to break that rule. I guess what's revolutionary is that it looks like he's going to make it work.
Wait till E3, where EA will finally let Will go more public with details. I'm sure that Spore will be winning a lot of "Best of Show" awards come May. Until then, trust us
It's almost an hour long and I go over each and every screen and action performed during the demo.
You can listen to my podcast at: http://www.gamingsteve.com/
It's almost an hour long and I go over each and every screen and action performed during the demo.
You can listen to my podcast at: http://www.gamingsteve.com/
This lenghty and complicated interview with Will Wright actually contains many of the memes of spore: http://www.gamestudies.org/0102/pearce/ Interesting reading for those so inclined.
Check out Gamespy's article on this, actually. It is far longer (5 pages!), and talks about how Wright got inspiration from the Demo Scene, and how the animations and such in the game are done cleverly and procedurally. As well there are the consequences of all of this for the video game industry.
Click here
I think this sounds like the game I've been waiting for all my life...
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