f13.net

I couldn't find one to necro, but Slashdot linked to a pretty good GameSpot review of the D.I.C.E. (http://www.gamespot.com/news/6165667.html?part=rss&tag=gs_news&subj=6165667) summit presentation about Spore given by Will Wright and his team.

My personal interest in Spore is not really in doing Second Life right (with a good UI, for example). Rather, I'm very curious to see whether the vaunted level of customization they want to achieve is something you can access right away (ala CoH character customization) or is locked behind countless years of grinding.

Basically, is it a game or a world? With all this talk of abilities and features, I want to see what the user experience is moment by moment. Maybe GDC? Maybe AGC?

Some stuff that stuck out:

bring it!

yeah seriously.  There's an obvious end game of species vs species (genocide?).  How long does it take to get there?  And, how does one find other players to fight?  There's no persistent "galaxy" to inhabit, right?

I think you couldn't find a thread to necro because they're all over in the PC/Console forum.

Spore is technically going to be a single-player game, although you'll have access to content created by other players.

And this is still numero uno on my looking-forward-to list, so I am compelled to post in all Spore threads 8-)

I'm still not convinced that this game won't suffer from too much breadth, not enough depth.   Mashing together 5-6 different game types into one isn't going to allow a lot of complex development of things.

The online component is going to give folks nightmares, too, as hobbiest 'having fun' types get devoured by min-maxers' world-destroying penises of death.

The only thing this game is going to suffer from is being played WAY too much.

Spore is the one game I'm not ashamed to cheer for loudly and proudly.

If it fails, I will be fetal in a corner in the dark for at least a month.

I suspect that the game will ensure that any player-controlled species, no matter how poorly evolved, can at least hold its own against any NPC species.

I haven't really folllowed Spore too much. Will Wright or no Will Wright, any concept has to survive development and first contact with actual players. Having been burned too much, I am merely cautiously optimistic until there's something installed on my computer.

So the "single player" thing is something of a surprise, particularly in light of the PvP-esque comments they made at DICE. What's that all about? So you're playing a largely Black & White like game with SL-level of customization and can bring in the creations of others to have mock battles if that's your thing?

If so then yea, this should be moved to PC/Console. And next time I'll extend my search beyond the one sub-forum I live at :)

The way it works is that your creations are uploaded to a central Spore server (opt-in, I believe), and stuff for you to encounter are also downloaded from this central server. They're seeding it with a bunch of stuff created by the in-house Spore team, but after the few months they expect it to be primarily populated by player content.

Supposedly they have some fitness-matching algorithms that will load in things that are both appropriate for you to encounter without being too hard or too easy (although in several demos Will has had to have his creature run away from some giant fanged monstrosity, so there's probably a pretty wide range being considered).

Further, it's been stated that you can have some sort of friends list, and their content will be given priority over random people's stuff. Precisely what level of control you get is unknown. I would be unsurprised if it had options to only use content created by yourself/friends/Maxis.

Oh, and moved to PC/C, because it certainly does belong here.

First, it's original title was to be "Sim Everything" -- so it's not any form of multiplayer game. There is no multiplay mode. It's entirely single player. (Spore is a much better name, though).

You've more or less hit in terms of gameplay. As you play the game, your "world" is populated with either the creatures shipped with the game (tons and tons) or from creatures snagged off of the Spore servers -- which will also take your creatures at various levels of development.

As an example: You finally make it out of the sea and onto the land. The Spore Engine has to populate the land portion of the game with prey and predators -- a good variety. It will grab those off the Spore servers, downloading other Spore player's creatures at roughly the right difficulty to populate your ecosystem. Or when you get into space -- you'll find other civilizations, lifted entirely from other Spore players end-game civilizations.

Customization starts with the "Creature" -- from single-celled to sentiance. Then vehicles and buildings, and finally terraforming. The game is very, very, very sandboxy. The "multiplay" consists entirely of the fact that your creatures -- and all the buildings, vehicles, and motivations, etc -- can be packed very tiny and shared among other Spore players. (There's supposed to be some sort of rating system to prevent Legions of Penis People from populating your world...)

Massively single-player. Not an MMORPG in any way, shape, or form. It's also the first game I've been seriously anticipating in a LONG time.

Thanks Yoru and Morat. I think this might be the first game that, to me, actually matches the "massively singleplayer" moniker. Makes perfect sense now.

