Look, we can all agree that Spore is not quite the game it could have been. In terms of the different eras that you coach your little creature species through, the game peaks early on in the cell stage. After that, everything goes a little downhill. But I'll tell you what: I've never, ever been so excited for a game to release, and I don't think I ever will again. I was losing sleep over it. And there's one simple reason: the Creature Creator.
]]>Trees that grow from seeds you plant? Easy. 18 quintillion planets? Whatever. If you want to talk about videogames' most ambitious endeavors, there's only one contender for the top spot. Spore, released in 2008, let players control a species they created from single cell organism all the way through to becoming space explorers. That included designing everything from the huts you lived in during the tribe stage, to the spaceships you used to careen around the galaxy near the game's conclusion. Most importantly, it let you craft exactly what kind of weirdo you'd be taking to the stars, whether six-limbed, beady-eyed monstrosities or fleshky daleks or Homer Simpson, and then it populated your world with everyone else's creations automatically, so that each planet was filled with delightful, handmade surprises.
Spore was a marvel. It's crying out for a sequel.
]]>You might have noticed all your friends' avatars and profile pictures turning into comic book drawings or impressionistic paintings over the last few weeks. That's because of Prisma, a photo editing app for iOS and Android that let's you apply a couple of dozen filters to images you feed it. The app goes further than simply messing with the hue like Instagram does, using a process similar to Google Deep Dream to warp and twist photographs - without shoving fucked up dogs in every corner.
I spent last night feeding it game screenshots, to find out what No Man's Sky, Half-Life 2, SimCity and more would look like if their artists abandoned realism.
]]>Mohawk Games is an excellent name for a company. And so it is that former Civilization IV lead designer and Spore man Soren Johnson approaches me sporting the company haircut. It's a recent trim job for the old headshrub, he tells me, but he wears it well. However, the brain beneath the mohawk - the mind behind some of strategy gaming's greatest greats - is the real main attraction here. Johnson's goal is to design "core strategy games" in conjunction with Civ V art director Dorian Newcomb and in partnership with Galactic Civilizations (no relation) developer Stardock.
First on the docket? A still unnamed Mars economy RTS with no units and 13 different resource types. Is it madness? Probably, but it's the good kind, the kind that drives a man to shave off most of his hair before a business conference, the kind that sounds wicked fun when people exchange fireside tales of their favorite matches.
Go below for a discussion with both men about how the game works, boardgame influences, how videogames might be able to replicate boardgaming's face-to-face appeal, designing strategy that's extremely complex but also accessible, release plans, and heaps more.
]]>This is the latest in the series of articles about the art technology of games, in collaboration with the particularly handsome Dead End Thrills.
When Paul Weir gave a talk at GDC 2011 about GRAMPS, the generative audio system he designed for Eidos Montreal's Thief, the games press took notice. Not so much of the contents, though, or indeed the subject, just Thief. Here, finally, was a chance to get something on this oh so secretive game. Maybe, while prattling on about 'sounds' and stuff, he'd toss them a headline or two, get 'em some clicks. Suspecting as much, Weir recommended to his audience that anyone just there for Thief nooz should probably leave the room. Some people did.
We can often seem deaf to game audio in the same way we're blind to animation. Maybe it's because the best examples of both are so natural and chameleonic that they blend into a game's broader objectives. Maybe it has to be Halo ostentatious or Amon Tobin trendy just to prick up our ears; or make the screen flash pretty colours. Or maybe Brian Eno has to be involved, as we'll come to in a minute.
]]>Soren Johnson is a clever man. He was a programmer on Civilization 3, the lead designer on Civilization IV, and then he moved over to Maxis to work on Spore. Now he's building himself a new home by founding Mohawk Games, a studio dedicated to creating "core strategy games".
]]>Increasingly nebulous mega-brain Will Wright has finally revealed what the hell he's up to next. He's spent his post-Spore years working at an outfit he calls Stupid Fun Club, which has had all sorts of wild ideas about TV shows and toys, but now he seems to be turning those historically ingenious eyes back to games.
