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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 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.
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!!