More Spore Details from DICE Summit

Will Wright and his team at EA put together a presentation for the DICE Summit, giving folks more details on the much-anticipated Spore . Gamespot reports on the talk, which sounds like it must have been highly entertaining to view. The entire presentation centered around the development process for the game, which has been a platform for smart people to talk about making games since Wright first announced the project. Designers from the team talk about making the space ship creator flexible ("It's pretty satisfying to fly around in your X-Wing and blow up The Enterprise."), and Wright mentioned their habit to run a batch process creating thousands of planets every night. Stephen Totilo at MTV also discusses the talk, and fleshes out a few more details from the event. Looking this over, what do you think? Still excited for Spore, or has it been in development too long?

Comments

Sure I'm still excited.

[casualsax3]

I would much rather have a game delayed by a full year, as long as the developers take advantage of that extra time. If I could have Spore tomorrow, but it would be lacking in some features or not as polished as it should be, or I could have it in a year with everything they promised - I'd definitely take it in a year. I have enough great games to play through as it is. I don't want to see major features scaled back a-la Project Ego/Fable due to time constraints. Take your time devs, and make it worth the wait.

Re:Sure I'm still excited.

[DeeZee]

Of course I agree, but looking at it from the dreaded Business Point of View(tm), a year extra in development is a lot of extra expenditures in salary and other costs, and it does not guarantee better sales. (In fact, a years delay might sour the deal for some people, not to mention the "buzz" might be gone by the time the game is actually released).

Re:Sure I'm still excited.

[milamber3]

Might I offer up Duke Nukem Forever and Daikatana as examples for a counter argument.

Development time

[ShadowsHawk]

It's not that the development has been to long, it's that we've been hearing about the thing constantly for the last year and a half! The phrase "Shit or get off the pot" has never been more appropriate.

Re:Development time

[shoptroll]

You must be new to gaming I take it? EA letting Maxis take their time with this is the best thing they can do. I'd rather have a good solid game to start of with before it gets EAified and they start churning out yearly iterations or an expansion pack or content pack every quarter. This also suggests that EA is putting a lot of money behind this project in order to let them keep working on this as long as they have. Although it's pretty well known that EA will let Will Wright/Maxis do whatever the hell they please, as long as it brings in the cash by the truckload.

Re:Development time

[SimHacker]

Although it's pretty well known that EA will let Will Wright/Maxis do whatever the hell they please, as long as it brings in the cash by the truckload.

I certainly hope that EA listens to what Will Wright says he wants to do, and lets him do it without throwing up any roadblocks. The last group of people who thought they knew better than Will Wright caused SimCity 3000 to be delayed by many years, and almost bankrupt Maxis. If they had just done what he said, they would be on top of the world, but instead they all got fired after EA bought Maxis and cleaned house.

-Don

Spore Wii?

[Shayneisgreat]

I want to play spore, but I want to stick with my inexpensive Wii.

How to cure the hype problem.

[PhoenixOne]

If you don't want to hear about things in development, stop reading Slashdot and those stupid gaming mags.

Personally I'd rather EA doesn't "shit" out Spore like they do so many other titles. Sims is still selling well, let the development time have the time they need.

Re:unlikely to be a nice game with this hype

[supremebob]

The last game that Will Wright tried like this was SimEarth, which also covered the full timespan of evolution from single cells to space fairing civilizations. Most people thought that it was overly tedious, though, and wasn't all that fun to play. I hope that he doesn't make the same mistakes this time!

Spore.

[rdwulfe]

Wright and team are putting major effort into this project, and it does look like they are comming along nicely. Every so often, there's new stuff up on the Spore website, though not near as much as I'd hoped would be on there by now. I can only hope this means that they are working as hard as they can and keeping themselves from being burned out at the same time. Wright has come out with some of the most influentual games of the last several years. Sims, Sim City, Sim Earth, and so on... These games made the whole Simulation selection of games possible. And for someone who's interested in AI and artificial life, like myself, these style of games are the most compelling. I just hope Wright does the one thing that could make this game TRUELY great: Make it so that the user has access to the programming of the game. I'm not talking Open Source. That is way too much to hope for. No, give us access to the procedural programming elements, so we can mod and make our own. Wright wants the users to create content, says we're better at it and more interested in doing it than game companies. I challange that we want even more, if we can have it. We want to be able to add things the creators forgot. We want to be able to add new sections to games, or new WAYS of doing things. So what if the dev team doesn't have time to add flying procedures to the game? Well guess what, we'll gladly do it. Give us a core. Give us the tools, and the basics. We'll make the rest, and we'll love you for it. Rion Wulfe

Re:unlikely to be a nice game with this hype

[bstorer]

Wright's gone on record as saying this was the game that he longed to make when they did SimEarth.

Spoor

[SimHacker]

If it was going to be shit, then it would be spelled "Spoor".

Spoor: spoor (plural spoor or spoors) 1. The track, trail or droppings of an animal

-Don

Re:OM.... Care Bears vs Klingons fight mechs

[SimHacker]

You hit the nail on the head there. Will Wright is fascinated with Care Bears. He had several slides on the topic in his GDC 2005 talk:

Pokemon, Neopets, Care Bears. Give kids a sense of ownership and mastery over the facts and details of the characters. Loved dinosaurs as a kid. Knew the rock-scissors-paper of different species of dinosaurs, which was something his mom didn't know. Mastery of facts.

Care bears. Started as greeting cards. Found a web app that categorizes your personality: Which Care Bear are you? Each care bear has special abilities. Care bear have cousins, that aren't even bears. Care bears live in a star-speckled, rainbow-trimmed, cotton candy, cloud world called "Care a Lot". If they fall out of the clouds, they land in the "Forest of Feelings" (Kindom of Caring). Forest of Feelings is over the earth. So the Earth must be the "Kingdom of people who don't give a shit".

-Don

Content Filtering

[MeanderingMind]

Excluding the game being actually fun and awesome, my only concern is how Spore deals with filtering of content.

The fact of the matter is, when this game is released someone is going to make one or more rather obscene creatures. Whether it's a perfect model of a Playboy bunny, or a disturbingly humorous creature based off of our naughty bits, there needs to be a way for someone to say 'I don't want that in my game'.

While there will be people who will welcome these things into their ecosystems, there will also be people who will not. For them, the entire experience will be ruined if their creature they have lovingly crafted can not be played without encountering a race of Fidel Castros.

It shouldn't be too difficult to have an option where you right-click a race and select them for replacement.