He's working on adapting a short story about a karmic computer, by sci-fi writer and technology ponderer Bruce Sterling, and he reckons he can get it turned around within a year.
]]>What has eight legs, three eyes, and a nose that spits deadly mucus? Doesn't matter, just kill it in the face and take its stuff. Richard's been playing a pre-release version of Spore's psychotic cousin, where life is simple, death is cheap, and the only good alien is one that drops a particularly snazzy hat.
]]>A new patch for Spore has made a few interesting tweaks possible. Perhaps the most immediately interesting is the ability to build asymmetric creatures. No longer to features have to be applied in pairs, which enormously opens up the possibilities for creature design. And once you've designed your creature, as spotted by Offworld, there's now the ability to export it to your favourite Collada 3D modelling program to experiment with at your leisure.
]]>Cleverman make cleverthinks! Fresh from the Web 2.0 expo earlier this month is this entertaining and educating half-hour talk with Will Wright about everything including but not limited to his career and games to date, what's next, lessons learned from Second Life, the intersect between games and reality and -ooh missus - Spore's controversial DRM and the business considerations around it: "These people have paid money for a game, and you don't want to be treating them basically as criminals". On Spore itself, he observes that he wanted it to be almost more of a toy than a game per se - something else for the game's many critics to chew on, then.
Also especially salient is an observation that gamers are basically narcissitic - "the more you can make the game about that person, the more interested, the more emotionally involved they will get." A theme which, clearly, has run through a number of his games. LET THE MAN SPEAK.
]]>Ooh, just a kind of radar-blip news post for Spore's expansion pack, Galactic Adventures. No firm release date yet, but we understand it's not far off. So here's something: Galactic Adventures delivers a whole load of space-stage stuff to do, mostly with missions on the planet surfaces that you can undertake with your creature and his/her space chums. There's rescuing of princesses, destroying aliens motherships, and of course loads of that user-generated content pollination. Judging by the trailers post after the jump, the planets themselves are massively more detailed than they were for vanilla Spore, and the "massive battlefields" that the expansion reportedly features could make the unhappy endgame of Spore a little more interesting to get through. Take a look at how Spore will change.
]]>What's that on the horizon? A storm of controversy, you say? Better batten down the hatches and man the lighthouse, we got some dark times ahead.
For the seventh game of Christmas, my true blog gave to me…
]]>EA have released a deauthorization tool for their much debated DRM system for Spore. By running it, you get back one of your five installations instantly, even if you haven't actually uninstalled it. If you try to run it, it'll require to be reauthorized, but this means that abstractly you can now install Spore on as many machines as you want - it's just that you can only run five of them at once. Hmm.
]]>The newly released v1.02 patch of Spore has actually caused a minor furore with one of its changes. Is it that you can hold down control in sporepedia to select multiple things? Nay. Is it the improved gait for two legged creatures? Nope. Is it the fact that there's an occasional cubic planet thrown in? Why, yes, that's it entirely. Here's an enbiggened image of the planet. What do you make of it? A poll and my own thoughts on this clearly crucial PC gaming issue beneath the cut...
]]>Via VG247, early word on what might be for the first add-on pack for the famously uncontroversial Spore. And it's... Cute & Creepy Creature Parts Pack? Oh, man. That sounds worryingly superficial, though I guess it embiggens the element of the game that's been most well-received. Still, there's only so much creature-tinkering I can do before getting bored. New/expanded stages plzkthx.
]]>Time to stick my hand into the angry beehive again... The EA/Spore/DRM issue isn't likely to go away any time soon. In a funny sort of way, the ridiculous DRM on Spore might well turn out to be a good thing for gamers - like it or not, EA's weight in the industry means they're trend-setters to some degree. That a company so big attempted the sort of draconian copy-protection that only smaller publishers had hithero dabbled in, and crucially they now seem to realise it was a mistake, may well set a positive precedent for everyone. So, while I initially decried the mass trolling of Amazon reviews, I have to agree now that a game as high-profile as Spore was perhaps an ideal object for protest. I'd still much prefer it was gone about in a smarter way than fevered screaming, though.
