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Will Wright on the Colbert Report 100

Posted by Zonk from the behind-the-eagle dept.
N'Gai Croal, the talented gent covering the games scene at Newsweek, has a short piece up looking behind the scenes at the Colbert Report the night that Will Wright was in attendance. Mr. Wright passed on some encouraging words about the progress of Spore, and some funny comments about the culture inside EA. From the article: "Wright told us that Spore is slated to come out sometime during the second half of 2007. It's currently at a stage that he calls Pre-Alpha Five. In non-geek, this means that the game is finally at a point where EA employees outside of his team can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned. The project's subsequent milestones--Pre-Alpha Four, Pre-Alpha Three, etc.--are expected to be achieved monthly until it finally hits Alpha next spring. " Update: 12/06 00:23 GMT by Z : Don't blame me, Comedy Central. I got the YouTube link from KingJoshi.
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Will Wright on the Colbert Report More

Will Wright on the Colbert Report

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  • I got a nerdrection. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @06:43PM (#17120854)
    It never went away.

  • Alpha countdown (Score:5, Funny)

    by Osty ( 16825 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @06:50PM (#17120970)

    The implication is that Spore will ship when it hits Alpha. I guess that's standard practice at EA ...

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Dues ( 786223 )
      That is certainly what happened with Ultima 9. I see no reasy why Spore's release should be any different.
    • EA is better than that, you need to give them some credit. They'll at least wait until it is in Beta before releasing it to the public. That way, they have enough 'good' footage and screenshots to entice people to buy it, who then get to suffer the wrath of a thousand patches...

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by illeism ( 953119 )
        EA releases patches?!
        • Just ask anyone who plays Battlefield 2 / 2142. They release a massive patch, and then there's usually a hotfix for the patch a couple days later. The patch will always nerf something else, which will be fixed in the next major patch, which will require another hotfix.

          Even after all the patching, some of the net code and connection problems in the Battlefield series are just unbearable. People are still having a CTD (crash to desktop) problem on random occasion too.
        • Yeah, the patch for Madden 2006 was Madden 2007, the next patch will be only around a year later.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Bonker ( 243350 )
      Mod Parent up as 'Informative', please.

      Teaming up with EA was the worst thing that ever happened to Maxis.

      SimCity 2000 was so polished and bug-free. SimCity 3 and 4 are... well... painful to run.

      My wife is a diehard 'The Sims' addict. She can go on and on about bugs in 'The Sims 2' that make me scratch my head... and I play MMOs and am used to longstanding bugs.

      I just got done reinstalling her system so that she would have more room to download player-developed content. Oh, she had a 70gb hard drive I bough

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by spyrochaete ( 707033 )
        I bought SimCity 4 from Walmart not long ago. I installed it and it wouldn't run. I went to download the latest patch and put up with the ordeal of having to register an account to do so. The patch didn't help. Emailed EA support but never heard back. Emailed a second time, nada. The next week I recieved an email from EA asking me to rate my tech support experience. I had choice words.
      • Personally, I like the fact that the new Sims for the Wii is unlike the other versions (I have most of the expansions for Sims 2 and three console versions). Also, you can get Sims 2: Pets for the Gamecube, which will run on your Wii as well.

        But I'm specifically waiting for the release of Spore for the Wii, as it will have most of the bugs fixed by then.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by chrish ( 4714 )
        She wanted to breed virtual dogs...

        That's funny, because most /. posters breed virtual girls!

        *rimshot*
    • Ah... that means we now have the source of the quote
      It compiles! Ship it.

      It was clearly an EA exec.

  • N'GAI CROAL??? (Score:4, Funny)

    by gumpish ( 682245 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @06:58PM (#17121090) Journal
    N'Gai Croal
    I'm sorry... is this a hoax? Is this Klingon or some shit? Is that really the name of an English speaker?

  • Tek Jansen (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Beek Dog ( 610072 )
    I was hoping for an announcement of the Tek Jansen video game. As long as we don't have to do the shuttle landing part.

    From the theme song: "Loving the aliens... Killing the aliens... Sometimes loving then killing the aliens."

    • I think Will Wright handled the interview well. He showed that he had a good wit, but still kept on message in promoting his games and didn't wander into irrelevant or boring tangents. Interestingly, he wasn't afraid to commit to the "wrong" answer of Cobert's loaded questions.

  • Sporekatana (Score:5, Funny)

    by Reason58 ( 775044 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @07:34PM (#17121538)
    Will Wright's About To Make You His Bitch.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by CamD ( 964822 )
      Haha...Dang, I just lost my 1 remaining mod point.

