Will Wright's Next Game: Spore

1up.com has a look at Will Wright's newest game, revealed today at the Game Developer's conference. Entitled Spore, the game promises to be (in a word) unique. From the article: "Wright's latest creation spans the rise of a space-faring civilization from its humble beginnings in the primordial soup. 'It's actually a lot like WarioWare...It features a wide variety of game types as a sort of homage to my favorite games.'" PC Magazine has details as well, as does Gamasutra.

Dangerous Ground

[MagicDude]

It's a dangerous gambit making a game like was described. Not that it's not intreaguing and has great potential, but rather it will be far to easy for this game to come short in it's attempt to appeal to all people. All the phases of the game have all been successful games in their own right: a diablo style kill-spree type game, a civilation style game, a space-colonization game, etc. I fear that they're going to have to cheap out on all these "mini" games because it's simply not possible to develop 6 good games in the development schedule that'll be given for one game, unless of course it becomes the next DNF. Thus it will be a crappy pac-man game strung to a crappy diablo game strung to a crappy civ game strung to a crappy sim city game, and so on.

Look of the game at GDC + legal shuts it down

[projection]

No screen shots (sorry!)

Game had a toon feel to it, but not completely toon rendered - sort of a mix.

Seemless, though slow in places, with Wright interacting with the character as he talked. From this, think it was playing in real time, and hence a fairly polished pre-alpha.

Presentation was at 10:30. At 12pm, it was due to be reshown at a theater open to Expo attendees. This was CANCELLED at the last minute, after some people had been packed in for half an hour. An official stood up and said it had been pulled, as EA said it contained confidential info. Kinda dumb, as 90 minutes before they'd shown it in a room with at least 500 people, cameras flashing all the time!!

Unique, but not 100% alien

[PhoenixOne]

Excuse the type, I'm using a tablet.

Will Wright said it was like WarioWare, but that was a huge stretch (even for him). It is like WW only in the fact that it is made up of lots of game types. Most of those game types have been done before (RTS, God Games, Risk, etc.) but never combined like this before.

The Spore design doc was in Wired last year

[SimHacker]

No screen shots, but the a diagram showing the design for Spore was published in Wired Magazine more than a year ago.

Wired asked Will for an illustration to print in the magazine, anything he wanted. So he made a diagram of Spore [donhopkins.com] that Wired published, but he didn't tell them what it was. The design docs for Spore have been out in Wired Magazine for a year now. (It's in the Feb 2004 issue of Wired.)

-Don

My Impressions

[Slyght]

I was in attendance at the talk, and boy was it good. Jon Hopkins did a very good job above taking notes on both the demo and Will's slides and lecture. OK, so here are some answers to some questions that have come up in the previous comments:

- Will didn't just talk about it, he gave a 45-minute in-game live demo of all aspects of the game, from bacteria to galactic god.

- Although I'm sure Will had practiced what he was going to demonstrate to us at the talk, there were times when things didn't go perfectly (example: he was trying to get ships from his town to attack a neighboring city's tanks, and they didn't attack and flew right by), and Will's an honest guy, so I'm pretty sure he really was playing it live and it they weren't playing any tricks on us like the HL2 E3 2003 demo.

- The game has a nice visual feel to it, but the graphics were about as revolutionary as the graphics in Sims 2 are. People aren't drooling over the graphics, but the gameplay. That's key.

- Will isn't introducing any revolutionary type of gameplay with Spore. Instead he's trying to take the best 10%-20% of exisiting genres/toys/games that he likes, including previous Maxis titles, and successfully combine them into one game. He said that it's a rule not to combine genres, and he wants to break that rule. I guess what's revolutionary is that it looks like he's going to make it work.

Wait till E3, where EA will finally let Will go more public with details. I'm sure that Spore will be winning a lot of "Best of Show" awards come May. Until then, trust us :)

Will Wright Spore interview (2002)

[praxis22]

This lenghty and complicated interview with Will Wright actually contains many of the memes of spore: http://www.gamestudies.org/0102/pearce/ Interesting reading for those so inclined.