Though EA aren't behaving in terribly gentlemanly fashion towards DRM-complaint posts on their forums, they are gradually backing down from some of the restrictions they unfairly placed upon Spore installs, and it looks like that trend's set to continue.
]]>Spore has only sold 1 million copies. Warhammer Online has a piffling 500,000 subscribers. Ah well. Might as well call it a day for the old IBM Compatible, eh?
Pffffffft. It's been a grand Autumn for PC so far, and with Left 4 Dead, Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3 (shut up) also incoming our beloved maths-box's star isn't going to dim any time soon. Two things worth noting about the Spore/WAR (hey, that rhymes!) success though.
]]>The good news is this: EA are taking a big step back on Spore's DRM. From three installs ever and one account per copy of the game, they're switching to as many re-installs as you want on a maximum of five computers, with a patch for multiple accounts for one machine on the way. That's a big change of heart. We hinted that there might have been a change from three to five installs last week. This weekend the LA Times reported that EA have "apologised" to customers for the digital restrictions, when issuing their reprise. They report EA Games' President Frank Gibeau saying,
"We've received complaints from a lot of customers who we recognize and respect. We need to adapt our policy to accommodate our legitimate consumers."
]]>Much like everyone else, we've been thinking far too much about Spore recently. Alex Hutchinson, the game's lead designer, has been thinking about it for years. With the game released, we grabbed the opportunity to talk candidly and extensively with him about its design choices. From high level decisions like the actual in-game effect of customisation to basic technical elements like the lack of autosave to the question of the sudden difficulty spike in Space (And the lack of difficulty elsewhere), he reveals Maxis' thinking. Whether you adore or abhor it, after reading this, you'll understand exactly why Spore is the game it is.
]]>We've all had a go at that Spore game, so it's time to bang the hammer of judgment and sound great horns across the internet. Spore: What is it good for? Absolutely something.
Jim: Right, shall we discuss Spore? Everyone ready? Kieron: Well, the trad way to start would be to say how much we've played, yeah? I've taken two races up into space, and reached the centre of the galaxy with one. A load of minor fiddling too, obviously. Jim: I've played it through to the space stage a twice, and then a third time at the space stage as a start. I've probably spent as much time again the various editors. Alec: I got an achievement the other day saying I'd spent 50 hours in space with a single species. This somewhat horrified me. Jim: Blimey. Where is John, by the way?
]]>We don't usually pay much attention to the charts, but I spotted the September 6th line up over on Shacknews and it amused me. And there's a mystery...
]]>I hadn't tried activating Spore more than three times, but reader roBurky did. It happened like this:
]]>Blogchums Videogaming247 have spotted that a Creationist blogger has started his own campaign against the evil of Will Wright's game. No DRM quibbles here though, it's all about the religious implications:
]]>People really don't like DRM. And a small but very passionate/ferocious group of people really, really, really don't like DRM. They've struck back by shaping Amazon's user reviews of Spore en masse, bringing its average rating down to just one star.
]]>We'll be doing a verdict next week, but for now, here's the three things you should know about Spore.
1) Spore is a four hour character creator for a polished version of Space Rangers 2. It's neat. 2) Ignore anyone's opinion who's played it less than - oooh - eight hours. There's certainly good reasons to dislike or even dismiss Spore, but it takes that point before you see past your preconceptions. 3) There is no Autosave. I repeat: there is no autosave.
And a load more detail beneath the cut.
]]>So reader SchizoSlayer drops us a line, and he says "Did you know that EA store is selling Spore for £40?" We didn't, but it is. The same site is selling this same digital download for $50 in the US. And Amazon UK are selling it in a box, delivered through your door for £27.
