Talked to Troy Hewitt, Director - Community Relations at the NY Comic Con.
Had a good talk with him and got a chance to play the game. (Black Andrew will be the most fearsome pirate ever!)
Check out our talk after the link. Read the rest of this entry »
With games these days seemingly coming out left and right, most of them uninspiring and usually a sequel or spin-off to something else, it’s hard to get excited about an upcoming title. Beyond that, with games like The Movies, Rollercoaster Tycoon and the Sims on the market, it’s even harder if it’s a simulation game. Well, I can’t argue those statements anymore. Not after seeing Spore.
Developed by Will Wright, creator of the Sims franchise, Spore goes well beyond the level of simulation any game has ventured before. Starting from a small petri dish through the lens of a microscope, all the way to looking down on your own galaxy, Spore combines the controls of other building and living sim games and creates a universe for you to evolve through. More than just building and living, you will see gameplay from almost all sim categories; from the 3rd person action to the Sims to SimCity to Civilization real-time-strategy and then well beyong that, delving into elements of gameplay never before seen. Really, it’s could be called a collection of sim engines in one but it is so complex and tightly packed, comparing it to other sim games gives it no justice.Watching a video at last year’s developer’s conference, Will Wright guides the audience through the ins and outs of his game’s new engine and shows just how in depth it really goes. The most impressive details lie in just how open ended it is, actually taking the term to a whole new meaning. Using it’s edit mode, you are not just confined to a few configurations such as two or four legs or a couple body shapes. You’re instead given complete control to create whatever you want. After you’ve finished, the system analyzes your creation and applies physics and modeling needed for it to interact realistically. It sounds like a system that could be full of hiccups but seeing some of the example creations made, it’s virtually solid. Here’s a a little rundown of just what the game’s about and what has been shown so far.
You begin in the aformentioned petri dish as a “spore” where you have control to interact with other single-celled organisms. Using an edit mode, you can completely change it’s form and abilities. Eventually, it will lay an egg and you will get a chance to evolve your spore to a multi-celled organism or creature. With enough time spent, eventually you will leave the confined petri dish and enter the sea as some sort of fish mammal to continue the process of evolution.
The game turns from a top-down 2D perspective to a 3rd person adventure where you have full control of your creature’s movement and actions. Eventually you will make it to dry land and here is where you will encounter a widely ranged ecosystem where other being are created by other players. It’s not a massive multi-player online game. Instead, the game will upload your creatures and to a huge server database and in turn, download and automatically populate your would with other player’s lifeforms. It’s a smarter system then just that though. It will make sure to populate your world with creatures of the same ecosystem brain level.. if that made any sense.Easier said, say if your world needs a flying creature, it will search the master server for a lifeform on the same or near same intellect level as your budding lifeform and bam, your world is complete (thank you Gamespot for that example).
As I said earlier, with enough time spent, you will evolve. It’s not completely clear how this is done other than a points system will be used. With enough points gained, you will be able to “buy” new legs to run faster or fiercer body parts to attack larger creatures. Over time and after saving a hefty chuck of points, you will have accumulated enough to upgrade your brain. By doing this you can begin a whole new mode of the game where you take control of a tribe of your creatures rather than just the one. It’s refered to as tribe mode but it’s more or less like a non-singular version of the sims, if anything. It will first appear to be a small camp set up with eventual upgrades for their huts or the tools they can use, with better tools for each upgraded hut. By using the tools and objects you provide for them, you can advance them further and grow their tribe even larger.
In time your tribe will evolve into a full city where you can go on to build roads and form a functional town. This is most closely resembled to SimCity. There is also a custom build mode for the buildings that’s pretty advanced yet simple enough for the average user to just pick up and create. Through continuous building of multiple cities, you soon gain the ability to visit other cities with vehicles or flying ships. This is where the game quickly becomes a game of civilization where each cities could grow and combine, or on the other hand, attack each other for dominance. From what we were shown, it looks like most the civilizations really don’t like outsiders..
Just when you think this game has gone an incredible distance, the view pans back a bit and begins to show a whole world beyond just a small piece of land with interaction happening all over it. This showed the level of complete domination could be accomplished. After so much evolution, your civilization will be able to build their own UFO or spacecraft. This is where the game goes far beyond anything sim games have before. You’ll now have the ability to visit other worldly planets, terraform them to build colonies, or go even further and use an ability called genesis and create a liveable atmosphere. From there, the galaxy is your playground. I’ll leave it to the pictures to speak for themselves but it’s nothing short than amazing.For the full 35 minute video with narration from Will Wright himself, please visit google video by clicking here, or copy and paste this link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330420559198&q=spore
 
 
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