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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."
Or really something new?
That would be something new for EA.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I know it's a tenuous link at best... but this game really reminds me of "EVO Search for Eden" which was an old game on the SNES with a similar concept... You start out as a fish, and you eat smaller animals to gain points, you then use these points to evolve your character. The game went through several stages (Fish/Dinosaur/Bird etc) and was great fun! Hopefully SPORE will be just as - if not more -fun!
Schrodinger's cat- A cat is put in a sealed box. Attached to which is a radioactive nucleus and a canister of poison gas
I'd be concerned about the game being too ambitious and not being a particularly good implementation of any of the other games it emulates. In the demo video, he talks about all the other games that it is like. Pac-Man in the beginning, then the Sims, then Sim-City, then Civilization, etc.
It sorta reminds me of that "Sim-Sim" game found inside the old Space Quest series. Anyone remeber that? Those Sierra games were really fun.
Anyway, Spore does look really cool.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
The full video including Will Wright's remarks about the demo scene and the procedurally generated games and such is also available on Google Video.
In Black and White you have enemy gods, in Spore you have enemy cities, and in both cases your critters do battle. You have little direct control over your subjects, and the game is more or less open-ended. Designing orgamisms is a (fun!) gameplay gimmick, not in itself gameplay. I see parallels here, and it has me slightly worried, insofar as I worry about these things.
Mind you, I think it *appears* great, and the video demo was fun (had me in stitches a few times; that diplomatic 'first contact' bit was great, as were the creature designs), but there has to be gameplay. We didn't see a whole lot of the gameplay mechanics in the video, probably because they weren't done yet. Talk of 'procedurally generated' and 'emergent behaviour' is all nice, but such claims were made earlier.
I am also worried about the lack of (talk about) synchronous multiplayer. At some point I'd want to pop my civilization online, have colonial wars and biological exchanges with critters actually being watched by another player. Hell, leave the world available online for others, so that when I get back there might be a whole range of critters on my world I wasn't aware of. Just disable the planet-pounders.
Black and White was a great toy, but not a particularly good game. I wonder if Spore will do better. This mindless optimism, however, is never a good idea for any game, by any developer.