It's massive in the sense that the world is built by other players. It's not in the sense that those other players can't screw you in realtime. That seems a great compromise to capture the widest possible offering. EA has learned quite a bit from Sims vs TSO. Good stuff.

It being a singleplayer game, I care much less now about how much customization is locked behind a grind, because there probably won't be much of one. Interested still in the sort of game mechanic they plan to put between player and customization UI, but this route gives them a lot more latitude to tweak that.

Which console? Xbox 360 would be the easy guess given how XBLA works and some similarities to Viva Pinata.

Lol...Second Life.

It's just a Will Wright game. You should know what to expect.

Basically, it works like this (at least in single-cell and creature mode -- not sure how it changes in tribe and Civ-versions):

You = Single-celled amoeba. You run around (Pac-man style) in a 2-D world. You eat food, avoid getting eaten. You eat enough, you "reproduce" and can modify your structure (perhaps add a spear-like node that lets you puncture and eat other food sources, or defend from other predators). You can save up for bigger break throughs, or work gradually -- supposedly modification is huge and very intuitive.

Once you get complex enough, you go to Three-D water world or move onto land (Creature mode) -- same idea, except it's a bit more Diablo-esque. (Run around, eating food, defending youself, that sort of thing). You lay eggs, have to defend the eggs -- survival and reproduction earns you access to the editor to "evolve" your creature. You save up enough, you can unlock the Big Brain O'Sapience and move to the tribal mode -- RTS-style.

In that mode, I think you unlock new tools or such -- and once it's complex enough, you move to city mode (Populus style). Your editors design buildings and vehicles. You take over the world or get complex enough, you get the UFO -- Galaxy-Mode. Once there, you get access to all the editors and can play in the big sandbox.

Meet other civilizations, terraform planets, collect creatures and drop them someplace to fight it out and evolve, colonize the universe, etc.....

The idea is to start off simple and gradually get complex -- Pacman -> Diablo-> RTS -> Populous -> Sim-Galaxy. The "tutorial" for the sandbox (Galaxy mode) is the entire game. You learn all the editors and how to use them.

I'll play it if I can create either a borg-like entity or grey goo.

Oh -- forgot to add. Supposedly the way you play your Creature in Creature and Tribal mode influences them throughout the game. You can make social creatures, militant and violent creatures, etc. Pragmatically, it's used to determine internal "bonuses" and trigger archtypal playstyles for others encountering your creatures.

Spore is the only game in a loooong time to make me a gooey fanboi. I have to make myself not check sites for any spore updates. I don't want to know anything more until it's done. The early tech demos were amazing. Amazing like I haven't seen in a lot of games, ever. The first time he pulls back from a close third person view, pulling away from the planet as you see the atmosphere's thin shell, the rotating planets around the sun, back to the full galaxy view and starts doing SETI-style searching...wow.

I hope the gameplay can live up to the promise of the early demos, but at the very least it should be a fun and wacky game.

If Molyneux or someone like that were making it, I'd be scared. But I still trust Will to deliver a great game.

There was also a cool thing in one presentation: the way you design your units gives them attributes. Make something with armor plated hide, good defenses but slow, automagically. When you leave the editor, a 'card' is created like an M:tG card. They actually hope to make a game based just on that. And everything is procedurally generated from a few kiloytes of information, so it's very net-friendly, lots of streaming in the background (and room for a lot of stuff on the shipping medium). So these cards for your critters and tanks and whatnot form your Spore-o-pedia reference guide, too. I'm going to shut up now.

This is THE game that will make me upgrade to a new PC, Vista bullshit DRM or not.

If this game is half as good as it's potential -- fuck, if it's 10% as good as it's potential -- it'll be worth a new machine. With anyone but Wil doing it, I'd say it didn't have a chance in hell of even coming close to the hype. With Wil? I'm cautiously optimistic that it'll make 25 to 50% of what it "could be". If for no other reason than it appears he's actually got the time and budget he wanted.

And even if it sucks, I might buy it. I'll reward daring and falling short over Generic Clone XXXX anytime.

Nitpick. From what I recall of the articles and demos, there's an interstitial phase between getting the UFO and getting the FTL drive that lets you go to other star systems, where you learn about the UFO tools and such by colonizing/terraforming/modifying the other planets in your home system.

But yes, my personal plan is to build a new PC about 1-2 months before Spore comes out, but it looks like it will run in "okay" mode on my current 2-year-old box.

