What mods make Oblivion better? I actually liked Vanilla okay, but that's because I played a dumb fucking Nord that smashed people in the face.
I got OOO downloaded, it looks like it does a lot. Can I play a caster or sneaky-type well with just that?
OOO being good is a huge matter of taste.
For every good thing it does (like adding new weapons and limiting the levelled equipment for some enemies), it does another retarded thing to balance it out. Like making the traditional first dungeon a freaking deathtrap for new characters, and adding new NPC's and monsters that are quite literally almost unkillable no matter what level you are.
Fortunately, it's modular so you can take some things and leave others out, but if you want the new weapon meches without running the risk of being ambushed by a squad of retardedly powerful uber amazons with equally uber gear, you're out of luck.
If you have the balls for it, trying to Install FCOM is insane. And Insanely awesome. It took me about 3 days to install it all, and now my Oblivion folder is over 10gigs in size.
Also, OOO fucked with the first dungeon outside the sewers because they wanted to test it. So in beta, they would make a character or something, an entirely new save, fly thru the entire demo dungeon, and then test out OOO in the bandit/undead dungeon.
PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
edited February 2008
ok so now I actually really want spore and it is probably maybe coming out soon
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
edited February 2008
god, this interview is amazing
I get shivers when I get to peek inside wright's brain like this
what an amazing way of approaching the problem, he basically built in facebook, flickr and tons of other social networking metaphors and functions into the game to create ease of use
brilliant
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
edited February 2008
oh, shit
brian eno is the dude that worked with them to get the procedurally generated music working right
Rank, every single fucking thing about this game sounds awesome.
There is so going to be an SE group for the pollinated content, and it will consist of nothing but ORKS ORKS ORKS
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Ubikoh pete, that's later. maybe we'll be dead by thenRegistered Userregular
edited February 2008
I was kinda skeptical about that massively single player stuff but it sounds really cool
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
edited February 2008
the full interview
part 1
In 2005, we first sat down with Maxis chief designer Will Wright--creator of SimCity and The Sims--to discuss his evolutionary epic Spore. Shortly thereafter, we said of the game in the pages of NEWSWEEK, "Non-gamers often ask when videogames are finally going to get their 'Citizen Kane.' But when Spore ships sometime next year, this infant medium might receive its Torah, its 'Origin of Species' and its '2001: A Space Odyssey' all rolled into one." Ignore the somewhat breathless prose and reflect for a moment upon the game's original ship date: sometime in 2006. But when we consider the scope of the gameplay (it's Pac-Man at the bottom of the evolutionary food chain, and "Star Trek" at the top); the magnitude of its technical ambition (large slices of Spore are procedurally generated, from the creatures animations to the musical score); and the challenge of designing a simple-yet-flexible interface to control it all (Facebook, Flickr and YouTube are among its influences), we're loath to begrudge Wright and his team at Maxis the time they needed to get it just right. You'll feel the same way after you read our world exclusive interview with Will Wright. We caught up with him last week via phone, a couple of days before he and his corporate overlords at Electronic Arts settled on the date of September 7th, 2008 to release the PC, Mac, DS and mobile phone versions of Spore. Even though we only spoke for just under 40 minutes, Wright dropped so much science that we had to break the Q&A into two parts, both of which will run today. In Part I, Wright explains in greater detail why the game has taken so much longer than he originally anticipated; how his team hit on social networking as the metaphor for navigating the vast amount of user generated content that Spore will almost certainly inspire; and whether there was any pressure from EA execs to ship the game before its time. Read on.
When we first met in your office to talk seriously about this game it was some time in 2005. It's now 2008, and you guys are finally set to announce a release date. What happened? What's been taking so long in making this game?
Oh gosh. It was so many challenges to overcome. A lot of them initially were technical challenges: procedural animation; can we do these levels of detail enough to have zoom on the models; etc. Once we nailed most of those, it became a very large design challenge. And probably the biggest design challenge was keeping it very accessible to players so that every bit of the game was intuitive, easy and approachable. At the same time, we were going to mix all these genres, so we wanted to have one kind of control scheme, camera scheme, feedback system, rewards, across these different game genres. That probably overall was the biggest challenge, I think.
We've had all the game levels up and running for quite a while now. Initially it felt like five different games kind of stuck together. We basically did pass after pass, bringing these things into alignment, kind of like aligning the Intercontinental railway, digging into the rails with a sledgehammer, slowly getting closer and closer and closer until pretty soon it's a seamless fit across the rail. At the tide pool level, the gameplay is 2-D, then the game moves into areas where the gameplay is 3-D. Maybe that's a bit easier transition to make with a mouse and keyboard than with a console controller, but can you talk about some of the things that you did to overcome the difficulty of creating a unified control system that could easily transition the player from stage to stage?
Well, part of it is we wanted stuff that players learn in one stage to basically be their early tutorial for the next stage. Even when you're in the 2-D cell stage, the way you learn to move and make your cell do things mirrors the next phase of the game where you're actually in 3-D. So the controls, we'll have them mapped that way. The editors--the same concepts that we use in the 3-D creature editor are still represented in the cell editor, but just in two dimensions. It's the same language that the player learns for how to manipulate things.
Also, there are some kind of broad concepts that go across the whole game that came in fairly late, after we got a sense of the entire thing, having to do with how we show your pollinated content. Every time you make something in the game you get a card; it gets pollinated to our servers so that we can get it to other players. We had to give players kind of a way of understanding that system. That at any time in the game they can hit a button, bring up their browser and browse the entire universe of content. They can look at what their friends have made; they can subscribe to Sporecasts, they can make buddy lists; they can tag content. We took a lot of the dynamics we saw going on the Web--especially social networking sites--and tried use that language to convey to the players how this all works.
What is "pollinated content"?
Whenever you make something in the game, a very compressed representation gets sent to our servers. As you play the game our servers are continually sending you new content for your world to fill out your ecosystem; your galaxy; opponents; cities; vehicles; whatever-it's being drawn from our database of content that other players have made.
Now, it's also trying to pick stuff that's appropriate for your game level. You don't want kick-ass creatures killing you right at the very beginning of the creature game. But the player also has a lot of control over that stuff. I can make a buddy list, and it will try to put my buddy's content in my universe at a higher priority. I can subscribe to Sporecasts, which are aggregations of content that players have decided to basically organize themselves. Also, when I get a card for a piece of content--whether it be mine or somebody else's--at any time I can open that card and leave a comment on the card, and the person who made that content will get the comment. It's like a guest book for every card. So the idea is that there's going to be a running community discussion group based around the content where every piece of content is its own thread discussion. Then we add things like Flickr tagging of content and stuff like that so that people can search what is probably going to be a very large database of content.
We've put a lot of functions in because this is unknown territory for a game, this type of sharing of content. Yet looking at The Sims, that was the thing you know people enjoyed almost as much as the game itself--sitting there playing, organizing, collecting the stuff that other players were making for the game. For them, that actually became a good bit of the gameplay of the Sims: people aggregating, collecting, browsing, and then using that content for things like storytelling.
It's always fascinating talking to you about Spore, but hearing you say this now, the scope of what you're doing along multiple axes seems even greater than it did originally. There are multiple game types. There's procedurally generated content. In 2005, you were already talking about the idea of a massively single-player game. But it seems like at some point in the process, you guys ended up building a Sporebook or MySpore into the game--which is another axis of complication for you as the developers--in order to simplify Spore for the players.
Yeah, that was pretty much it. In some sense we were pushing in three dimensions at once, and with each one trying to kind of push the boundary out farther than it had been pushed [previously], so we ended up hitting a lot of very unexplored territory. But even though it is unexplored, you want it to make sense to the player. You don't want to come up to a player, and say, "Here's some brand new thing you've never heard of. Let us explain it to you".
What you want to do is find some metaphor for the players to wrap their minds around it right off the bat. That's where looking at things like social networking sites became a really good model, a communication tool for us to make it really clear to a player what a Sporecast was, or what a buddy list was, or what tagging of content was. These are terms that a lot of our players will already understand in different kind of arenas. It's just hasn't really been applied to games before.
Even though you're not working day to day on the Sims anymore, it seems like this could be extremely applicable to Sims 3 whenever that might come out.
Yeah, this happens with all of our games. A lot of what The Sims expansion packs became was based upon us watching what people did with The Sims 1. A lot of what The Sims 2 became was based on what we saw people doing with the Sims 1. A lot of what the Sims 1 became, was based on what people were doing with the Sims City.
