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Spore: Videos! Pics! Procedural Space Slugs! (OP nsf56k)
Bitstream
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
SPORE
Spore is the upcoming "Sim-Everything" game from Will Wright. A bunch of new information has come out of last week's conference glut, including a release date described as "Decemberish".
What we know
Not a lot of concrete stuff yet. Spore simulates life across a galaxy, taking you and your creature from lowly microbe to space-faring super-science-wielding empire and everything in between. We've seen a lot of pictures and video now, but the real mechanics of the game are still unknown.
What makes Spore really interesting is the amount of player-generated, procedural content. Almost everything, from textures to sounds to entire planets, is generated from tiny amounts of data on the fly. This means everything is really small in terms of data - we're told that creature savefiles will range between 1 and 3 kilobytes, making online exchange damn near instantaneous. Which leads me to this:
"Massively Single-Player"
Nearly everything around you, from plants to slugs and up to spacecraft, is created by other players. EA maintains a central database, the Sporepedia, which holds all creatures and objects everyone creates. When you explore your planet, and later your galaxy, the game accesses the Sporepedia and populates the universe with other players' creations. You will have a degree of control over whose content you see, with a basic friend list (and ignore function, if you don't want to see a herd of Penisaurs bounding across the plains).
Oh yeah, I almost forgot - Spore is trying a new business model in the form of collectible cards and plastic figures custom-made for users. Some of these have already been produced and given to a lucky few who made creatures at E3 and at private review meetings. Scott of VG Cats drew a Spore strip, which the Spore devs rebuilt in the Spore engine, and later received a set of figurines of his creatures. We can expect this service to be available for players at launch, evidently.
What we don't know
A lot. The big point of contention amongst the fanboys is aquatic civilizations; we've gotten hints pointing at their inclusion, but we've also heard of their possible removal. Still up in the air.
Plus, we still don't have a solid release date. Fearmongers are saying we won't see this game until next year (it's already been delayed more than a year past its original date), but the new footage is looking really polished, and the "Septemberish" claim sounds pretty reasonable.
Pictures
From Wright's SXSW keynote:
The revamped creature editor:
Wright's newest nightmare:
A close-up of the stats involved. Very interesting, and very RPGish:
Wright's UFO, not at all similar to a certain famous spaceship:
Applying the Heat Ray to the unfortunate planet:
Videos
From the GDC07 demo:
Tidepool stage
Creature stage
Tribal stage
Civ stage
Space stage
Wright's SXSW Keynote:
http://www.viddler.com/explore/sandieman/videos/114/
the Spore demo portion
(Transcript)
Robin Williams (!) demos Spore at E3 '06:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3423935674619182066
Spore is the upcoming "Sim-Everything" game from Will Wright. A bunch of new information has come out of last week's conference glut, including a release date described as "Decemberish".
What we know
Not a lot of concrete stuff yet. Spore simulates life across a galaxy, taking you and your creature from lowly microbe to space-faring super-science-wielding empire and everything in between. We've seen a lot of pictures and video now, but the real mechanics of the game are still unknown.
What makes Spore really interesting is the amount of player-generated, procedural content. Almost everything, from textures to sounds to entire planets, is generated from tiny amounts of data on the fly. This means everything is really small in terms of data - we're told that creature savefiles will range between 1 and 3 kilobytes, making online exchange damn near instantaneous. Which leads me to this:
"Massively Single-Player"
Nearly everything around you, from plants to slugs and up to spacecraft, is created by other players. EA maintains a central database, the Sporepedia, which holds all creatures and objects everyone creates. When you explore your planet, and later your galaxy, the game accesses the Sporepedia and populates the universe with other players' creations. You will have a degree of control over whose content you see, with a basic friend list (and ignore function, if you don't want to see a herd of Penisaurs bounding across the plains).
Oh yeah, I almost forgot - Spore is trying a new business model in the form of collectible cards and plastic figures custom-made for users. Some of these have already been produced and given to a lucky few who made creatures at E3 and at private review meetings. Scott of VG Cats drew a Spore strip, which the Spore devs rebuilt in the Spore engine, and later received a set of figurines of his creatures. We can expect this service to be available for players at launch, evidently.
What we don't know
A lot. The big point of contention amongst the fanboys is aquatic civilizations; we've gotten hints pointing at their inclusion, but we've also heard of their possible removal. Still up in the air.
Plus, we still don't have a solid release date. Fearmongers are saying we won't see this game until next year (it's already been delayed more than a year past its original date), but the new footage is looking really polished, and the "Septemberish" claim sounds pretty reasonable.