It's a leading reason I'm building a new pc, too. Hopefully it'll run good given my resolution limitation of 720p. Parts should be in today and tomorrow!

Grr.  Lack of a solid release date makes saving for a new machine tough.  I have no idea whether to expect a the cash to build a caddy or a kia.

Given the creator, the "within the year" release date, and the stylistic way the game is being done -- I expect even my two year old computer will run it just fine. It's not really looking like it's going to require all the shinies in the world to run.

I'm building my new computer now (using Morphiend's parts list) and figure it should handle Spore just fine.  If not, I'll add another video card.

OMG USE MAH LIST!!one!

 :hello_kitty:

Shhh.  I'm posting plausible deniability for my benefit in case ye olde wife debates our "need" for a new machine.  My circa SWG-launch budget buy computer thanks you.

If that machine doesnt, Spore has some MAJOR problems (or is delayed until 2012+)

Can I get a copy of that parts list, and a price? I bought my computer in April 2002. While a great deal of maintenance and a few upgrades have kept it working pretty well (plus a specific focus on MMOs, where the smart ones go the lcd-approach), it's time for a new one.

That's pretty much my thought.  I expected my GeForce 3 to be able to handle Doom 3 just fine (because that's what they were running the early demos on, supposedly), and that didn't work out too well, but that's only because Doom 3 didn't actually get released until several years after that.

Darniaq, you definitely need to get out of the MMO board more often.   :-)  Here's the list. (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9213.msg264894#msg264894)  It ran me about $2k after adding a Barracuda HD and a copy of XP Pro (since I'm going to be keeping my "old" PC operational and giving it to the GF as a giant step up from her PIII) but doesn't include peripherals like mouse, keyboard, monitor, etc.

New Popular Science interview (http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/f1a18906612a0110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html). Includes photos.

Mmm, planetary rings...

Mine, $2500: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9025.msg266406#msg266406

Morph's, $1700: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9025.msg258608#msg258608

Thanks!

The in-progress XP4 project : http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pCb3jLr8uzxACsWVnK_v7Mw

It changes over time as prices change and money is found in the sofa, so the final config will probably change.

Will Wright's Spore keynote (http://www.wonderlandblog.com/wonderland/2007/03/sxsw_will_wrigh.html) from SXSW.

Splendid.

I don't think Spore is going to be a "niche game" any more than Legos are a niche toy.  I think it's going to have tremendous appeal to people who see games as toys and aren't afraid to play with toys.  /me waves.

People who think games are Serious Business and aren't worth the time if they don't have a narrative probably won't like Spore.  But you know what?  Those people are a much narrower niche than people who play games just because they're fun.

I won't deny that Spore is a niche game because ANYTHING is "niche" for sufficiently large values of niche.  All games appeal to some particular subset of sentient entities that you can label a "niche".  Including wild successes like The Sims and WoW.  I just hate seeing the term used dismissively.

I find it surprising that people (in this jaded community) are getting excited about a game that hasn't been released/demo'd/seen.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see Spore be a great game because the concepts and gampeplay have fantastic potential.  But, there's still a lot that could go wrong - *cough* grindy shit to unlock the next gameplay style *cough*.

I wasn't dismissing Spore because it's niche. I want more niche games, especially on the PC whose days of non-online mass market games are fast departing. I was calling it niche because it's so much less mainstream than the Sims that predicting success for Spore based on its sandbox-y similiarities with the Sims was dangerously myopic.

Look, Will Wright has already done Spore, it was called SimWorld. It didn't sell nearly as well as SimCity, despite being a more ambitious version of City. The subject matter of Spore is niche, while the subject matter of the Sims (virtual dress up/relationship games) is a mainstream genre that hasn't been tapped for shit by game makers.

Part of it (for me) is that it's a game completely built around player content, with the bulk of the development going into content creation tools, rather than having a few kludgy tools thrown in as an afterthought.  And that it's being done by a team that has the resources to pull it off and a pretty good track record.

Another part is that every non-gamer who I've shown the Spore demo video to has said "wow, that looks really cool... when is it coming out?"  Including my mother.  If MY MOM, the same person who wouldn't let me buy a Nintendo, looks interested in a video game, we are on the verge of some sort of major paradigm shift.  Dogs and cats living together, that sort of thing.

This.

