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Spore About Six Months Away
SimCity creator and all-around genius Will Wright recently publicly stated that Spore is about six months away. Whether that's six months from completion or release isn't said. CVG has his comments from a recent interview with Radio 5 Live: "Spore's an ambitious game - which he admits - that's essentially a life sim. Players start off as a single-cell organism and then create their species at every stage of its evolution - from its first steps on land through to tribes then a culture and then finally it's off to explore the galaxy. 'We've had to do a lot of testing to make sure that the game is accessible by a wide group of people', Wright went on to explain. 'I want the people who have played The Sims to be able to play Spore - I don't want it to be some thing just hardcore gamers play.'"
Just like there isn't anything more in this post than in the subject :)
Right After Duke Nukem Forever - which will be released in 5 Months....
The above comments are not guaranteed to make sense to anyone other than the author...
Perfect for *my* Birthday. Which just goes to show that it all works out in the end.
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Has been true for any given day of the past two years! Once a year, it will be ready in time for your birthday.
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Underwhelmed Indeed. I was totally stoked about playing Spore when I first saw it... Now there are so many other cool games that ACTUALLY came out like Portal that make me not care as much about Spore.
and the Iraq War proponents have both started converting time to Friedman Units.
It's okay. If you live long enough, you'll probably have another birthday. For more information.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Call me cynical, but the wider the audience is, the dumber the game will be.
Now the time has come with Spore delays that people equate it to Duke Nukem Forever. For one, Will Wright is a perfectionist. He wont let trash get released. he wants the game acessible to more than the hardcore. The money spent developing would justify the need for a wider audience.
People dont make games simply because they want to, they need to take a serious financial look at cost versus estimated market. You cannot simply jump in, spend $20,000,000 dollars in development and expent the game to be a 5 million copy seller.
Remember Sims 1? That was a huge risk for EA to take. A risk that paid off beyond what anyone imagined. They game was simple, barren of serious content and low graphics. It was all done in a way that if the game didnt sell well, at least they didnt invest excessive cash into the game. By making it expandable, they had planned for it's potential success. Years later Sims is going strong.
Spore is in a similar category. It could flop, it could be the boulder that crushes the sims dominance. But if they release a game, that is buggy, and crash prone, that they plan to patch repeatedly for another year, the game will be quickly dropped and fail miserably. So in taking this risk, they must be 100% certain that Spore is complete, 99.9% bug free and acessable to a large ammount of people, both hardcore and non gamer alike. It's not easy to do this. It takes time, planning, implementation, testing and more planning and revision. Give it time, it will be worth the wait.
Now, Duke Forever. It's an FPS, no where near as complex as Spore. It should have been out after 2 years development. It was basically an empty promise that kept the company alive. Duke = Vapor, Spore = Real.
Am I the only one that can't hear about spore without thinking of this Penny-Arcade comic?
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
You make an interesting point. Would we be better off not knowing about stuff (building up hype) until it's ready? Is this why open source isn't gaining more steam? People expect the instant gratification? Your more likely to pick something up if it comes out "production stable" within a specific period of time? So let's say there's an ambitious project to create a game with ___ feature, but this is going to take years of development and bug testing. Would you like to know it's on the horizon or about 1 month before it's released?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Pre-order now at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FKBCX4/.
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The first half 2008 will be full of awesome releases. Spore will rival with Duke Nukem Forever, Perl 6 and bytecode compiled Ruby, and it'll be the year of the Linux desktop! On top of that, we'll have about a hundred amazing new storage and display technologies we were reading about weekly in Slashdot.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
No.... it's not an RPG. It's an alien doll house by the guy who popularised Sim Dollshouse. The fun in Spore comes from sticking arms and eyeballs on your virtual pet. The games are simplified fare which will be torn apart by those mythical hardcore gamers. I think some people have been reading too much into the videos, which are usually 50% focused on the design screen and 50% showing the actual game, except the design screen IS the game. Just you wait, the Spore backlash will make Black And White look like GOTY material.
The Sims IS hardcore. So harcore that people buy expansions after expansion while it is THEM that create the real content, pay for sites hosting user made content and spend ages working around all the shortcomings of the original product.
First update for most people? To get rid of the cartoony look of the characters and get some realistic faces in there.
The Sims community is as hardcore as the flightsim crowd. This is NOT a casual game. Casual gaming is web-based. Games you can pick up and play AND finish in a few minutes. The Sims AIN'T.
In fact the only difference between The Sims, flightsims, trains sims and the "traditional" hardcore crowd of FPS lovers, is that the first group can speak proper english and has touched a member of the sex they find attractive.
But in time and money spend on the game, in many ways the former group is even more hardcore.
So what does he want Spore to be? A tetris type game OR a The Sims?
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