Every game is a learning experience you build upon. At some point you could have build something that seems to be in the right area then you give it to the players, they do something really remarkable with it, and it opens new vistas that you want to explore the next time around. It's almost this back and forth ping pong where we jump in this new space, explore it as thoroughly as we can, then we can use players, and the players transform it, and decorate it into something remarkable, which clearly shows us the next door to go through.
At what point in the process did you guys hit on the social networking metaphor as the way to approach the pollinated content part of the game?
I think a lot of that has to do with Caryl Shaw and her team. She's running the content pollination team. We actually first started looking at things like collaborative filtering on sites like Amazon, in terms of "How can we organize this content, and sort it, and find content that would be relevant or interesting to you?"
At the simplest level, when a piece of content comes in we actually do a feature analysis of the content. For instance, if I took a City Hall from my city, it can look at other content that thematically matches that City Hall, and suggest that to me. "Oh, maybe you'd like to buy these buildings because they kind of match the City Hall We've seen other players connect these buildings to that style of City Hall." At the first level, we had the computer trying to do an aesthetic categorization of these things. So right off the bat we were looking at things like Amazon's collaborative filtering; or any site that's dealing with a lot of content. Then we started looking at other things like Flickr tagging. When you're dealing with user generated content, there's been a lot of exploration in different formats on the Web already, and so the mechanisms, the way people think about that is somewhat familiar.
That's happened throughout most of our games. You know SimCity if you look at the very first SimCity the rough metaphor was a paint program. There was a palette of tools on the side, and you had this landscape as a canvas that you were painting on, so in some sense you know SimCity was already taking a metaphor from the very early paint programs. The players could come up to it and say, "Oh, I see it's like MacPaint."
How did you harmonize the different metaphors for each of the five stages of existence--tide pool, creature, city, etc.--which each have not only their own gameplay, but their own interface metaphors?How do you harmonize those, both in terms of the controls and the player experience?
We wanted to bring those metaphors as much into alignment as possible. There was always this dramatic tension between, say, this level wanting a particular set of controls, but that was inconsistent with the next level or the previous level. That probably remains the biggest design challenge: how do we make these levels work well with a fairly consistent control scheme across all of them? And it's not just the control scheme itself. It's also things like the feedback; how we present goal structures; how do you know something good has happened or bad; or what do you do to get to the next level?
It was a process of occasionally--all the levels would kind of go their independent ways, and then about once a month we would pull them all back towards some central portion; we'd figure out what the underlying spine is. Then they'd go off in own directions again, and then we'd pull them back. Eventually the shape of what that central spine is--it was being pulled back and forth and in all these other directions by each level--and in some sense I would say these levels were voting on you know what they wanted for camera control, for showing goal states, feedback, stuff like that. In a design sense, it was a kind of a Darwinian process; almost democratic that these levels kind of voting what the overall metaphor would be. But it was very much a process of iteration. It wasn't sit down, figure it all out at the beginning and then go do it. It was turn that crank painfully once a month, about twenty of thirty times.
This gets back to what we were saying about the length of development. From the beginning it sounded like an incredible game. It's sounding even better now, but you have EA on the corporate side, which is trying to make its projections and figure out when the game is going to ship? What kind of pressure were you under you know--whether it was self-imposed or externally--to provide visibility to the executives, when given the process you've described, the only way to unlock the great game that hopefully is inside your vision is through this process of iteration, which simply takes time?
Interestingly enough, on this project probably more than any other, the executive management at EA has always been on the side of "Get it right." Whenever we were basically saying, "Okay, we're not going to ship it this Christmas the way we thought," it was always, "Okay, but just get right. Get it right."
If anything, I think the team itself has felt more internal pressure to ship it sooner, but at the same time, as we get closer and closer, it's like "Oh, there's these last few things that'll just make it perfect," and "Oh, we've got to get this in." Things become visible to you toward the end of the process. Design opportunities that weren't obvious before, and so they weren't part of your schedule, but then you uncover these possibilities, and it's like, "Oh God, I don't want to leave that on the table. It would be so painful to do that." So that's probably the overall reason why the game is taking so long.
As we started digging into the pollination and how to communicate that to the player, I don't think originally we were expecting it to be such an ambitious undertaking. But as we started going down the path, and realizing all the things the players would want to do, and then we wanted to make those things easy and obvious, it expanded our design aspirations in that area, and as a result, it's going to come out in the state that feels like we you know thoroughly explored the design possibility space, and found the local maxima in there as opposed to just dropping in there and got the first thing we could build that was stable.
Right.
If you do it right this is--we've seen this with SimCity and The Sims these kinds of games: if you go in there and just thoroughly explore the design space, I mean almost to an obsessive degree, you don't have to worry about anybody else competing with you. [Laughs.] It's such a painstaking process. I'm still to this day surprised that we don't have a really reasonable competitor for the Sims. But I think it's for the same reason. Wow, that's an interesting way of looking at it. So at what point would you say that things were truly starting to come together to the point like where you could say, "All right, I've had this vision in my head--me and the team we've had a vision in our heads--and it's starting to feel right, like the end is in sight." When did you guys hit that point?
Certain features and certain levels, they were starting to have a certain amount of finish. I'd say we put a big effort on the space level around the end of the last year, in terms of getting some of the rough metagames playable and tuning and all the features in. I think the Creature and Space stages were the first two levels where I really started feeling that, to a point where I'd say, "I can't wait until Civ feels this good or Tribes feels this good. They kind of set the bar for some of the other levels and they kept making progress too. So I'd say it was on a level by level basis. A lot of it was pacing too. We started to do a lot of focus group testing around the end of last year with a wide range of players: a lot of them very casual players that hardly play games at all, to get a sense of how accessible it was. And we discovered some interesting things. It caused us to kind of go back, and rework the design a bit.
For instance, one of the things that we changed late last year was....We noticed universally when people were able to just drop into any editor that they wanted to and play around with it--that was a much more entertaining experience for them to start understanding what the gameplay was. The gameplay made a lot more sense to them after spending time in the editor designing something. Originally we were going to force the players to start at Cell and play their way up through every level, but we decided that we wanted to make it feel more like a toy box of the universe. So we let players drop into any level they want to, right off the bat. We have an entry path for every level, straight off the bat, where you grab somebody else's pollinated content as your starting point if you didn't play Creature for instance. We found the players enjoyed browsing the levels lightly at the beginning, and trying a little bit at each level, then they would generally go back, start a full game from the Cell level, and play the whole thing straight through. It's interesting that you mention that, because the most recent Vs. Mode I did on Level Up with Stephen Totilo from MTV was on Burnout Paradise. Obviously, you're starting with a completely new IP, whereas Burnout is established so there's already something there for people to either push back against or love. With Burnout, there was a mixed early response first with the demo, and initially to the finished game as well because of its open world, go anywhere, do anything structure as opposed to the previous games, which had a fairly rigid progression of race upon race upon race. In your case, while Spore is not out yet, you have shown the game several times, and the assumption that people had was that there would be a certain set progression. Now that you've done this redesign based on the feedback from a focus group of casual gamers, is there any concern that the core gamer who has played some or all of your previous games, where there is something of a linear progression, is going to feel weirded out or thrown off by Spore because they're feeling like "This isn't game-y enough."
Well, I think this in some instances far more game-y than a lot of the other games I've done. We have very clear goal structures at each level, because we use levels. They're also in some sense difference genres. We naturally are seeing people have their you know favorite level; they really enjoy Civ, but Creatures is a little too laid back for them, or they love Space because it's so elaborate. People are paying for the game. right? I mean, it's their game. They bought it. I don't feel right as a designer locking them out and forcing them to watch my cutscenes, and play this level before they get to that level.
There's a lot of narrative reward in playing through the entire game from start to finish in different ways. There are mechanisms in the game that acknowledge that. But again, I think a lot of players are going to approach this as something between a game and a toy, and I wanted them to be able to just open the box, the toy box, look in at all the toys, say "Ooh," and grab the toy they want. So for a lot of people, that's going in and designing a really cool space ship right off the bat, and then going off, and playing the Space game. For other people, it's going to be grabbing a creature, and making a lot of friends in Creature game. I think I want more of that kind of joy of discovery as opposed to, "Here's an obstacle course. Let's see if you can get through it," because I think that's going to be, at the end of the day, a more accessible experience that serves our franchise the way we're kind of envisioning it. This is really a game about creativity and exploration, more than it is about beating the final boss.
RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
edited February 2008
part 2
Once someone has their initial toy box experience, they then decide, "Okay, I'm going to start at Cell and progress through." How much time did people collectively or individually want to spend in each of the stages before moving onto the next? Especially because like you said, there's an arc of evolution, but at the same time they're separate genres, and as you already said, different people respond to each of genres differently.
One of the things that we also decided not that long ago, based upon a lot of this focus group testing, is that we were actually going to put in difficulty levels in that the player selects, so when you start playing you can start at easy, medium or hard. We found that a lot of players that preferred playing with their toys in the world, where the world was pushing back at them less hard--those were closer to Sims players. Whereas the gamers wanted to go in and really play some hardcore fighting games in Creature or Civ.
We decided that it when you select the planet at the very start of the game, you select a difficulty level, so players can surf that as well. That's going to influence not just difficulty, but also the pacing in some of these games. Some of them are like a lot of RTS games or empire-building games, where you start out very lean on resources and you're digging yourself out of the hole; on the hard setting, it's going to feel a little bit more like that. On easy, I think the pace will go a little bit faster through a level. So it's going to depend primarily on the difficulty level. And once you get to Space, that's the point at which you can sit there and play the thing for 30 hours if you want, and it feels little bit more like an MMO at that point. A Wii version has already been announced. What can you say about what that's going to play like in terms of structure, control, etc.?
I can't say much about it except the fact that the overriding kind of factor in my mind and Lucy [Bradshaw]'s, in terms of looking at what direction that team goes with it, has been to make really good use of the controller. What interests me about the Wii is that in some sense you have a much higher bandwith controller than you have with any other console or even a PC. How do we abstract the maximum Because one of the biggest advantages we have is our procedural animation system, which means that we can have an infinite of variety of animations that we can make the creature do because it's done procedurally. So that's a natural kind of strength of having a higher bandwith input device--it should really feel like I'm puppeteering this creature very directly, as opposed to I'm just indirectly controlling with a few buttons here and there. The rest of the design is totally going to evolve around that.
A lot of the prototyping they've been doing is, "How do we make you feel like you have the most control over this creature, even in a very subtle ways, by moving this controller around?" and then make the gameplay serve that, because I think if I had nothing else, but a really fun creature to drive around the environments, and I felt like I was really controlling in a very expressive way I would have a blast with just that alone. So that's a really good starting point. One thing we talked about in our original interview was that with all of these different areas that you were pushing into, it was almost like Dave in "2001: A Space Odyssey" going out to the furthest reaches of space and time, but coming back, or maybe it's more like Prometheus--
I hope not. [Laughs.]
--discovering these things, and bringing them back. When you have time to look at some of the games that EA currently has in development or has recently released, what are some of the things that you guys have come up with that you think are going to be relevant to your fellow game designers at EA?
I think certainly the way we deal with content is going to be something that could be used in a lot of different ways across gaming. The way that players think about content in the game, because you're already dealing with a trend in gaming of players being given more and more creative control of the game experience, and games also having social currency around the game play experience, either with things like achievement ladders on Xbox Live or fan Web sites or whatever it might be. So I think that's a big part of it. Thinking about other aspects of the game, the creativity tools--a lot of computer intelligence can actually make a player feel more creative, giving them a higher amount of creative leverage in the game. That's something that we found universally appeals to everybody.
You know, I liken it to when I first got my computer way back when, my first Apple II. I'd go out and buy software at the one computer store in New York City, and every piece of software felt like something brand new that I'd never seen before. It was like another magic thing that the computer can do. The first time I saw a spreadsheet it was like that; the first time I saw a 3-D modeling package; the first time I played the Pinball Construction Set--each one of those felt like kind of a minor miracle like, "Oh wow, this magical device can do this thing now." Games used to feel that way. Some of the very first games that I bought--each was basically showing me a trick that I my computer could do that I never imagined it could do. It seems like as games have gotten more mainstream, and more genre-based, it's kind of lost that magic. So now when you see a game, it's like "Okay that's a little bit better first-person shooter than Half-Life," or "That's a little bit better so-and-so than this," and it feels very evolutionary instead of revolutionary.
Recapturing that magic where come up to the computer, and in ten or twenty mouse clicks you've done something that really surprises you, that you didn't think you could do or the computer could do, but really the credit comes back to yourself, that "Wow, I didn't know I was so good at building cities or designing space ships or whatever." In some sense, it's a self esteem generator. You should go up to the computer, and you should walk away thinking, "Wow, I didn't know I was so good at that." Are you guys going to put "It's a Self-Esteem Generator" on the box?
[Laughs.] I don't know if it's so much a marketing slogan, but I think it's a good design philosophy. You want the player to walk away feeling better about themselves then before they walked up to a computer, rather than the other way around. We have the ability to build systems that unlock creative potential within players. It's amazing just with The Sims how many people ended up making these amazingly elaborate machinima movies using The Sims 2. I bet you half them had never picked up a video camera in their life, but they got so good at playing The Sims, and then they started making these wonderful films, and sharing it, and getting feedback. People saying, "Oh, I love your film", and all of a sudden they're like these little independent film makers. And it was only because the computer was encouraging them the whole way; at some point the game went from being an entertainment diversion to a tool and they started seeing it that way. It's like, "Oh, not only have I learned to play this game real well, but in some sense I've learned to play this instrument really well, and other people enjoy looking at the creative output from me playing this instrument." What are the machinima tools like within Spore?
We have that built in throughout the game where you can capture game footage at any time, photos and stuff. In the Creature Creator--this is another thing we went down the path of, "What would we really want to do with this?"--I can design a creature, have them play all these animations, move them around on either a set backdrop or a black screen which is essentially a green screen, so I can actually mix it in with other footage, and composite it. There's also a one-button upload in that moviemaking feature to YouTube. So I can actually make a movie in the game, and with one click of the button upload it onto YouTube. Again, this is where we wanted it to blend from the game world to the world of Web content so that it felt like this game was another creative tool pouring into some of these sites. Plus you can take pictures, email them to your friends, and all that stuff within the game. Going back to what you said about games now feeling evolutionary rather the revolutionary. You've created a game that sounds like it will be revolutionary, but you've built it on top of established genres, and established metaphors, and then tried to weave all of that together into something new. Do you see something ironic in that? Or is there something here that actually ties into what you studied and researched about how the processes of evolution and design work?
It is interesting because as you go through the game you're not just going through different genres, but the genres you're going through are almost in order of historical appearance. So you start with this Pac-Man like thing; then you go into what's more like a third-person shooter; then you go into the the RTS-like stuff; and then you end up in an MMO. So you're kind of recapitulating the development of games is a medium. But in some sense games are built upon predecessors, and they borrow concepts, and metaphors, and control schemes. So that actually served us pretty well. First-person shooters I think were influenced by things like Pac-Man, in terms of how you control your character. The feedback that you got from an RTS was based upon things that you got in the early first-person shooters, etc.
When The Sims first came out one, I was following the Usenet groups. With The Sims the Usenet groups were actually the first to start playing it--the hardcore gamer groups-- and at first you know people were saying, "Ah, it sounds like a stupid game," But a few people were playing the game and coming on and saying, "Oh, I was playing The Sims last night, and I made this guy starve," or "He went into the bathroom, and I locked him in." They would describe these stories as to what happened when they played the game, and every story was completely different. I mean no two were the same it wasn't like, I" saw this cutscene, then I got the sword, then I killed the dragon." And the other people listening to the stories got very intrigued like, "Wow, I didn't know you could do all that stuff. I didn't realize that the breadth of possibilities was that large within the game." So I think that gamers--even non-hardcore gamers--recognize that the more narrative breadth in a game the more interesting it is to them, because the more personal it is to their experience. When we talked about the game back in '05, you spoke about procedurally generated music. Where did that end up?
Well, that was one of the things I was really at the outset very skeptical of because I never really heard any decent procedurally generated music. At some point in the project, though--probably right around then--we hooked up with Brian Eno who ended up working with us on the procedural score. So actually we ended up with over probably--about half of our music is now procedurally generated within the game based upon things you make.
We found it was so fun, we've actually built this little kind of harness where Brian and our sound engineer could play around with the underlying levers on the procedural engine. This is one of those things that became so fun to play with, we decided we had to surface it the player. So in the game right now, when you're designing a city, one of the things that we allow you to do is open this little device and compose your own theme song for your city-- Wow.