This is the first game I've gotten really excited about in a long time, and not in the least because the majority of my childhood and adolescence were spent playing Will Wright's various Sim games. I had every single SimCity2000 book ever printed, and I read them all, cover to cover, multiple times. The man is more or less my personal Jesus.

Will it be a mainstream success? I think so. But if I like it, that's all I give a fuck about. My one worry is that it will be too gamey or won't have a sandbox mode where I can just fuck around with the tools and the mid-level games and blow up planets and whatnot. I'm aware of the stellar mode, but from what I hear, there's still going to be 'goals' and shit up at that level. Once I unlock everything, I just want to run around making my own fun.

This, coincidentally, may or may not involve populating a planet with furries and then experimenting with things like the positive-feedback-loop runaway greenhouse effect slowly turning it into a molten, burning hell.  :-)

I'd be much more worried about the fact that if any one of those gameplay styles isn't fun, the whole game dies.

Or about the fact that effort could get spread thin amongst the 'stages' so you end up with a sequence of bad mini games that make the whole effort feel like a circa 1990 movie (http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/batman-the-movie) tie (http://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-st/platoon) in (http://www.mobygames.com/game/ghostbusters-ii).

I think it's entirely possible that there will be some point in the game where I'm thinking "oh for God's sake, just let me find the next foozle to eat so I can be done with this stage already."  On the other hand, though, in his various talks on this, WW has said that the "goal-oriented" part of the game is meant primarily as a tutorial to introduce you to the various editors.  He's also said that once you finish the goal-oriented bit, you've got a complete sandbox with access to every stage of the game and every editor. 

So even if I don't like one of the stages, well, I only have to play through it once, probably for a fairly brief time, and then I never have to go back to it again, even if I want to "reroll" a new creature.

My general sense is that Will wants to keep the "dollhouse" player-content aspect of the Sims (you're choosing limbs instead of choosing wallpaper, but it's really the same sort of game), while cutting out most of the grind (lest we forget, the Sims was an INCREDIBLY grindy game, with lots of tedious micromanagement needed to accomplish the game's main goals). 

I am 100% in favor.

My wife wants to play it. More than wants to play it, she's hoping it's good enough to justify grant money to buy copies for her elementary school. If it's what it looks like, you're talking about a game custom-designed for fostering creativity, exploration, and love of science in kids. She's not the only teacher waiting for the game to be released.

The best sort of learning takes place when you think you're playing, and this has a lot of potential for younger kids (and the editors seem designed to allow that sort of gameplay).

As for me -- I'm excited about this game. I haven't been excited about a game in a long time. And there's a lot of jaded gamers here excited about this game. Even if Wright fails, that should convince designers there's a market for the idea -- if not Wright's personal solution.


Sam: To me, it looks like "the grind" is hidden inside a gameplay many find fun. Pac-man, Diablo, an RTS -- you play a game to advance. And like you said -- you only have to beat it once. :)

I'm extremely interested in the technical concept of procedural graphics and behaviors. The game itself, in all the videos I've seen, has interested me less the more I've seen of it.

Some of those jaded gamers have never even liked one Will Wright game, and are just setting themselves up for disappointment.

That's the only thing that'll be wrong with this game. Too much hype and completely ungrounded expectations. As if he's making something for them all of the sudden.


Besides that one uncontrollable issue, Will Wright won't fail. He'll make a good Will Wright game, and nothing more.

SimEarth.  I had it for the SNES, and it sucked because you didn't do much in that game.  Even if you were doing badly in SimCity, you usually had *some* money to play around with, or else some slider you could dink with to get some and then do something with.  In SimEarth, *everything* cost points (money equivalent), even the slider bar things.  So you couldn't touch anything without burning points, and they accumulated very, very slowly.  Hell, even the function that let you query your little critters to see what stage of development they were at cost points.  It didn't sell well because it was a bad game.

My great fear (I've said this before) is that one or two parts of Spore won't be fun, and that will ruin the whole experience. What happens if you really like the 3rd stage but hate the 2nd? I hope they have a mode where you can just start at a certain phase and stay there or something like that.

Unless Wright was totally lying, there will indeed be that mode.

It's a life sim without MMOtards. How bad can it possibly be?

Seconded that SimEarth just plain sucked.

Better than SimFarm.

I liked SimEarth. And SimAnt.

Same. I haven't disliked any one of his games.