]]>Apparently the official online embargo starts lifting tomorrow, but a bunch of print scores have already found their way into the realms of webby-land. Most notably, CVG have just posted a slightly bizarre summary of Tom Francis' print review in PC Gamer UK, which is possibly a cheeky attempt to get a march on tomorrow's online reviews. The lad scored Will Wright's new'un a whopping 91%, but delivered a few sharp punches to Spore's ribs. For the whole review you'll need to read the mag, but what are, purportedly, the most pertinent comments can be found here.
]]>The Associated Press has managed to squeeze a comment on Spornography out of Will Wright:
"When you give players creative control, you have to expect they're going to do the unexpected. Some of it's really good for what they were shooting for. It's amazingly explicit, especially when those creations are animated. We just have to make sure those people aren't messing up the experience for others."
Which, while not approval as such, certainly isn't damning the monstrous penis-beasts and sodomy monsters the internet seems so fond of. Good on 'im. Unfortunately they don't ask whether he's made any Sporn himself, which means we're duty bound to speculate wildy that he has, and that it was unimaginably disgusting.
]]>[Brandon Boyer, the author of this piece, is one of Rock, Paper, Shotgun's international agents. In 2006 he visited Spore developers Maxis at their studio on behalf of Edge magazine. The following article is an updated version of the feature that was published in that magazine last year. In it Mr Boyer talks to Wright and his team, and gets the heart of how this game came to be. Read on to discover how Spore was made of people.]
]]>Via the big K, this latest Spore trailer sees producer Kip Katsarelis and designer Soren Johnson talking about the civilisation stage of Spore, particularly what they themselves enjoy about that planetary-struggle mechanisms of Maxis' forthcoming evolve 'em up. Lovely stuff.
]]>A quick pimp for RPS chums Eurogamer, who will very shortly be hosting a live interwebby reader chat with Lucy Bradshaw, one of the main brains behind the soon-oh-so-soon Spore. Bradshaw is "every bit as responsible for that game as [Will Wright]", according to EA topdog John Riccitiello.
]]>True, we've known about the September 7th (5th in Europe) release date for a while now, but it was hard to ever quite believe in it after all those painful years of delays to Maxis' evolveathon. But Spore has indeed gone gold at last, and the release is mere weeks away - making it perhaps the vanguard for what's set to be an absolutely epic Autumn for PC gaming. Internet, prepare thyself.
]]>On its influences, on scientific creativity, science as a brand, and on the amazing success of the Creature Creator. Top of the PC charts since it was released, apparently. Plus, why they released it early. Go, Will:
]]>Dear RPS Readers,
Thanks for the interested comments in response to my first post! They have warmed my heart and girded my loins for the rest of the week. Straight after filing my first report I had to dash (well, walk leisurely) across downtown Los Angeles to get to the EA press conference, held at the Orpheum Theatre – a truly gorgeous restored vaudeville theatre where they shot the theatre scenes for Last Action Hero. Which wasn’t as thrilling as accidentally ending up at Union Station (where they filmed the police station scenes for Blade Runner) yesterday, but interesting none the less. In a round about way that sort of sums up EA’s press conference, too. Not hugely thrilling, but unquestionably interesting.
]]>The second part of Will Wright's interview with Gametrailers is up, and indeed for you to watch below. This time he talks about what's next for games, how he enjoyed Grand Theft Auto 4, and Raid On Bungeling Bay (which bizarrely both GT and Wright name incorrectly). Toward the end GT's questions descend into silliness, but Wright's answers remain erudite and intelligent. Which is fun.
Again, watch the screen behind him for more Spore hints, including a screen tantalisingly titled, "Choose an Economic Land Vehicle", and the very lovely bed-with-teddy-bear spaceship.
]]>There's a new video of Will Wright explaining Spore in a bit more depth on GT today. It's below, so click away to have a look. Make sure to keep an eye on the screen behind Wright, which shows quite a lot of footage of the spaceship creator. It is one of eight creating tools in the game, along with the Creature Creator.
]]>Jim: Okay, a quick verdict. “The Spore Creature Creator is quite good.” Anyone have anything else to add? Kieron: I concur. John: You can make knobs. Jim: Actually it's a shame that our penis coverage, so to speak, has eclipsed the other clever creations. Kieron: Yeah - I actually feel a little guilt on this. There's a selection of genuinely awesome stuff out there - the ED209s, the planes, the chairs... Alec: The legs aren't great. John: I had a desire to make a sofa, but it never really worked out.