      With this game being pushed out so far (despite looking playable for quite some time) I wonder if it'll end up being received like Daikatana, or as another poster said, that it will be nothing special by the time it releases.

  • Colbert = Coles Notes (Score:3, Insightful)

    by spyrochaete ( 707033 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @08:02PM (#17121900) Homepage Journal
    I watched this interview last night just because it was Will Wright. So many interesting topics were alluded to and touched upon but nothing was explored in sufficient detail. Wright is a brilliant man and a fantastic speaker, but like all of Colbert's guests he was not given enough time or flexibility to speak his mind. Having seen Wright interviews elsewhere this really frustrated me.

    Will Wright is a man who speaks best without an interviewer. I look forward to the next opportunity to see him give a lecture.
    • Yes, unfortunately Colbert often quashes what could be interesting points in his interviews with his shtick. It's a shame, as I really like his angle and wit, but often he forces the satire just a little too much in the interview portion of the show. His fake interviews back when he was on the Daily Show were some of the best, but he hasn't yet grown into the live interview role it seems. Perhaps he will mellow into it more with time.

      • Let's Be Honest... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by HeavenlyBankAcct ( 1024233 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @08:38PM (#17122308)
        Will Wright is far from being the type of guest I would expect to see on Colbert's show anyway. Colbert's interviews ARE mostly vehicles for Stephen to deliver his patented deadpan and that's why having guests from the political world seems to be a far more comfortable fit -- it was somewhat uncomfortable to watch Colbert attempt to shoehorn his "overwrought conservative" persona into an interview with a fellow who was obviously not on board to promote any sort of political agenda whatsoever.

        This, to me, was a case of "bad booking" at its finest. I would've loved to have seen Will Wright on the Daily Show, but the Colbert Report has always seemed at its best when it's 'guests' are little more than targets for the host's witticisms. Actual informative interview content has never been a strong point of the series.
        • Thank you for putting into words what I could not. The whole time I watched it I felt like there was a lot of unnecessary tension there. Colbert being a geek and all, should have at the least paid the man the respect he has EARNED. Colbert frequently pays homage to geeky things and so it was kind of offputting to watch Will Wright who is a geek celebrity, get mocked in an unintelligent fashion by Colbert who I'm willing to bet is dying to play Spore as badly as the rest of us.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by guyjr ( 180613 )
            You know, I kept hearing that Colbert was a nerd / geek / whatever before watching the interview, and now I gotta question where people got that impression from? He clearly didn't know much about the games he was referring to, or maybe he was just playing dumb... if so, it was stupid, well beneath his level with many of his other guests. Will definitely got MUCH more speaking time than the typical Colbert guest, which is what leads me to believe Steve was simply not able to keep up with Wright at all - and

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by jellie ( 949898 )
              Colbert is a huge nerd/geek/whatever. When he was younger, he played Dungeons & Dragons and read some J.R.R. Tolkien books. When Viggo Mortenson went on the Daily Show a while back, Jon Stewart played an audio tape of Colbert reciting (from memory, I believe) Aragorn's history.

              I'm pretty sure Colbert knows about games in general, if not The Sims and Spore specifically. On the show, he pretends to be an arrogant, condescending jerk - being a technical, geeky person would not really fit that role.
        • Colbert really tantalized with his theological questions, though. An amazing if unlikely interview was at the tip of Colbert's tongue the whole time.

  • pre alpha is playable? (Score:4, Informative)

    by skam240 ( 789197 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @09:27PM (#17122844)
    " It's currently at a stage that he calls Pre-Alpha Five. In non-geek, this means that the game is finally at a point where EA employees outside of his team can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned."

    now it's been a little while but back when i worked for ubisoft, pre alpha deffinitly did not mean you could play it from beginning to end. pre alpha meant you could play certain small portions of the game at certain times. game testers barely saw the game at all at this point because there wasnt anything for them to work with. what he's talking about makes the game seem like it's almost ready for beta (the stage after alpha but before they start producing release canidates).

    anybody else out there in the game industry? am i out of date with current terminology, are these terms highly relative to the company one works for (i know they are somewhat but this seems to be a bit much), or is something odd going on here?
    • It means execs/marketing/packaging/etc can take a look at most of the game (bugs & all) and have a reasonable idea of what it will look like and how the major features will work. That way the non-development stuff can really start kicking into gear (not that planning & stuff would have already happened). Testing has assuredly already started, albiet with a smaller more focused QA team, generally in house with the studio as opposed to the bigger "general QA" teams.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by skam240 ( 789197 )
        while the pre alphas typicaly had game play featuring all of the game's major features for review purposes, it certainly wasnt "most of the game", over at ubisoft. I spent some time as a QA lead over at Ubi and every developer i worked with at this stage explicitly stated that they did not want QA feedback on the game yet because most of the game didnt work and they already knew that. At this point it would be just me (with my assistant depending on how 'big' the game was) writing my test plan.
        • It probably means the same thing here as well. But its still "done enough" to let people have an idea of what the final product will be. At this stage if you can't get an idea of how the product will behave end-to-end then you're in deep shit. You don't even have to have final art, or things like all the bells and whistles on the graphics, but you need to have all the gameplay elements finished to let everyone know what they can begin focusing on for the marketing campaigns and whatnot. You are right th