--and it's actually using the procedural generator. So I can hit the "roll the dice button," and it generates a new procedural melody with rhythm, or I can actually grab the notes, and if I want to even put in my own tune on the notes. We've basically turned the procedural music generation into its own little toy and embedded that within the game as well. I asked you this back in 2005, and after this interview, I've got to ask it again: this seems like everything is in there. What's left for you to do after this game is done?
[Laughs.] Oh, there are so many ideas and things to do, and so little time. I've never felt I was constrained by lack of ideas, in the least. There are plenty of things I would love to do. You know Spore is--it's one I'd say strong, fanatic, artistic vision, but it would be really depressing if I couldn't think of a game I could do after that. You could say the same thing about The Sims: The Sims is a game about all of life, what could you do beyond. This is just one particular triangulation of the world through a particular set of lenses. There's going to be a lot of learning after Spore. For me, the first half of it is when we ship the game; the second half is when we see what the players do with it. I know that's going to surprise us, and it's going to open up new areas to explore that we didn't even think of right now. So it doesn't feel like your ultimate game. You don't feel like this is your magnum opus, the thing that you were meant to do?
Well, I'd like to think--it feels like something that you know has been latent in me for a long time. I've spent a lot of time, many years, thinking about this; all of the stuff I wanted and the aspirations I had for it. Coming to the end of it, it's feeling really nice to see it all working; the vision really becoming tangible. That doesn't mean that it is the end of my creative aspirations. [Laughs.] I mean at the end of the day it's going be an artifact that our team throws out into the world, and the world takes it, and does stuff with it, it will grow.
I'm really interested in the franchise, because I've always thought about Spore from the very outset not so much as a game, but as a franchise. I don't think I can talk too much about some of the other stuff we're doing around this, but we're looking at doing a lot of stuff way outside the game space, with this kind of franchise theme. Because I really like the idea of conveying science as a toy, or just education as a toy, but I think science especially is really applicable to that process, and I don't think games are the only way to do that. Will, thanks very much for your time--oh, I forgot to ask the last question, the most important question of all. When is it going to ship?
I've been told I can tell you that it's going to ship in September, and then we're going to get you an exact date before your story goes to print. Right now we're hammering out what exact day in September, but I can tell you it's in September. And do you all ready know what you're going to do after you ship the game? I don't mean professionally. It's like what they say to the quarterback, "You've just won the Super Bowl, what are you going to do?" So Will, "You've just shipped Spore, what are you going to do?"
Oh gosh, I don't know. I'll tell you over a beer one day. I've got a lot of ideas I'm kicking around, including other games so…. Excellent. Will, as always, thank you very much for your time, and I can't wait to see the game in person.
Well, thanks. Good talking to you, N'Gai, and good luck with the article.
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
edited February 2008
Interview with Executive Producer Lucy Bradshaw
Not content to simply bring you the news of Spore's release date (September 7th, 2008) or the reasons why the game has taken so long to develop (like numerous Facebook relationships, it's complicated), the staff of Level Up has brought you one more exclusive. When we found out yesterday that the PC edition of Spore would be accompanied by versions for the Nintendo DS, Macintosh computers and mobile phones, we again reached out to Electronic Arts to get the scoop. Maxis vice president and Spore executive producer Lucy Bradshaw was kind enough to promptly answer the questions we sent over via email--thanks!--and the answers demonstrate the amount of care that Maxis has put into trying to make sure that each instance of the game is worthy. Below, Brashaw tells us whether Mac and PC users will be able to share content with one another; which Japanese artistic tradition inspired the look of Spore for DS; and which single stage of the original game has been blown out for mobile phones. Intrigued? Keep reading.
What challenges have there been in developing a Mac version of Spore?
We're working with a company called Transgaming on our Mac version of Spore, and the effort is going very smoothly. When we set out to do this, it was to make sure that we have a simultaneous release on both the PC and Mac; too often our Mac versions ship months behind the PC. Just recently we were able to show the Creature Creator at MacWorld. We really feel that the creative nature of Spore will appeal to the Mac audience so we are excited to bring the game to both platforms. Will Mac and PC users be able to share content with one another?
And, yes, the content that players create on the Mac version can be shared with PC players as well as other Mac players. All of the building blocks that are available in Spore's Creature, Building, Vehicle and Spaceship Creators are the same for both the PC and Mac versions, so we can now populate the galaxies of both Mac and PC players with the content that other players create, which makes exploring your own personal galaxy always unique and surprising. How do the features and gameplay in the Nintendo DS version of Spore differ from those of the PC and Mac versions? Will the DS version have any unique content?
Spore for the Nintendo DS is an entirely unique design. We focused on delivering the core features of Spore: creativity, exploration, sharing and collecting, while taking full advantage the unique aspects of the DS platform such as the stylus and connectivity. The result is a completely specialized version of the creature phase of the game complete with a Nintendo DS unique creature creator that we are calling Spore Creatures. Players will create their own creature in the Creature Creator and then evolve this creature by making friends, defeating enemies and exploring the galaxy on a quest to find new evolutionary paths and save their home world. Along the way, they can record all the species they've encountered using the Spore Species Guide, trade and collect custom created creatures and earn badges for accomplishing a variety of tasks.
We even decided to go with a custom look for Spore Creatures so the content is entirely unique to the DS. Our artistic inspiration came from Japanese flat rod puppets and shadow box art. The look feels great and lends to a more intuitive editing experience allowing for a huge amount of flexibility in the creatures a player can create. The greater simplicity enables the player to focus on the gameplay and their unique creations. We've also made unique abilities for the creatures of Spore Creatures. As you evolve your creation, you'll find special biopowers that can help you fight or socialize in order to succeed on your quest. Will DS users be able to exchange content with each other via local or online Wi-Fi?
As players are creating creatures in their game, they can save their favorites. They can share, trade or simply show off these favorites with friends either locally or over Wi-Fi. If you share a creature with a friend, that creature can show up in your game as well, and they can battle or befriend them much like the PC and Mac game. Once traded, creatures will continue to spread to other players as they connect and trade. What features and gameplay can we expect to see in the mobile phone version of Spore?
Just as Spore Creatures for the Nintendo DS is an offshoot of the creature phase, Spore Mobile revolves around the first phase featured in the PC game: the cell phase. You'll start out in the primordial ooze and work your way up through the food chain as you head for land avoiding predators and adapting to your environment. The mobile game features its own editor where you can customize your creature by adding parts like tails, eyes and mandibles, each with unique abilities that will help you overcome the challenges you'll face. The mobile editor also allows you to alter the size, shape and color of your creation in millions of different ways. Will mobile phone users be able to exchange content with one another?
Yes, users will be able to trade their creations with each other--once you've finished the core game and you've created a creature, you can then take that creature online via a network connection or by trading alphanumeric codes manually. You'll even be able to battle other people's creations via an online Arena accessible from your handset or on the web.
ok, in spite of my naysaying earlier I am getting pretty psyched about this game now
never, ever doubt will wright's ability to obsess over a game until it is a magical sandbox of adventuresome magicalness
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JimothyNot in front of the foxhe's with the owlRegistered Userregular
edited February 2008
That's great that the Mac and PC users draw content from the same pool-- I'm really hoping that somehow it works with the Wii version too. How great would it be to only have to buy one version?
I know it's premature, but I'm already thinking of Sporecasts, aside from the general SE++ one. Like one based on Avatar animals, one based on Animorphs aliens, etc.
Hi, I’m Will Wright and I’m working on a new game called Spore™. You’ve heard of it? Oh, that’s right, you signed up to get the Official Spore Newsletter. According to my notes, we haven’t sent a single newsletter out. Maybe that’s why I’ve been hearing from so many fans wanting some new information on Spore.
While we finish up the game over the next few months, we’ll be sharing more information with you and other fans. As a newsletter subscriber, you’ll be among the first to get new Spore information, screenshots, videos and other cool features from the Spore team. Check out our launch date teaser, and of course you can visit Spore.com for updates anytime.
I'm sure you can imagine Will Wright speaking those words... That's always a plus.
I actually met him once in an LA shopping mall. This was back when Sims 2 just shipped though, so I didn't get to talk much about spore, let along know it was even in the concepts...
