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

[johneee]

My wife saw that video, turned to me and said, "we're getting this game, right?"

I'll give her this, when I told her it would cost us somewhere in the region of $2000 she actually had to consider it for a full second and a half before she said ok.

So, I'll get a new computer, but I won't be able to use it for six months, and I won't actually see my wife for that time either... Thanks Will Wright.

GTA model

[Douglas Simmons]

I'm surprised to see people going in the opposite direction that GTA did insofar as raciness considering they had the most successful game. Perhaps it wasn't just GTA's R-ratedness that made it such a hit but the quality of the game itself, and it appears that EA and other companies agree if they're making games about microbes in lieu of cop/whore/pedestrian killer games.

Re:GTA model

[chrismcdirty]

Of course it's the openness of the game that made it so popular, and not the fact that it's outright offensive to a multitude of people. Custer's Revenge had plenty of sex and violence, and a handful of people remember playing it. The Sims, on the other hand, managed to be one of the top selling games of all time by being an open-ended game with no real ending point.

Re:GTA model

[sehryan]

"Or is it Intelligent Design? I can't really tell."

I guess it depends on who is playing it.

Re:GTA model

[yppiz]

Just wait until someone discovers the Hot Chordate mod.

--Pat "mod +1 Evolutionary Biology / GTA tie-in"

obl. gary larson

[pimpimpim]

Reminds me of a "far side" cartoon: Movie Concepts Walt Disney Never Brought to Cinema:
"Bert the adventurous amoebe"
"Andy the sandworm"
etc :)

Re:obl. gary larson

[clem]

So until next time, "Adios, Amoebos!"

Spore's orginal name was:

[Anonymous Coward]

Billy and the Intelligent Design workshop.

They had to tone it down a little.

Intelligent Design Simulator

[withears]

Conservatives feel that Spore will open the way to fully immersing our youth into the Intelligent Design movement.

Re:Intelligent Design Simulator

[shelterpaw]

Conservatives feel that Spore will open the way to fully immersing our youth into the Intelligent Design movement.

Liberals hope that Spore will open the way to fully immersing our youth into bi-transsexual organisms with no morals or values. :P

Re:Intelligent Design Simulator

[Cy Sperling]

Actually, I think it is quite the opposite. It makes a very compelling case for the mechanics of evolution. Granted, the player exerts a guiding hand over mutations, but the whole point of the game is to grow organisms from single cells all the way to intelligent extra-planetary species. This is achieved by progressive mutations that, hopefully, give the newer organsim an advantage in it's environment. Intelligent design proposes that fully-formed complex creatures simply sprang forth onto the earth from a 'designers' hand. The beauty of Spore is that you cannot create your creatures with the end result in mind. You start with a single cell and intervene with it's design at intervals based on it's ability to succeed in the environment. You would never get to simply sculpt an intelligent humanoid from clay, give it a soul and toss it out into the world. Instead your end-game form is dependant on a multidue of generational mutations which were each a reaction to a gradually changing environment. Add in the fact that the other creatures in your world can be comprised of the creations of other players and, if anything, you get polytheism- multiple creators whose 'children' compete for success in the universe.

Good idea, misguided goal

[the grace of R'hllor]

"Innovative" and "franchise" are incompatible terms. A franchise, after all, is exploiting an existing idea, and is all about "same". A game like Spore, should it be succesful, will be succesful because it is unique, not because there are a zillion and one Spore-a-likes.

On whether the game will be succesful; it's essentially a new gametype (or mix thereof) by an industry vet, it's being hyped to hell and back, and it's got the backing of EA. I hear echoes of Black and White, and the echoes do not sound good.

Re:Good idea, misguided goal

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Innovative" and "franchise" are incompatible terms. "

Wrong. See Super Mario Brothers.

Re:Good idea, misguided goal

[the grace of R'hllor]

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.

Cheat codes?

[dr_dank]

I wonder if Spore will have an Intelligent Design cheat code that would skip you right to homosapien and win the game.

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

Outragous! I must protest!

[jandrese]

Hmm, this game sounds like Evolutionay propaganda to me. I demand that the game include a "truth" mode where your civilization simply appears as fully developed humans (minus one rib in the male model) and goes from there. :)

Actually, that would be a clever little joke on the creator's part. Perhaps include a "-dogma" commandline switch that does just that. If they really wanted to get some reactionary types mad, they could even include various modes for all of the crazy creation myths from various world religions.

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.

FUN TIME

[SandMonkey]

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!

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:Spore looks to be GREAT

[misleb]

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

it's about damn time

[rayde]

while i dutifully buy an EA football game once a year, i really think EA needs to move away from its dependency on existing franchises and follow Nintendo's lead by innovating into new gameplay ideas. Let's hope it's not just lip service.

so here is my idea for EA. I think they should change madden releases to bi-yearly, with a $5 or so roster update/patch in the off-years. The huge pool of resources poured into madden every year could be directed into these smaller home-grown projects.

Will they lose money? I dunno. They'll make money on their roster update, that's for sure. And if they create a few gems with those reallocated resources, they're opening up loads of future franchise possibilities.

so the choices are to continue to cash-in now, or to plant these seeds for the future.

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:I think that boycott comes on other terms

[iamlucky13]

Guess EA can't win that one 'gainst the religious right, huh?

If you want to speak for the religious right, you should first consider joining it. I personally think it sounds like a cool idea for a game.

Re:Christian Backlash? I think not.

[Manmademan]

Speaking as a full-on, 100% bible-believing Christian, I very very much would like to play this game. It's a game. It's not the real world. In that way, I see no reason to ban it, or whatever. Now, if the game claimed (which it does not) to represent the exact same structure as creation on Earth, then that's something else.

Why would that be "something else?" As you said this is just a game. Whether or not you agree with what it claims is no reason to ban it. The Bible Game claims that the biblical representation of Genesis is 100% truth and you don't see atheists storming the streets in protest. It's EA's right to make a game that claims whatever they wish, as long as that claim isn't outright slanderous.