Tendo City

Quote:Will Wright's Friday morning GDC speech, the disingenuously-titled "The Future of Content in Games," was in truth a trojan horse -- the real purpose of his talk was to reveal his latest project, a game called Spore.

Spore could end up being quite literally the biggest and most ambitious game ever attempted. Although it begins at the microscopic level, with players taking control of a monocellular organism in a tidal pool, the scale changes as the creature evolves and grows. The end result: A massive adventure spanning an entire galaxy with player-driven gameplay and design shared seamlessly online among the entire Spore community.

Spore seems to be a concise summary of Wright's virtuosic approach to game design. In tackling the most significant issues and trends facing developers moving into the next generation of games, he appears to have designed a project that gracefully encompasses a wide array of genres while giving players an unprecedented level of control over their game experience.

I really hope he doesn't pull a Fable with this one, tell us about how amazing this game is going to be and all the things you can do and then at the last minute show us a finished product that had a bunch of the best features cut out. Anyway, this is an amazing concept and I really hope he can pull it off.

PC Magazine

Spore looks incredible cool. Can't wait to find out more.

Yeah, maybe we'll see some screenshots sometime soon.

This guy isn't the same guy as the guy who screwed us with Fable, the game I really could go without owning, well, at least I should have waited for the PC version...

No, that was Peter Molyneux. This is Will Wright, the man that founded Maxis and created the Simcity series, among other things.

That's actually exactly what I said.

They are totally different people, who make different kinds of games, so why even the reference?

Um... I didn't start it. First post, GR said "I hope this doesn't end up like Fable" to which I responded "This guy is NOT the Fable guy" which I meant to mean "they are different so what one does doesn't reflect what the other might do".

Then it's question for GR. :)

I guess he just posted it because it's an unsettling feeling of being betrayed once and not wanting to be let down so much again. I must admit I too am pretty wary of games offering everything... I never expect a game to offer AS MUCH as they originally would have wanted, for example Perfect Dark wasn't quite as much as they promised, but in the end I'm generally satisfied by what I get because while not what they promised, it's pretty close. Fable was WAY off, barely worth the full price of admission. That was a one time thing though, I think it's safe to assume he'll be pulling off what he promises here.

Quote:Then it's question for GR.

Because this, like Fable, is a game that promises the player will be able to do ANYTHING. We all know what happened to Fable, though, instead of being the greatest RPG ever created and one that allowed you almost complete freedom, it turned out to be a very confining, cliched, fairly average RPG that last a grand total of 9 hours. Yes, I do realize that these are two completely different people, and that Will Wright is a bit more reliable than Peter Molyneux, but I can't help but be wary. Obviously.

With Will Wright, you've got a history of 'playground' games that are open-ended -- SimCity, The Sims, Unnatural Selection (not his game, but it was published by Maxis... I mention it because it's an artificial life simulation.), etc... with Molyneux? You've got that too (Populous, Black & White, etc)... so yeah, I can see the connection, actually. I'd just say that perhaps Wright has been more consistent... after all, Black & White and Fable both dissapointed, while Maxis hasn't made a bad game since it was, well, still Maxis...

Anyone that played the Sims or any of the Sim games can see that a game like that wouldn't be that hard to do. In Sim Earth you started out as a protoplast or a protein or something and had to help it evolve in to a multi-celled organism, you could eventually create people and countries and then ultimately have an 'Exodus' where they leave for another planet and then start over again.

So this will be just be all his Sim games combined, basically.

SimEarth was also one of the most horribly complex and confusing games I've ever played. I was way too young for it, I'm sure...

You can see screens at jeux-france, I think. I saw a bunch the other day.

And here they are!













I can't wait to see some videos of it.

Now THIS sounds exciting. Could you imagine how much data is going to have to be stored on a disc to have a whole solar system? Nay, GALAXY! OR EVEN THE UNIVERSE! Sure the vast majority of it would be nothingness, but still.. Imagine if it was to scale, it'd take possibly hundreds of thousands of years to find another suitable planet to move to!! THAT'S INSANITY!!.. No thank YOU Mr. Wright. I'll be content with living in my own Solar System thankyouverymuch. And all this is not to mention the glaring tedium that would be waiting the millions of years for our single cell organism to evolve! Count me out. I'm having far too much fun with Tekken 5.

Yeah...I kind of don't think your creatures evolve in real time.

While in NORMAL situations I'd point out that level data takes up an infintesible part of a game when compaired to the things that the disks are actually needed for, the textures, sounds, and stuff like that.

However, a galaxy is literally bigger than you can imagine. Seriously, humans don't have as many BRAIN CELLS as there are stars in the Milky Way, so we just can't fully grasp it's utter bigness. Just as an example, it's physically impossible for any aliens to have ever visited us, or even know we are here from our broadcasts, and by the reverse, SETA can only find broadcasts from aliens who have been able to send radio waves for billions of years themselves so it can actually reach us. Heck, the nearest star is something that we can only say what it looked like 4 years ago, and that's when looking RIGHT at it. Imagine the sheer time lag between the close stars and the far ones. Yeah, I bet your brain just broke.

Point is, even the map data for that would be pretty freaking huge, if they actually let you go through an entire real galaxy. Not without some shortcuts and generalizations anyway... They'd need to recycle a lot.

Well, I don't think it'd be physically impossible for them to have ever visited us. I mean, let's say they had been 'space capable' for hundreds of thousands of years. If their technology was sufficiently advanced it's more than possible. Hell, if they were able to travel at just half the speed of light, it'd only take a mere 20 years to get here from one of the nearby stars. Of course, with each further star away that figure would grow exponentially. Though, that's not to mean that it couldn't happen. Billions of years is enough time for millions of different paths of evolution to advance sufficiently to become space born, and indeed build a gallactic empire, then eventually die off again.

