Spore Editor Available June 17th

Dr. Eggman writes "Ars Technica heralds the coming of the creature editor for the highly anticipated Spore. A previously promised downloadable demo of the creature editor from the game, due on September 7th, will be available June 17th. Furthermore, a full version of the creature editor will appear as a standalone product at the same time for $10. According to EA: 'The demo lets players shape, paint and play with an unlimited number of creatures, using 25 percent of the creature-making parts from Spore. Gamers can then share these creations with their friends, including seamless uploads to YouTube.'"

Comments

Re:money off the full game?

[CogDissident]

Actually, they have said that the reason they're releasing the creature editor early, is to populate the game with creatures (that we make) before the game comes out. So non-networked players will have species to play against from the start.

So they're actually being paid by us, to make content for their game. Which is actually kind of the premise of this game (for good or for ill, they count on people making their content for them).

Re:Sorry, haven't been following the updates...

[kinoku]

Xbox 360, PC, PS3 just like the Sims. And then maybe a retarded version for handhelds.

Re:Vaporware?

[Talderas]

Spore has generated a great deal of hype. But endless delays and brief glimpses of demos are starting to give this whole project the feel of vaporware. Far from it. Spore is finished, they are just in Beta-testing to work out all the kinks. The Spore we saw when Robin Williams created a creature, the Spore which Will Wright first demoed, is nothing like what it looks like now. September 7th is the release date, which is directly stated in the article. Call it Vaporware if you will, but in just over 4 months the world will suffer a slight productivity drop as many individuals start playing Spore.

Re:Hmm, let me guess...

[canajin56]

Conspiracy theory #2 is that they don't want to pay artists to create the models of things for the final launch, better to sell the useless editor and make people do the work for them. Am I right? Or am I right?

No, that's completely right. The game uses fancy clustering stuff, sort of like "recommendation" algorithms on netflix etc. So you start designing your first creature, and it populates the world with various other creatures from the database, that its distance algorithm measures as "similar" to what you designed. Can't do that very well without a huge database. Therefore, they are releasing the editor early in order to get that database fully populated. It's not that their artists won't be doing anything: They'll be working full time. It's just that they need millions of entries in the database.

The only news here is that the editor they've been releasing soon (Its always been known they would release the editors early to populate the database) won't be fully functional, and they'll be CHARGING for the full version. That's pretty annoying. And as far as I know, there will be a DS game featuring just the tide pool phase.

Re:My big concern

[Dr. Eggman]

In demoing the Sporepedia, a card-like encyclopedia of user generated content, the creators have stated that creatures/veichles/buildings automatically added are based on a sort of dynamic filter created out of your own choices in creation/selection. So, if you do not want to see such things then you simply need not create/select them and they will end up at the bottom of the selection choices as more favorable selections are pushed up.

Re:Sounds like a great deal to me, personally

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that you'll never be able to pwn any Spore players, as it is a single-player game. Unless you count contributing to the creature-library as pwning them.