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?

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.

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: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: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.