    • Heh. I'm with you (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Wednesday December 06, 2006 @05:53AM (#17126368) Journal
      now it's been a little while but back when i worked for ubisoft, pre alpha deffinitly did not mean you could play it from beginning to end.


      Heh. I'm with you. Now I don't know what it's called internally at the various publishers, "EA employees outside of his team can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned" already sounds better than what others call a release. In fact, for some it's where you get after 3 patches... if you're lucky.

      Take, say, Jowood for example. If "play from beginning to end" is a condition for "pre-alpha", then all their games aren't even pre-alpha as released. Unless you play them in half hour increments, because that's about how long it takes them to CTD. (OK, ok, so it's not a hard number. If you have 2GB RAM you can actually play some for 2-3 hours until the memory leak kills them. 'Course, the last half of that time they're swapping, so they "run" like a snail on sandpaper.)

      Or looking at some of the patch logs, e.g., "family tree dissappeared when the first generation of player chars died out" or "in singleplayer mode the game could freeze between 1432 and 1440" in The Guild 2, as well as the other 30+ _major_ bugs listed in there... I honestly can't imagine that someone at Jowood actually played (or could play) that game from beginning to end. I mean, fuck, 1432 is literally after 8 game turns, and the death of the first generation of characters could be even earlier than that. And let me also say that if that doesn't kill your game by then, the pathfinding has already flown off the hook by that time too. It can't deal well with city growth. Or a few other issues will kill it. Count 'em and weep: 8 turns tops before the game flies off the hook.

      Or take such massive fuck-ups as, say, AO at launch. Read the review on Something Awful, if you're curious, and I can vouch that all the issues described there were 100% accurate. Those swirling doors and enemies attacking through walls still bring back bad memories. In fact, SA goes pretty easy on them. There were a ton of other issues that they don't even mention there. You could run on flat ground on the street and then the game would glitch and you'd find yourself falling from stratosphere for no obvious reason. Characters would occasionally fall into the floor and start swimming in the floor. Mission instances (the non-city ones a little later) were often generated in such ways where you couldn't even get through one without falling in some hole in the ground and having no way out. Enemies' melee attacks had the same range as a sniper rifle. "Stealth" missions required you to kill everyone in the building to get the badge. Balance was a _sick_ joke: not only whole classes were useless, but a whole _faction_ in the game didn't even have shops above newbie level. Etc.

      Or the German version of Victoria. Oeer. Now that was a new low. It threw a script syntax error when you tried to start the campaign. Not something blamable on the gamer's computer, or drivers, or whatever. Literally, one of the main scripts had a typo. That game couldn't run as released on _any_ computer. Forget playing from beginning to end. You couldn't even _start_ the game. It's that sad, folks. We all occasionally joke about games being shipped when they can display the main menu, but that game was the literal case of it. I can't imagine it being tested more than that, because as shipped it _couldn't_ get past the main menu.

      Etc.

      So, heh... "can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned" is pre-alpha? Heh. Oh what I wouldn't give to only endure "rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned" in most games released nowadays.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shplorb ( 24647 )
      At the places I've worked, Alpha is considered to be "feature complete", in that all of the code features have been laid down and work then progresses on filling out the content side whilst the code is fixed up and made more stable.

      When content is all done, it's Beta and work progresses on ironing out all the bugs and tuning the play and content to get it ready for submission.

      Submissions are called release candidates and when one passes submission it becomes gold master and is released to manufacturing.
    • anybody else out there in the game industry? am i out of date with current terminology, are these terms highly relative to the company one works for (i know they are somewhat but this seems to be a bit much), or is something odd going on here?

      There is not and has never been an industry standard terminology for development stages. Many companies use a similar terminology of alpha/beta but exactly what degree of functionality or what stage of development these imply varies wildly. So I say just take what Wi

  • Greek Alphabet (Score:3, Informative)

    by balthan ( 130165 ) on Wednesday December 06, 2006 @05:39AM (#17126302)
    Someone should really let programmers know there are more than two letters in the greek alphabet.

    Pre-Alpha Five, indeed.

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