Spore Editor Available June 17th 119
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.'"
Re:money off the full game? (Score:5, Informative)
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... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Vaporware? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hmm, let me guess... (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sounds like a great deal to me, personally (Score:1, Informative)