]]>The guys over at 1up were lucky enough to get some time to sit down and talk to Will Wright at the EA3 event, and they've posted the video over at Game Videos. We, being repurposing blogger-types, have posted it after the jump. There's not a whole lot of new Spore information, but it's nonetheless satisfying to hear Wright wax about his game, and admit that the creature creator has been completely redesigned around ten times to get it to the state we find it in today.
]]>Now that we've all finished scrubbing our dirty, dirty bodies clean after looking at all those obscene Spore creatures, there's one question on our lascivious lips. What's EA/Maxis going to do about all these phalluses and buggerers and gaping anuses? Spore is, after all, a family game. It surely wouldn't do for little Johnny Evolution to discover a vagina-beast has wandered into his game.
]]>The Eyes have it and I have the eyes. Well, I don't, but Kel Lind of Buttonbasher does. He's had the full Spore Creator since Friday and has painstakingly provided grabs of all the bits and bobs in the full version. "I figured that your readers might want to check it out, if they're on the fence on whether to purchase or stick with the demo," says Kel, figuring correctly. Initial RPS response to them: a tad disappointed by the legs, but bar that, win!
]]>My first Spore child, made before I realised how to actually scale creatures' flesh. Anyway - as the title will have strongly hinted - the Spore Creature creator is online. Apparently it appeared on EA's site briefly before being taken down (There's a placeholder file there now), but people have nabbed it and it's available on major torrent sites. Such as this one. First impressions? Even with only a quarter of the complete Spore content, it's an incredible piece of software. More of my first creatures beneath the cut...
]]>We're a week away from the Spore Creature Creator crawling from the sea of development onto the rocky beach of the marketplace. And it seems some people have it already, as the Spore user video channel is starting to recieve little videos of people's monstrous beasts. By my count, nineteen in the last day. No phallus-footage yet, but glancing over these first few births is getting me urge to get demiurgic.
Videos of a few of the best, with some theorising what ecological niche they'd fill beneath the cut. I have to use my Biology degree for something, y'know.
]]>PCG's Tim Edwards takes the prize for being the first guy to make a cock into a character when he went hands on with Spore. Come September, inevitably, millions of others will swiftly join Tim's little fella - making this a release date at least one other way. Being mentally four, I'll probably make one too. For those who are about to cock: we salute you.
]]>Spore: The Sim Everything we require, or the downfall of Mr Wright? Only time, and a long time sat alone at a PC screen, will tell. Anyway, more images from the early-sentience stages of a civilisation after the jump. EA's typo-ridden press release reports: "You begin the Tribal Stage as a small group of sentient creatures which have just discovered tools and have formed the first tribe on their planet. Gather food with your tribe members by picking fruit, hunting or domesticating wild animals and fishing. Your tribe runs on food buy tools with it, purchase tribal accessories with it, gift it to other tribes, steal it from other tribes, and (of course) feed your tribe with it. Use different tools to befriend or attack neighboring tribes, aid in hunting and gatherting, or heal your tribe members."
]]>""We want people to think about the world a little differently as a result of having played the game." Hmm. Mandibley and tentacley, live together in perfect harmony? High Lord Wright talks about the scientific grounding behind his minigame-manic evolve 'em up...
]]>You know what's wrong with you? No, not you, the person behind you. Yes, you. You're not excited about Spore yet.
I understand - the whole thing is so esoteric and fanciful that it's tempting to assume it will simply be an over-grown character creator, but really, it's so much more than that. Seriously, look at the video below. And then the latest crop of Cell Phase screenshots. (Click on the for giganticness).
]]>Good news, loud, complaining denizens of the internet! Bioware have backed down on their draconian copy protection for Mass Effect.
Edit: And EA say the same goes for Spore.