Now if only he'd make a Sim Survival game. It'd be the greatest thing since sliced bread.  :-)

Sounds sort of boring to me. Sim-city worked because it had so many parallels to real life, traffic jams, low rent neighborhoods, pollution that people would become addicted to solving it. Taking your "freak-o-the-week" for virtual walks around some alien sludgefarm... not so much. Of course if there are enough sliders and variables to make optimizing your monster challenging it will also scare off all but the hardcore.

Needless to say I don't see the point in being strongly pro or anti until something playable is actually released.

SimAnt was awesome.  I learned to hate that fucking human.  All he did was mow his lawn sixteen times per day.

Breed more queens... when you start spreading like wildfire because you're sending out 3-4 queens at a time (as well as the other colonies) you drive that lawn-mowing bastard right out of his house.  Buahaha

I'd be more worried about it if it wasn't Will making it, and if he wasn't more than willing to say 'hey, let's spend another year getting it right' after admitting some of the problems you just mentioned.
The one interview or lecture where he was talking about how he recruited the team because of all the cool coding ideas they had was very interesting. It should pay off pretty well.

I've already admitted to being a huge fanboi for this one. I love science and space, I just hope enough of his original inspiration shines through the long haul of development and polish to deliver the original zeal. It's kinda silly, but just the idea of starting in a drop of water and building a civilization to explore space makes me excited like I haven't been in a long time. Equally silly, the first time he pulled out the camera to the galactic view, talked about the SETI inspiration and started to mouse-over stars looking for radio signals....chills of excitement.

Add in tiny filesizes and a game predicated on shared content, and I foresee some good times. I can't wait to invade Haemish's Planet Angst.

Oh, and I'll see your transcript and raise you a youtube search link (http://youtube.com/results?search_query=will+wright+sxsw&search=Search)!

Yes to everything Sky said.


I love you man.

The creature editor is looking really polished.  I'm not quite sure how to quantify that, but it looks a lot more "done" than the early demos.  A lot more parts in the body part palette, tooltips (it looks like) saying what each one is good for, the stage-backdrop thing going on in the background... it looks good.

Also, I dig the acid-spitting ninja slug.   :thumbs_up:

I'm going to make a team of eye-patch wearing Monkies who fly Deathstars called "Revenge"

So yeah, I'm excited.

Great to see the Enterprise in action. I was hoping they would allow customization on all levels and they really seem to be working toward that. Now we'll see if they can get past the lawyers, I'd love to have an x-wing or the millenium falcon. And yeah, polish is looking good, I hope it doesn't slip again (though honestly I'm totally ok if it does!).

Looks like they cut down some features and shortened the 'microscope slide' portion of the game, which is kind of a bummer. Flagellums rule!

I'm guessing they cut it because it was functionally similar to the creature-on-land game, or it simply wasn't demoed. They also appear to have cut the fish part, where going onto land was optional, or that too might've been not demoed.

I liked the more realistic look of the earlier versions of the microscopic phase, but I can't say I'm that surprised that they opted for a softer art style. More appealing to non-science-nerds that way.

As long as I can still blow up planets.

Yes yes.  SimFarm didn't even work.  I finally gave up on it.  SimEarth also crashed a hell of a lot.  Stability is not one of the hallmarks of the Sim games, unfortunately.

Why did I think Spore was a MMO?  Was it ever announced as multiplayer?

No.

It's technically multiplayer in the way it will download content from other players from their centralized server to flesh out your pond/world/galaxy. And I'm pretty certain you can prioritize friends so we can all have Haem's Planet Angst in our galaxies somewhere.

And destroy it and enslave it's people every time it gets spawned into my game.  Muahahaha!

So I can use someone else's content but I can't play _with_ them?

Yep. It's a single-player game.

God, I'm worried this game is going to suck. Please don't let it suck.

That's what I keep thinking.  It's getting the "let the F13 crew buy it and play with it for a month first" treatment.  I recall the furor over Black and White, Morrowind II and Titan's Quest well.   It's a VERY ambitious game, so I worry about the depth of the parts that will comprise the whole.

Fucking Titan Quest, its amazing that replacing something that most people hate (b.net) with something nobody could stand even trying to use (gamespy) was enough to completely doom that one for me.  Oh that and the balance came across as totally f'd up on several levels.

Sony's answer to Spore?

Little Big Planet (http://www.mediamolecule.com/games.html)

18 minute video is worth a looksee.

That's pretty cool.  Reminds me more of Garry's Mod than Spore, though.