Spore Is EA's New Ace

BusinessWeek reports on EA's Next Big Thing. From the article: "EA is stumbling, and a big part of its time-tested strategy is about to change. The company hopes that its next mega-franchise will revolve not around a football star, a boy wizard, or a dashing British spy, but...a microbe. The game is called Spore. Developed by Will Wright, the creator of SimCity and The Sims, it lets players design an invertebrate in its primordial stages and then guide its evolution until the creature's offspring develop into a thriving civilization with cities, religion, and spaceships. EA's ambitious goal is to create more such innovative, internally developed games while lessening the company's dependence on professional sports and Hollywood movie franchises."

Comments

Spore video

[RonnyJ]

Spore video on Google: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330 420559198&q=spore

Re:Spore video

[Ryvar]

That's the partial video, the full video is here, free registration - which does not require you to validate your email address so any garbage works - is required.

--Ryvar

Re:Spore video

[Anonymous Coward]

"B&W2 is going to be ..."

You realize that it came out months ago, right? And that it crashes on startup on about 1 in 5 machines, has no multiplayer, doesn't let the creature learn from your actions, doesn't let you skip the tutorial (until the most recent patch 1.2), has bugs that cause the game to stop progressing to the next world, lets armies run right through your city walls, and absolutely *crawls* on nVidia GeForce 6800 cards?

Just checking.

Re:Spore video

[Anonymous Writer]

Don't forget the official site.

Old links

[moral kiosk]

Video of Will Wright's Spore Demo (~35 min): http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330 420559198&q=spore PA's take: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/05/27

for those that don't have flash: screenshots

[pimpimpim]

Google video is nice and all, but eats my cpu. So, here some screenshots for the people with underpowered pcs:

http://www.thesporezone.co.uk/screens/index.php?ID =1

http://www.spore.com/screenshots.php

Videos are old

[Guspaz]

The video links people are posting are about a year old. So yeah, they're cool, but they're nothing new, and we haven't heard a peep about the game since then.

Re:Videos are old

[Swift(void)]

That is because it wasn't even a game when it was first displayed. It was a proof of concept of the particular progamming style he chose, and one that he admitted was very patchy and only just held together. EA didn't officially start backing the game for a good 3 to 4 months after GDC 2005, and it still probably isn't ready to set the hype machine loose on.

Re:Spore looks to be GREAT

[DrEldarion]

All along, they've been saying "winter 2006" as a release. I think everyone was hoping that would mean Q1, but Q4 2006 seems to be the target.

Knowing Wright, though, he won't let it out the door until he feels it's done completely, so it may be later.

Re:Sim Earth / Sim Life sequel?

[danpsmith]

It's really something new. If you watch the demonstration, this game is basically many games in one. You start off as a microbe basically eating other micro-organisms in order to gain strength or points or whatever and trying not to get killed by other microbes. As you evolve you eventually go from bacteria->sea creature->land creature, then after you are finished that evolution, tribes form allowing you to have control over the tribe. After this cities form and a civ like game goes on. After you have populated the whole world you can leave your home planet and populate others. Magnificent. The most impressive bit had to have been when I saw him drop a creature from one planet onto a moon and the creature simply exploded because the moon had no atmosphere. Then there's the fact that this will use an online database to link up everyone's creatures and try to maintain an eco system. I mean, I honestly think this game is a little bit more than a "sim" something. It's more like a computer incarnation of the living breathing thing, maybe a little sillier looking, but very scaled and nice otherwise.

Re:Cheat codes?

[AniamL]

It's homo sapiens, which is Latin for wise man. Homosapien doesn't even really make sense. (Sorry, I need to make my study of classics useful)...

Re:Spore video - logins to pqhp

[necro2607]

err, registration?? pfff... no need to waste your time.

http://www.bugmenot.com/view.php?url=www.pqhp.com

have fun...

Re:Spore looks to be GREAT

[modecx]

I watched the shorter length google movie, and that was addressed towards the end. He says that when your civilization(s) advance enough, that manipulation of creatures is possible, and that when you get to that stage of the game most of the editors are freely available (i.e. that you don't have to follow the usual rules that drive evolution in the game, feeding, reproduction)

It certainly looks and sounds as if you can micromanage to your heart's content once you get to that point, including growing new colonies, managing old ones, creating new ecologies, etc.

Maybe it's not open ended, if you take the definition of "open ended" to not include growing, and becoming better... Who knows where evolution is supposed to take us, maybe we're supposed to transcend our existence beyond what we can imagine, maybe we're meant to roam the stars, and maybe we're supposed to stay. It looks open ended from our view, but if you had the perspective of some enlightened, omniscient being, our existence might not look open ended. It might look like a continuation of many, many stages. I'd say that this game appears to be as open ended as the player wants to make it.