I'm pretty sure what they have tried to do with the many delays is:
a) make the gameplay make more sense as a progression and add content (good idea, probably wills)
b)dumb down the game so anyone who understood the sims can play this game (so-so to horrible idea, most likely EA's)
That makes it more viable for a casual game, which I am all about.
c) redo the art style so that it looks 'kooky and cute', automatically turning any creature we will end up creating into a blob with certain unique features and large eyes. (Stupid, Terrible Idea, almost certainly EAs)
from the photos that Rank posted, it looks extremely similar to what I saw last year in the Spore thread and pics.
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
edited February 2008
those might have been pretty old, sam, but as far as I can tell you're still perfectly capable of making monstrosities
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Raneadospolice apologistyou shouldn't have been there, obviouslyRegistered Userregular
edited February 2008
I'll read the words probably tomorrow at the library
I hate not fucking knowing how to do some big, game-changing thing
because all the advisers are dickfaces with no helpful advice
If anything, they should have added like a City Council or something.
"Mayor, we the council members think it's time for some better traffic routes. In 2 months, we'd like to see overall congestion drop from 70% to 50%. If you can make this deadline, we will grant you $10,000 as well as mention [city name] as a great place for any potential investors and companies looking for new locales."
See, now what shit would be helpful. Do these 'missions' and help get your skyscrapers or Hi Tech industry quicker/better. However, it's not like something like this is intrusive. I mean, shit, chances are, you would find this a good idea and want to fix it anyways.
Assuming of course the AI isn't retarded.
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Blake TDo you have enemies then?Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered Userregular
edited February 2008
Was it ever possible to get rid of that alien in Sim City 2000?
Posts
Kzer-Za, Kohr-Ah, or pre-sundered?
Wii Friend Code: 0072 4984 2399 2126
PSN ID : Theidar
Facebook
Behold the annhilation of the extraterrestrial and the rise of the machines.
Hail Satan!
WISHLIST
If you have the balls for it, trying to Install FCOM is insane. And Insanely awesome. It took me about 3 days to install it all, and now my Oblivion folder is over 10gigs in size.
Also, OOO fucked with the first dungeon outside the sewers because they wanted to test it. So in beta, they would make a character or something, an entirely new save, fly thru the entire demo dungeon, and then test out OOO in the bandit/undead dungeon.
Here's FCOM's trailer video.
http://www.stage6.com/user/1erCru/video/1910357/Oblivion-FCOM-Convergence-Official-Trailer
I get shivers when I get to peek inside wright's brain like this
what an amazing way of approaching the problem, he basically built in facebook, flickr and tons of other social networking metaphors and functions into the game to create ease of use
brilliant
brian eno is the dude that worked with them to get the procedurally generated music working right
that's fucking awesome
There is so going to be an SE group for the pollinated content, and it will consist of nothing but dong creatures.
part 1
You'll feel the same way after you read our world exclusive interview with Will Wright. We caught up with him last week via phone, a couple of days before he and his corporate overlords at Electronic Arts settled on the date of September 7th, 2008 to release the PC, Mac, DS and mobile phone versions of Spore. Even though we only spoke for just under 40 minutes, Wright dropped so much science that we had to break the Q&A into two parts, both of which will run today. In Part I, Wright explains in greater detail why the game has taken so much longer than he originally anticipated; how his team hit on social networking as the metaphor for navigating the vast amount of user generated content that Spore will almost certainly inspire; and whether there was any pressure from EA execs to ship the game before its time. Read on.
When we first met in your office to talk seriously about this game it was some time in 2005. It's now 2008, and you guys are finally set to announce a release date. What happened? What's been taking so long in making this game?
Oh gosh. It was so many challenges to overcome. A lot of them initially were technical challenges: procedural animation; can we do these levels of detail enough to have zoom on the models; etc. Once we nailed most of those, it became a very large design challenge. And probably the biggest design challenge was keeping it very accessible to players so that every bit of the game was intuitive, easy and approachable. At the same time, we were going to mix all these genres, so we wanted to have one kind of control scheme, camera scheme, feedback system, rewards, across these different game genres. That probably overall was the biggest challenge, I think.
We've had all the game levels up and running for quite a while now. Initially it felt like five different games kind of stuck together. We basically did pass after pass, bringing these things into alignment, kind of like aligning the Intercontinental railway, digging into the rails with a sledgehammer, slowly getting closer and closer and closer until pretty soon it's a seamless fit across the rail.
At the tide pool level, the gameplay is 2-D, then the game moves into areas where the gameplay is 3-D. Maybe that's a bit easier transition to make with a mouse and keyboard than with a console controller, but can you talk about some of the things that you did to overcome the difficulty of creating a unified control system that could easily transition the player from stage to stage?
Well, part of it is we wanted stuff that players learn in one stage to basically be their early tutorial for the next stage. Even when you're in the 2-D cell stage, the way you learn to move and make your cell do things mirrors the next phase of the game where you're actually in 3-D. So the controls, we'll have them mapped that way. The editors--the same concepts that we use in the 3-D creature editor are still represented in the cell editor, but just in two dimensions. It's the same language that the player learns for how to manipulate things.
Also, there are some kind of broad concepts that go across the whole game that came in fairly late, after we got a sense of the entire thing, having to do with how we show your pollinated content. Every time you make something in the game you get a card; it gets pollinated to our servers so that we can get it to other players. We had to give players kind of a way of understanding that system. That at any time in the game they can hit a button, bring up their browser and browse the entire universe of content. They can look at what their friends have made; they can subscribe to Sporecasts, they can make buddy lists; they can tag content. We took a lot of the dynamics we saw going on the Web--especially social networking sites--and tried use that language to convey to the players how this all works.
What is "pollinated content"?
Whenever you make something in the game, a very compressed representation gets sent to our servers. As you play the game our servers are continually sending you new content for your world to fill out your ecosystem; your galaxy; opponents; cities; vehicles; whatever-it's being drawn from our database of content that other players have made.
Now, it's also trying to pick stuff that's appropriate for your game level. You don't want kick-ass creatures killing you right at the very beginning of the creature game. But the player also has a lot of control over that stuff. I can make a buddy list, and it will try to put my buddy's content in my universe at a higher priority. I can subscribe to Sporecasts, which are aggregations of content that players have decided to basically organize themselves. Also, when I get a card for a piece of content--whether it be mine or somebody else's--at any time I can open that card and leave a comment on the card, and the person who made that content will get the comment. It's like a guest book for every card. So the idea is that there's going to be a running community discussion group based around the content where every piece of content is its own thread discussion. Then we add things like Flickr tagging of content and stuff like that so that people can search what is probably going to be a very large database of content.
We've put a lot of functions in because this is unknown territory for a game, this type of sharing of content. Yet looking at The Sims, that was the thing you know people enjoyed almost as much as the game itself--sitting there playing, organizing, collecting the stuff that other players were making for the game. For them, that actually became a good bit of the gameplay of the Sims: people aggregating, collecting, browsing, and then using that content for things like storytelling.
It's always fascinating talking to you about Spore, but hearing you say this now, the scope of what you're doing along multiple axes seems even greater than it did originally. There are multiple game types. There's procedurally generated content. In 2005, you were already talking about the idea of a massively single-player game. But it seems like at some point in the process, you guys ended up building a Sporebook or MySpore into the game--which is another axis of complication for you as the developers--in order to simplify Spore for the players.
Yeah, that was pretty much it. In some sense we were pushing in three dimensions at once, and with each one trying to kind of push the boundary out farther than it had been pushed [previously], so we ended up hitting a lot of very unexplored territory. But even though it is unexplored, you want it to make sense to the player. You don't want to come up to a player, and say, "Here's some brand new thing you've never heard of. Let us explain it to you".
What you want to do is find some metaphor for the players to wrap their minds around it right off the bat. That's where looking at things like social networking sites became a really good model, a communication tool for us to make it really clear to a player what a Sporecast was, or what a buddy list was, or what tagging of content was. These are terms that a lot of our players will already understand in different kind of arenas. It's just hasn't really been applied to games before.
Even though you're not working day to day on the Sims anymore, it seems like this could be extremely applicable to Sims 3 whenever that might come out.
Yeah, this happens with all of our games. A lot of what The Sims expansion packs became was based upon us watching what people did with The Sims 1. A lot of what The Sims 2 became was based on what we saw people doing with the Sims 1. A lot of what the Sims 1 became, was based on what people were doing with the Sims City.
Every game is a learning experience you build upon. At some point you could have build something that seems to be in the right area then you give it to the players, they do something really remarkable with it, and it opens new vistas that you want to explore the next time around. It's almost this back and forth ping pong where we jump in this new space, explore it as thoroughly as we can, then we can use players, and the players transform it, and decorate it into something remarkable, which clearly shows us the next door to go through.
