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.'"

Re:Underwhelmed!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Call Me Cynical

[Squiffy]

Call me cynical, but the wider the audience is, the dumber the game will be.

Delays are not always bad.

[Devir]

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.

Talk about not knowing your market

[SmallFurryCreature]

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?