Spore Revolution

The Wright Stuff

In February 2007, Will Wright sat down with Popular Science magazine for a very lengthy interview entitled The Wright Stuff.  Once published, it was 8 pages long!  Here are some interesting tidbits from the interview that I gathered:

• You're not forced out of any level, in most cases.  Since Spore encompasses many types of gameplay, you can just stick around in the area you feel most comfortable with any really work on it instead of being pushed from A to Z.
• The learning curve is smoothed out by the game teaching new concepts at every level.  In other words, it will be very difficult to just pick up the game at the space age without learning all the shortcuts first from the previous ages.
• They are in the design process of a storybook feature so that you can share your creature's story with everyone.. ^_^
• There is no end game.  It will mostly be rankings of who conquered the most plants of built the most federations, etc.
• If you die and your creature fails, you don't start from scratch, but you're taken down to the previous level to reevaluate.
• One of the major reasons they didn't make it an MMO is because of in-game liabilities, like you being exterminated by a 14 yo with too much time on their hands.  And they don't have to worry about planets going offline. And besides, its hard to feel like God when everyone has the same powers as you.

Spore at the SXSW

There have been a lot of articles coming out about Will Wright at the SXSW.  Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much more news on release dates or new features that we aren't already familiar with. Everyone wants to see the creature editor, but that itself is getting old as we are all anticipating its release and looking forward to hearing more about missions, quests, and gameplay related areas.

Here's a quote from an article entitled Spore: A Taste of Things to Come by Tim Gideon for PC Magazine, who got to demo the game before the keynote speech by Will Wright:

"Wright says his overarching goal is to make people understand the universe and their place in it better by playing with different possibilities and their consequences on the environment."

I'm so thrilled to hear this and hope he can reach his goal.  One interesting thing I heard him say in the video was how he was hoping being able to manipulate time and space so easily would help us think forward into our own futures.

SXSW: Will Wright Keynote Video

Here's a great video of Will Wright's Keynote speech at the iSXSW.  It is a 17 minute video going through the different stages of your creature from the tidal period to the  space age.  The video is very entertaining as Mr. Wright brushes death a lot.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/zachinglis/videos/1/

I have to say its amazing how powerful this game will be.  It has a lot of Sim City in it, a lot of Sims, taken to another level.  Everyone is about custom content now, and social networks, and I think Spore will hit the nail on the head. It's definately a shame that its not an MMO for if it were I would most likely give up WoW, but perhaps thats something we can look forward to in the future! ;D