At what point in the process did you guys hit on the social networking metaphor as the way to approach the pollinated content part of the game?
I think a lot of that has to do with Caryl Shaw and her team. She's running the content pollination team. We actually first started looking at things like collaborative filtering on sites like Amazon, in terms of "How can we organize this content, and sort it, and find content that would be relevant or interesting to you?"
At the simplest level, when a piece of content comes in we actually do a feature analysis of the content. For instance, if I took a City Hall from my city, it can look at other content that thematically matches that City Hall, and suggest that to me. "Oh, maybe you'd like to buy these buildings because they kind of match the City Hall We've seen other players connect these buildings to that style of City Hall." At the first level, we had the computer trying to do an aesthetic categorization of these things. So right off the bat we were looking at things like Amazon's collaborative filtering; or any site that's dealing with a lot of content. Then we started looking at other things like Flickr tagging. When you're dealing with user generated content, there's been a lot of exploration in different formats on the Web already, and so the mechanisms, the way people think about that is somewhat familiar.
That's happened throughout most of our games. You know SimCity if you look at the very first SimCity the rough metaphor was a paint program. There was a palette of tools on the side, and you had this landscape as a canvas that you were painting on, so in some sense you know SimCity was already taking a metaphor from the very early paint programs. The players could come up to it and say, "Oh, I see it's like MacPaint."
How did you harmonize the different metaphors for each of the five stages of existence--tide pool, creature, city, etc.--which each have not only their own gameplay, but their own interface metaphors?How do you harmonize those, both in terms of the controls and the player experience?
We wanted to bring those metaphors as much into alignment as possible. There was always this dramatic tension between, say, this level wanting a particular set of controls, but that was inconsistent with the next level or the previous level. That probably remains the biggest design challenge: how do we make these levels work well with a fairly consistent control scheme across all of them? And it's not just the control scheme itself. It's also things like the feedback; how we present goal structures; how do you know something good has happened or bad; or what do you do to get to the next level?
It was a process of occasionally--all the levels would kind of go their independent ways, and then about once a month we would pull them all back towards some central portion; we'd figure out what the underlying spine is. Then they'd go off in own directions again, and then we'd pull them back. Eventually the shape of what that central spine is--it was being pulled back and forth and in all these other directions by each level--and in some sense I would say these levels were voting on you know what they wanted for camera control, for showing goal states, feedback, stuff like that. In a design sense, it was a kind of a Darwinian process; almost democratic that these levels kind of voting what the overall metaphor would be. But it was very much a process of iteration. It wasn't sit down, figure it all out at the beginning and then go do it. It was turn that crank painfully once a month, about twenty of thirty times.
This gets back to what we were saying about the length of development. From the beginning it sounded like an incredible game. It's sounding even better now, but you have EA on the corporate side, which is trying to make its projections and figure out when the game is going to ship? What kind of pressure were you under you know--whether it was self-imposed or externally--to provide visibility to the executives, when given the process you've described, the only way to unlock the great game that hopefully is inside your vision is through this process of iteration, which simply takes time?
Interestingly enough, on this project probably more than any other, the executive management at EA has always been on the side of "Get it right." Whenever we were basically saying, "Okay, we're not going to ship it this Christmas the way we thought," it was always, "Okay, but just get right. Get it right."
If anything, I think the team itself has felt more internal pressure to ship it sooner, but at the same time, as we get closer and closer, it's like "Oh, there's these last few things that'll just make it perfect," and "Oh, we've got to get this in." Things become visible to you toward the end of the process. Design opportunities that weren't obvious before, and so they weren't part of your schedule, but then you uncover these possibilities, and it's like, "Oh God, I don't want to leave that on the table. It would be so painful to do that." So that's probably the overall reason why the game is taking so long.
As we started digging into the pollination and how to communicate that to the player, I don't think originally we were expecting it to be such an ambitious undertaking. But as we started going down the path, and realizing all the things the players would want to do, and then we wanted to make those things easy and obvious, it expanded our design aspirations in that area, and as a result, it's going to come out in the state that feels like we you know thoroughly explored the design possibility space, and found the local maxima in there as opposed to just dropping in there and got the first thing we could build that was stable.
Right.
If you do it right this is--we've seen this with SimCity and The Sims these kinds of games: if you go in there and just thoroughly explore the design space, I mean almost to an obsessive degree, you don't have to worry about anybody else competing with you. [Laughs.] It's such a painstaking process. I'm still to this day surprised that we don't have a really reasonable competitor for the Sims. But I think it's for the same reason.
Wow, that's an interesting way of looking at it. So at what point would you say that things were truly starting to come together to the point like where you could say, "All right, I've had this vision in my head--me and the team we've had a vision in our heads--and it's starting to feel right, like the end is in sight." When did you guys hit that point?
Certain features and certain levels, they were starting to have a certain amount of finish. I'd say we put a big effort on the space level around the end of the last year, in terms of getting some of the rough metagames playable and tuning and all the features in. I think the Creature and Space stages were the first two levels where I really started feeling that, to a point where I'd say, "I can't wait until Civ feels this good or Tribes feels this good. They kind of set the bar for some of the other levels and they kept making progress too. So I'd say it was on a level by level basis. A lot of it was pacing too. We started to do a lot of focus group testing around the end of last year with a wide range of players: a lot of them very casual players that hardly play games at all, to get a sense of how accessible it was. And we discovered some interesting things. It caused us to kind of go back, and rework the design a bit.
For instance, one of the things that we changed late last year was....We noticed universally when people were able to just drop into any editor that they wanted to and play around with it--that was a much more entertaining experience for them to start understanding what the gameplay was. The gameplay made a lot more sense to them after spending time in the editor designing something. Originally we were going to force the players to start at Cell and play their way up through every level, but we decided that we wanted to make it feel more like a toy box of the universe. So we let players drop into any level they want to, right off the bat. We have an entry path for every level, straight off the bat, where you grab somebody else's pollinated content as your starting point if you didn't play Creature for instance. We found the players enjoyed browsing the levels lightly at the beginning, and trying a little bit at each level, then they would generally go back, start a full game from the Cell level, and play the whole thing straight through.
It's interesting that you mention that, because the most recent Vs. Mode I did on Level Up with Stephen Totilo from MTV was on Burnout Paradise. Obviously, you're starting with a completely new IP, whereas Burnout is established so there's already something there for people to either push back against or love. With Burnout, there was a mixed early response first with the demo, and initially to the finished game as well because of its open world, go anywhere, do anything structure as opposed to the previous games, which had a fairly rigid progression of race upon race upon race. In your case, while Spore is not out yet, you have shown the game several times, and the assumption that people had was that there would be a certain set progression. Now that you've done this redesign based on the feedback from a focus group of casual gamers, is there any concern that the core gamer who has played some or all of your previous games, where there is something of a linear progression, is going to feel weirded out or thrown off by Spore because they're feeling like "This isn't game-y enough."
Well, I think this in some instances far more game-y than a lot of the other games I've done. We have very clear goal structures at each level, because we use levels. They're also in some sense difference genres. We naturally are seeing people have their you know favorite level; they really enjoy Civ, but Creatures is a little too laid back for them, or they love Space because it's so elaborate. People are paying for the game. right? I mean, it's their game. They bought it. I don't feel right as a designer locking them out and forcing them to watch my cutscenes, and play this level before they get to that level.
There's a lot of narrative reward in playing through the entire game from start to finish in different ways. There are mechanisms in the game that acknowledge that. But again, I think a lot of players are going to approach this as something between a game and a toy, and I wanted them to be able to just open the box, the toy box, look in at all the toys, say "Ooh," and grab the toy they want. So for a lot of people, that's going in and designing a really cool space ship right off the bat, and then going off, and playing the Space game. For other people, it's going to be grabbing a creature, and making a lot of friends in Creature game. I think I want more of that kind of joy of discovery as opposed to, "Here's an obstacle course. Let's see if you can get through it," because I think that's going to be, at the end of the day, a more accessible experience that serves our franchise the way we're kind of envisioning it. This is really a game about creativity and exploration, more than it is about beating the final boss.
One of the things that we also decided not that long ago, based upon a lot of this focus group testing, is that we were actually going to put in difficulty levels in that the player selects, so when you start playing you can start at easy, medium or hard. We found that a lot of players that preferred playing with their toys in the world, where the world was pushing back at them less hard--those were closer to Sims players. Whereas the gamers wanted to go in and really play some hardcore fighting games in Creature or Civ.