Community Manager, Jay Watamaniuk, has posted to the Mass Effect forums saying,
"There has been a lot of discussion in the past few days on how the security requirements for Mass Effect for PC will work. BioWare, a division of EA, wants to let fans know that Mass Effect will not require 10- day periodic re-authentication."
The reasons jumpward.
]]>All it's taken is one little post and a landslide of others follow. At least that's what's happened when Bioware's Derek French reveals that Mass Effect and Spore will be coming with a fairly hefty piece of DRM attached. It won't just activate online when you first install the game - it'll also have to check in to the server regularly to continue working. If ten days go by without a check-in working, the game stops working. In other words, major lengthy internet outage, no playage. Since RPS-comrade Rossignol is going to be having that kinda length of time offline shortly, this has to be frowned at.
Beneath the cut: Derek French's full post, just so the actual words people will be arguing about are present in the vicinity if this spirals out of control into another 300+ post thread about the P-word. Oh - and a few more initial thoughts too.
]]>Exciting news for fans of exciting news: EA have announced they're releasing a creature creator for the forthcoming Will-Wright-Is-Clever-'em-up Spore. It'll be available on June 17th, which strikes me as a very specific sort of date that's simultaneously a long way away. Perhaps EA have some manner of secret plan they need a distraction for? Pah. Who cares. They can march robotic death legions into our capitals as long as we get hands on with the evolutionary-putty of Spore. The freely-available demo gives you 25% of the parts of the full game, while if you pay $9.99 you get the full version. The results of both can be inputted into the final game. While the $9.99 thing strikes me as a somewhat embarrassingly flagrant attempt to secure extra monies from the Spore-hungry masses, the facts they're importable means that the even before the game comes out the user-created-content machine is running, meaning the universe is going to be pre-populated with all manner of penis-with-eight-legs creatures. Shame the pack can't be a pre-order incentive or something.
]]>I'm not quite sure how I missed this video about Maxis' work on Spore earlier this week, but fortunately VG247 flagged it up. A brief but pleasingly insight into the studio that is developing Spore.
]]>Electronic Arts are sponsoring the SCI-FI London film festival at the Apollo West End theatre, which runs from 30 April – 4 May. The interesting part for us, however, is that Mass Effect, Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath, Spore, Boom Blox (Spielberg's Wii thing), and Dead Space will be playable at the event. Man, there's going to be a fight over that Spore booth. Find out more about the science fiction bonanza (which includes a load more than videogame promos) over here. And I might see you there.
]]>This talk is a couple of years old now, being a seminar organised by The Long Now Foundation in June 2006, but I had only had the MP3 previously. Today I discovered that it is also available in full as a video via the excellent Fora.tv. If you've not already seen or heard this, then you must.
]]>Lordy lawks, what could be more exciting than the thought of Simon Amstell as Doctor Who? How about a release date for Spore?!
This press release on Spore's site reveals the news. Mr Wright, he say,
"The wait is almost over. We're in our final stages of testing and polish with Spore, and the team at Maxis can't wait to see the cosmos of content created by the community later this year."
So, this September then. Woo!
[Twiddles thumbs]
[Evolves extra thumbs for increased twiddling] Okay, let's watch the video...
]]>Spore: even after all those troubling delays, it's still quite possibly the most exciting game of the coming year. When we hear that Will Wright is even demonstrating it to the spaceheads at NASA, it sounds like we get to nod solemenly at its cleverness as well as clap for joy at its gloopy, many-legged wonders. Here's a from-the-hip recording of his presentation, which, not unsurprisingly, focuses on the planetary exploration and colonisation aspect of the impending evolve 'em up:
]]>Before I discuss the game formerly known as Sim Everything, an anecdote relevant to our recent collapse into the scatological:
I once had a wee next to Will Wright. At a urinal, you understand - I didn't just stride into his office and evacuate my bladder by his chair. It was at E3, back in 2003, I believe. I'm bad at chit-chat at the best of times, but trying to think of something to say to one of the industry's finest minds, over the sound of splashing micturition, was impossible.
]]>
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