It wouldn't necessarily be THAT big. I would assume that all planets/solar systems/galaxies/universes are radomly generated. Basically all you'd need would be the parameters under which these things can be created. It would, of course, have a huge load time to start out with, or the these things could be generated as you gain the ability to visit each.

Hmm, a very intriguing idea. Kind of like a bastard child of The Sims, Civilization, and (as lazy said) all the other Sim games that Wright has created. This shows promise though, and if properly executed could be an epic and monumental title. I'll have to chech out more information on it...

ABF's always talking about how awesome Sid Meier is because he made some silly series of games called "Civilzorationsedness" or something like that. But, I bet Sid Meier'd never make a game as incredibly awesome and sweet as this! Take that, Sid Meier! *Simcity still rocks the cazbah* *raises the colors*

Don't act like OB1, GR... even in jest...

What are you even talking about, ABF?

OB1 is the one who makes foolish assertions based on pure opinion and holds with them no matter where the facts lead... you don't have to be that way. :)

Quote:OB1 is the one who makes foolish assertions based on pure opinion and holds with them no matter where the facts lead... you don't have to be that way.

You know you'd love Civilization. You don't want to play it much because you'd prove me right. :)

I HAVE played Civilization! Take that, Dallas Maverick's guard Jerry Stackhouse!

But, if I remember correctly, it was just Civ I, and not for all that long really... the Civ series has changed from game to game just as much as SimCity has. (and in both cases, the first game was great, the second better, and the third not as good. :))

I'm sure I'll play the other Civ games someday...

I thought Civ I was fun enough, but I liked Civ II a lot more...

Simcity 4 is awesome.

Of the three Civ games (Not including the nauseating Call to Power spin-off), I'd say Civ II is the best. It improves on the first so much, without deviating from it's core gameplay. For me, Civ III changed the game too much, I just couldn't enjoy it the way I did Civ II.

Quote:Of the three Civ games (Not including the nauseating Call to Power spin-off), I'd say Civ II is the best. It improves on the first so much, without deviating from it's core gameplay. For me, Civ III changed the game too much, I just couldn't enjoy it the way I did Civ II.

That is exactly my opinion. Civ III may be good, but it's too big a change for me to like it anywhere NEAR as much as I loved Civ II. Civ II is in my 'top 10 games ever' list. Civ III? I'd never consider putting it even close.

Oh, the two Civ II expansion packs are great... but Civ II Test of Time is worthless junk. Get Multiplayer Gold Edition and Fantastic Worlds (the only disk with all the Civ II music tracks on it...). :)

Here's a really good article that goes over the different gameplay modes. And another article from GameSpy.

And here's a thread about the game started by someone who saw it at GDC.

Quote:Wright has teamed up with European demo coders to assist the game's design, capitalizing on their reputation for putting together amazing amounts of content in the smallest data space possible.

Quote:a big emphasis of his presentation was on compression, storing model and texture data into procedural driven 1k spaces. Since all the objects in the game share the same seed its fairly easy to compress them and rebuild them using the same procedurals.

It was an amazing demo.... to go from a bacteria and zoom out to an entire solar system, albiet with visual abstraction... Is just mindblowing.

but then to leave that solar system to view other worlds in a galaxy... its uncalled for.

Quote:Well, when I said phases, I didn't mean the game is divided into discrete sections. It all seems to flow in a ridiculously organic fashion, scaling fairly effortlessly from one scale to another. There was some abstraction built into it; when you move from civilization view to the global map you're given a somewhat iconic map to work with. But the zooming from planet to solar system to galaxy is just unbelievable -- it's fast and fluid.

Also, the common reaction to this game from people who weren't there is, "Nice idea, but not realistic as a game." But he showed what appeared to be the whole experience running as he spoke on a PC of some sort. It was pretty freaking robust.

From a thread at CGTalk:

Quote:This was, quite simply and with no hyperbole, the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Even a small part of it, such as just being able to edit and design creatures, would have been groundbreaking alone. But with the massive scale Wright demonstrated, from editing paramecia up to editing your own buildings and cities and spaceship designs, it was just breathtaking.

With the creature part, you could edit and modify the spanes and scale up all parts. You could ad on all sorts of things to them, like limbs and graspers and wings and all sorts of facial parts. The skin would wrap smoothly around whatever you added, complete with procedural textures wrapping appropriately too. And whatever you created, it would walk! He stuck a third leg on a two-legged creature... It walked. He showed a weird 8-legged thingy, and it walked. He showed a creature like a push-me-pull-you from Doctor Dolittle, with 2 heads and 3 pairs of legs, and it walked. He showed an awkward mega-encephalic 8-beaked parrot thing with legs and vestigal wings, and it walked, its top-heavy head lolling back and forth ("Like driving an SUV," Wright joked.) He ened shoed whis bizarre creature (as if the others weren't) with 4 linbs, but two of them branched out into two more limbs each bearing a foot. And yes, it walked. It was just incredible: Making any kind of bizarre life form ytou can think of and seeing it in some environment moving around, attacking prey, fleeing to avoid being prey, comminicating, dancing, the works.

I'd better get some artwork done now, 'cause when Spore ships, no-one's ever going to see me again! :-)

-mike

SimUniverse?

This is going to be so awesome.

This is going to be beyond awesome. Orgawesome even.

Bojacksome even!

Of course, it could also suck.

But it'd be much better for the gaming community if it is awesome. Help gaming to move further along to fulfill it's potential. Someone needs to do it before it becomes too commercialised to give us all hope.

Will Wright has yet to dissapoint me so far, but you are right, this could turn out to be a failed work. I don't think its very likely, however, but we shall see.