We decided that it when you select the planet at the very start of the game, you select a difficulty level, so players can surf that as well. That's going to influence not just difficulty, but also the pacing in some of these games. Some of them are like a lot of RTS games or empire-building games, where you start out very lean on resources and you're digging yourself out of the hole; on the hard setting, it's going to feel a little bit more like that. On easy, I think the pace will go a little bit faster through a level. So it's going to depend primarily on the difficulty level. And once you get to Space, that's the point at which you can sit there and play the thing for 30 hours if you want, and it feels little bit more like an MMO at that point.
A Wii version has already been announced. What can you say about what that's going to play like in terms of structure, control, etc.?
I can't say much about it except the fact that the overriding kind of factor in my mind and Lucy [Bradshaw]'s, in terms of looking at what direction that team goes with it, has been to make really good use of the controller. What interests me about the Wii is that in some sense you have a much higher bandwith controller than you have with any other console or even a PC. How do we abstract the maximum Because one of the biggest advantages we have is our procedural animation system, which means that we can have an infinite of variety of animations that we can make the creature do because it's done procedurally. So that's a natural kind of strength of having a higher bandwith input device--it should really feel like I'm puppeteering this creature very directly, as opposed to I'm just indirectly controlling with a few buttons here and there. The rest of the design is totally going to evolve around that.
A lot of the prototyping they've been doing is, "How do we make you feel like you have the most control over this creature, even in a very subtle ways, by moving this controller around?" and then make the gameplay serve that, because I think if I had nothing else, but a really fun creature to drive around the environments, and I felt like I was really controlling in a very expressive way I would have a blast with just that alone. So that's a really good starting point.
One thing we talked about in our original interview was that with all of these different areas that you were pushing into, it was almost like Dave in "2001: A Space Odyssey" going out to the furthest reaches of space and time, but coming back, or maybe it's more like Prometheus--
I hope not. [Laughs.]
--discovering these things, and bringing them back. When you have time to look at some of the games that EA currently has in development or has recently released, what are some of the things that you guys have come up with that you think are going to be relevant to your fellow game designers at EA?
I think certainly the way we deal with content is going to be something that could be used in a lot of different ways across gaming. The way that players think about content in the game, because you're already dealing with a trend in gaming of players being given more and more creative control of the game experience, and games also having social currency around the game play experience, either with things like achievement ladders on Xbox Live or fan Web sites or whatever it might be. So I think that's a big part of it. Thinking about other aspects of the game, the creativity tools--a lot of computer intelligence can actually make a player feel more creative, giving them a higher amount of creative leverage in the game. That's something that we found universally appeals to everybody.
You know, I liken it to when I first got my computer way back when, my first Apple II. I'd go out and buy software at the one computer store in New York City, and every piece of software felt like something brand new that I'd never seen before. It was like another magic thing that the computer can do. The first time I saw a spreadsheet it was like that; the first time I saw a 3-D modeling package; the first time I played the Pinball Construction Set--each one of those felt like kind of a minor miracle like, "Oh wow, this magical device can do this thing now." Games used to feel that way. Some of the very first games that I bought--each was basically showing me a trick that I my computer could do that I never imagined it could do. It seems like as games have gotten more mainstream, and more genre-based, it's kind of lost that magic. So now when you see a game, it's like "Okay that's a little bit better first-person shooter than Half-Life," or "That's a little bit better so-and-so than this," and it feels very evolutionary instead of revolutionary.
Recapturing that magic where come up to the computer, and in ten or twenty mouse clicks you've done something that really surprises you, that you didn't think you could do or the computer could do, but really the credit comes back to yourself, that "Wow, I didn't know I was so good at building cities or designing space ships or whatever." In some sense, it's a self esteem generator. You should go up to the computer, and you should walk away thinking, "Wow, I didn't know I was so good at that."
Are you guys going to put "It's a Self-Esteem Generator" on the box?
[Laughs.] I don't know if it's so much a marketing slogan, but I think it's a good design philosophy. You want the player to walk away feeling better about themselves then before they walked up to a computer, rather than the other way around. We have the ability to build systems that unlock creative potential within players. It's amazing just with The Sims how many people ended up making these amazingly elaborate machinima movies using The Sims 2. I bet you half them had never picked up a video camera in their life, but they got so good at playing The Sims, and then they started making these wonderful films, and sharing it, and getting feedback. People saying, "Oh, I love your film", and all of a sudden they're like these little independent film makers. And it was only because the computer was encouraging them the whole way; at some point the game went from being an entertainment diversion to a tool and they started seeing it that way. It's like, "Oh, not only have I learned to play this game real well, but in some sense I've learned to play this instrument really well, and other people enjoy looking at the creative output from me playing this instrument."
What are the machinima tools like within Spore?
We have that built in throughout the game where you can capture game footage at any time, photos and stuff. In the Creature Creator--this is another thing we went down the path of, "What would we really want to do with this?"--I can design a creature, have them play all these animations, move them around on either a set backdrop or a black screen which is essentially a green screen, so I can actually mix it in with other footage, and composite it. There's also a one-button upload in that moviemaking feature to YouTube. So I can actually make a movie in the game, and with one click of the button upload it onto YouTube. Again, this is where we wanted it to blend from the game world to the world of Web content so that it felt like this game was another creative tool pouring into some of these sites. Plus you can take pictures, email them to your friends, and all that stuff within the game.
Going back to what you said about games now feeling evolutionary rather the revolutionary. You've created a game that sounds like it will be revolutionary, but you've built it on top of established genres, and established metaphors, and then tried to weave all of that together into something new. Do you see something ironic in that? Or is there something here that actually ties into what you studied and researched about how the processes of evolution and design work?
It is interesting because as you go through the game you're not just going through different genres, but the genres you're going through are almost in order of historical appearance. So you start with this Pac-Man like thing; then you go into what's more like a third-person shooter; then you go into the the RTS-like stuff; and then you end up in an MMO. So you're kind of recapitulating the development of games is a medium. But in some sense games are built upon predecessors, and they borrow concepts, and metaphors, and control schemes. So that actually served us pretty well. First-person shooters I think were influenced by things like Pac-Man, in terms of how you control your character. The feedback that you got from an RTS was based upon things that you got in the early first-person shooters, etc.
The homage part of Spore has been one of my favorites in that I've always wanted to put in homages--not just to games, but to a lot of movies. So especially as you get into the Space phase of the game you know it feels like this mashup of every sci-fi cliché you can imagine all stuck into one thing. What we're really trying to achieve actually at every level of the game is what we call "narrative density," which is that each of these levels has a lot of inherent storytelling within it. So when a player goes through the level I want you know as much as possible the players to feel like the story that they experience in Civilization or in Tribe was very unique to them, and if they compared it to another person's experience playing Tribe that they hear a very, very different set of stories. To me that basically implies narrative breadth in the game design, which at the end of the day I think is one of the really interesting metrics for game aesthetics.
When The Sims first came out one, I was following the Usenet groups. With The Sims the Usenet groups were actually the first to start playing it--the hardcore gamer groups-- and at first you know people were saying, "Ah, it sounds like a stupid game," But a few people were playing the game and coming on and saying, "Oh, I was playing The Sims last night, and I made this guy starve," or "He went into the bathroom, and I locked him in." They would describe these stories as to what happened when they played the game, and every story was completely different. I mean no two were the same it wasn't like, I" saw this cutscene, then I got the sword, then I killed the dragon." And the other people listening to the stories got very intrigued like, "Wow, I didn't know you could do all that stuff. I didn't realize that the breadth of possibilities was that large within the game." So I think that gamers--even non-hardcore gamers--recognize that the more narrative breadth in a game the more interesting it is to them, because the more personal it is to their experience.
When we talked about the game back in '05, you spoke about procedurally generated music. Where did that end up?
Well, that was one of the things I was really at the outset very skeptical of because I never really heard any decent procedurally generated music. At some point in the project, though--probably right around then--we hooked up with Brian Eno who ended up working with us on the procedural score. So actually we ended up with over probably--about half of our music is now procedurally generated within the game based upon things you make.
We found it was so fun, we've actually built this little kind of harness where Brian and our sound engineer could play around with the underlying levers on the procedural engine. This is one of those things that became so fun to play with, we decided we had to surface it the player. So in the game right now, when you're designing a city, one of the things that we allow you to do is open this little device and compose your own theme song for your city--
Wow.