Pictures
From Wright's SXSW keynote:
The revamped creature editor:
Wright's newest nightmare:
A close-up of the stats involved. Very interesting, and very RPGish:
Wright's UFO, not at all similar to a certain famous spaceship:
Applying the Heat Ray to the unfortunate planet:
Videos
From the GDC07 demo:
Tidepool stage
Creature stage
Tribal stage
Civ stage
Space stage
Wright's SXSW Keynote:
http://www.viddler.com/explore/sandieman/videos/114/
the Spore demo portion
(Transcript)
Robin Williams (!) demos Spore at E3 '06:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3423935674619182066
Bitstream on
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Posts
*read: arouses
Boats attacking land structures!
The horrible thought that Halo 3 will be out before Spore just puts this into perspective. Spore is light years away.
It better damn well not be. I thought Halo 3 was coming out in November? I expect Spore out by then.
It is coming out this year, right? RIGHT?
I'm sure you could... but you would be considered a suicidal race by the computer and your species on other people's computers would kamikaze all the time.
Erm, you dont.
Its procedural.
It is always different.
Thats why you never get tired of it.
Id imagine Im going to spend 90% of my time creating creatures rather than playing the game. Heck, the whole civilisation part looks incredibly boring, but the early stages, animal evolution etc looks amazing.
Fine with me. I just want to create a race that will destroy all life in the galaxy and only has temporary colonies near the places that need to be purged of life.
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A rather good game? I certainly hope so.
Wright is not Molyneux.
I just want to know some more stuff about the molecular stage.
"Very little is known of the molecular phase after its revelation on February 7, 2007 other than that the game play is similar to that of the classic puzzle game Tetris."
Remind me to never run into any of your creatures.
Maybe thats why this game keeps getting pushed back?
Black and White was brilliant.
Black and White 2 was not as good but still fun and enjoyable and a worthwhile purchase.
I hate how just because B+W2 wasnt the second coming of christ people think it was awful. It was great. As was Fable.
Molyneux has taken enough heat because of stupid fans blowing the hype way out of proportion. The same might happen to Wright. He isnt somehow better. The Sims is good but the general consensus is it isnt astounding. It just sells really well on the back of expansions.
Grand times await us all.
I want Spore to be out yesterday.
Molyneux hyped his own game up to stupid proportions.
Here are some of the things he promised early on:
* Planting trees and being able to watch them grow over the course of the game
* Admiring townsfolk who mimic the character's dress and style.
* Competing heroes who can actually beat the player to a quest.
* The ability to carve the character's name into a tree.
* A heroes guild in every town.
* The ability to vandalize all manner of public and private property (the example used was a sundial).
* The ability to have children.
Here are some other things he hyped up about it later on:
* Finding a unique item called the "Singing Sword" by Peter Molyneux in an interview a few weeks before the game was released (the game had already gone gold).
* The ability for players to have their own personal unique weapon that could be upgraded and enchanted as to make it more powerful as they played through the game.
* NPCs with other NPC relatives (a given example by Peter Molyneux was a tester of the game had married the daughter of a rich town mayor. The player then killed the mayor secretly and ended up inheriting the mayor's wealth).
* The ability to become a were-balverine.
* A vibrant, living world where NPCs didn't have strictly scripted actions to perform each day (somewhat like the 'Radiant AI' found in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion).
* Freedom of exploration throughout the world of Fable, often labeled as "If you can see a place in the distance, you can go there", this was likened to the world exploration found in games such as The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
Then I want to share this race online with everyone else, and then it will turn up in their universes and destroy them all.
It will be a plague, and unstoppable plague which will burn the galaxy in a swathe of fiery destruction.
That or some kind of bunny rabbit.
I think that's something I've been pretty impressed by in the footage we've seen - they seem to have struck a balance between "nature documentary" and "porn parody" that somehow manages to be funny without being gross. I mean, cheesy porn music kicks in and everything, but they don't feel the need to put up that damn censor-blur thing.
That is what I plan to do. Well, I will do it right after I am done moving around the stars and planets to form what looks like a giant wang.
Now you crawl out from the sea as a worm. Thats not cool at all.
I expect this is EA's doing, and we will see a Water themed completion pack* upon the horizon.
* completion as opposed to expansion, where they are actually adding features to the game. In this case they are just giving us features that were stripped out to make more money later
Edit:
"However, in recent interviews Will Wright has stated that that underwater creatures (and therefore native underwater civilizations) are on the cusp of being cut from Spore before release. He did, however, hint that they might come to full light in a future expansion pack. As with many of the mysteries of Spore, the final fate of Underwater Civilizations won't be known until after the game is released."
Damn you!
It's frustrating how many cuts there are in each clip, and how short each one is. You don't really get to digest the gameplay because a lot of portions are pieced together with .3 second clips.
The "design-a-creature" and "design-a-building" elements, for example--how long does it really take to put one together? You can't get any idea from these clips, because there's 30 cuts in each one of those five second segments.
True.