--and it's actually using the procedural generator. So I can hit the "roll the dice button," and it generates a new procedural melody with rhythm, or I can actually grab the notes, and if I want to even put in my own tune on the notes. We've basically turned the procedural music generation into its own little toy and embedded that within the game as well.
I asked you this back in 2005, and after this interview, I've got to ask it again: this seems like everything is in there. What's left for you to do after this game is done?
[Laughs.] Oh, there are so many ideas and things to do, and so little time. I've never felt I was constrained by lack of ideas, in the least. There are plenty of things I would love to do. You know Spore is--it's one I'd say strong, fanatic, artistic vision, but it would be really depressing if I couldn't think of a game I could do after that. You could say the same thing about The Sims: The Sims is a game about all of life, what could you do beyond. This is just one particular triangulation of the world through a particular set of lenses. There's going to be a lot of learning after Spore. For me, the first half of it is when we ship the game; the second half is when we see what the players do with it. I know that's going to surprise us, and it's going to open up new areas to explore that we didn't even think of right now.
So it doesn't feel like your ultimate game. You don't feel like this is your magnum opus, the thing that you were meant to do?
Well, I'd like to think--it feels like something that you know has been latent in me for a long time. I've spent a lot of time, many years, thinking about this; all of the stuff I wanted and the aspirations I had for it. Coming to the end of it, it's feeling really nice to see it all working; the vision really becoming tangible. That doesn't mean that it is the end of my creative aspirations. [Laughs.] I mean at the end of the day it's going be an artifact that our team throws out into the world, and the world takes it, and does stuff with it, it will grow.
I'm really interested in the franchise, because I've always thought about Spore from the very outset not so much as a game, but as a franchise. I don't think I can talk too much about some of the other stuff we're doing around this, but we're looking at doing a lot of stuff way outside the game space, with this kind of franchise theme. Because I really like the idea of conveying science as a toy, or just education as a toy, but I think science especially is really applicable to that process, and I don't think games are the only way to do that.
Will, thanks very much for your time--oh, I forgot to ask the last question, the most important question of all. When is it going to ship?
I've been told I can tell you that it's going to ship in September, and then we're going to get you an exact date before your story goes to print. Right now we're hammering out what exact day in September, but I can tell you it's in September.
And do you all ready know what you're going to do after you ship the game? I don't mean professionally. It's like what they say to the quarterback, "You've just won the Super Bowl, what are you going to do?" So Will, "You've just shipped Spore, what are you going to do?"
Oh gosh, I don't know. I'll tell you over a beer one day. I've got a lot of ideas I'm kicking around, including other games so….
Excellent. Will, as always, thank you very much for your time, and I can't wait to see the game in person.
Well, thanks. Good talking to you, N'Gai, and good luck with the article.
What challenges have there been in developing a Mac version of Spore?
We're working with a company called Transgaming on our Mac version of Spore, and the effort is going very smoothly. When we set out to do this, it was to make sure that we have a simultaneous release on both the PC and Mac; too often our Mac versions ship months behind the PC. Just recently we were able to show the Creature Creator at MacWorld. We really feel that the creative nature of Spore will appeal to the Mac audience so we are excited to bring the game to both platforms.
Will Mac and PC users be able to share content with one another?
And, yes, the content that players create on the Mac version can be shared with PC players as well as other Mac players. All of the building blocks that are available in Spore's Creature, Building, Vehicle and Spaceship Creators are the same for both the PC and Mac versions, so we can now populate the galaxies of both Mac and PC players with the content that other players create, which makes exploring your own personal galaxy always unique and surprising.
How do the features and gameplay in the Nintendo DS version of Spore differ from those of the PC and Mac versions? Will the DS version have any unique content?
Spore for the Nintendo DS is an entirely unique design. We focused on delivering the core features of Spore: creativity, exploration, sharing and collecting, while taking full advantage the unique aspects of the DS platform such as the stylus and connectivity. The result is a completely specialized version of the creature phase of the game complete with a Nintendo DS unique creature creator that we are calling Spore Creatures. Players will create their own creature in the Creature Creator and then evolve this creature by making friends, defeating enemies and exploring the galaxy on a quest to find new evolutionary paths and save their home world. Along the way, they can record all the species they've encountered using the Spore Species Guide, trade and collect custom created creatures and earn badges for accomplishing a variety of tasks.
We even decided to go with a custom look for Spore Creatures so the content is entirely unique to the DS. Our artistic inspiration came from Japanese flat rod puppets and shadow box art. The look feels great and lends to a more intuitive editing experience allowing for a huge amount of flexibility in the creatures a player can create. The greater simplicity enables the player to focus on the gameplay and their unique creations. We've also made unique abilities for the creatures of Spore Creatures. As you evolve your creation, you'll find special biopowers that can help you fight or socialize in order to succeed on your quest.
Will DS users be able to exchange content with each other via local or online Wi-Fi?
As players are creating creatures in their game, they can save their favorites. They can share, trade or simply show off these favorites with friends either locally or over Wi-Fi. If you share a creature with a friend, that creature can show up in your game as well, and they can battle or befriend them much like the PC and Mac game. Once traded, creatures will continue to spread to other players as they connect and trade.
What features and gameplay can we expect to see in the mobile phone version of Spore?
Just as Spore Creatures for the Nintendo DS is an offshoot of the creature phase, Spore Mobile revolves around the first phase featured in the PC game: the cell phase. You'll start out in the primordial ooze and work your way up through the food chain as you head for land avoiding predators and adapting to your environment. The mobile game features its own editor where you can customize your creature by adding parts like tails, eyes and mandibles, each with unique abilities that will help you overcome the challenges you'll face. The mobile editor also allows you to alter the size, shape and color of your creation in millions of different ways.
Will mobile phone users be able to exchange content with one another?
Yes, users will be able to trade their creations with each other--once you've finished the core game and you've created a creature, you can then take that creature online via a network connection or by trading alphanumeric codes manually. You'll even be able to battle other people's creations via an online Arena accessible from your handset or on the web.
now i am finally really excited for this
never, ever doubt will wright's ability to obsess over a game until it is a magical sandbox of adventuresome magicalness
I know it's premature, but I'm already thinking of Sporecasts, aside from the general SE++ one. Like one based on Avatar animals, one based on Animorphs aliens, etc.
I have no idea what the DS will actually do, but I have a sneaking suspision it will be great.
Satans..... hints.....
Sweet.
They will be called the OHJESUSFUCKINGGODWHY
I've been waiting for this game for like 4 years
did you see those interviews up there?
they had lots of words
words
I'm sure you can imagine Will Wright speaking those words... That's always a plus.
I actually met him once in an LA shopping mall. This was back when Sims 2 just shipped though, so I didn't get to talk much about spore, let along know it was even in the concepts...
He was so fucking chill and charismatic.
from the photos that Rank posted, it looks extremely similar to what I saw last year in the Spore thread and pics.
right now I'm going to eat a can of spam
Regardless as long as I can play it casually I'm gonna buy it.
Fuckin' junky gamers are ruinin' my casual style.
I have a problem sometimes with some of Will's Games. They can be too sandboxy and sometimes be really hard to get from point A to B.
Sim City was always an example. "Hey Advisors! I want some fucking skyscrapers!"
"Well, everyone has electricity, and water, so I'm shutting up."
"Crime is at .01%."
"Environment is doing alright..."
And then you are left with no hints or goals or anything to further assist/guide you into whatever the hell you want to do.
I hate not fucking knowing how to do some big, game-changing thing
because all the advisers are dickfaces with no helpful advice
I told them to fuck off.
It was a cool house and deserved waterfront views.
Satans..... hints.....
twice.
there was like 1 nice neighborhood with everything perfect
then everywhere else was a giant ghetto
people flocked to live in the shitholes
If anything, they should have added like a City Council or something.
"Mayor, we the council members think it's time for some better traffic routes. In 2 months, we'd like to see overall congestion drop from 70% to 50%. If you can make this deadline, we will grant you $10,000 as well as mention [city name] as a great place for any potential investors and companies looking for new locales."
See, now what shit would be helpful. Do these 'missions' and help get your skyscrapers or Hi Tech industry quicker/better. However, it's not like something like this is intrusive. I mean, shit, chances are, you would find this a good idea and want to fix it anyways.
Assuming of course the AI isn't retarded.
Satans..... hints.....