Savegamer

Spore?

Wow. A week ago i watched the E3 preview of this game featuring Will Wright showing off some of the aspects of the game. I was quite blown away by the whole concept when i first heard of it, but now when i've seen it in action i am completely sold. My only question now is if it really is a game or just a sandbox. The mechanics seem to imply completely open ended and 100% editable content, which sort of restricts the challenge/reward incentive. If you haven't heard about it yet, the game lets you start out as a single microbe swimming around in a little puddle, eating smaller creatures and evolving. You will be able to customize your creatures by earning points and eventually you will grow into a fully developed creature ready to colonize the world, eventually the whole galaxy, sounds neat right?

To our great despair, the game wont be released until mid 2007. The game seems rather finished but i think what is holding it back is one of the biggest features, which is online content sharing. Basically as the player-base starts getting creative - their creatures will be uploaded and then downloaded into your world. There is no true multiplayer function, it's more like an automatic downloadable content feature. Now this will of course result in more than one planet of walking penises but other then that it seems great. It will of course have a tag-function for inapropriate content but it doesn't seem waterproof to me. The other thing holding it back - beyond the immense amount of balancing and bugfixing a game like this would need - is EA, who basically said "Get this one right" and gave Wright all the time he needed. EA seems to have economical troubles and will need another The Sims to keep up.

In my opinion, this game has a good chance of becoming a critically acclaimed hit. It will ship to all platforms and due to the childlike simplicity and intuitivness of the interface it will capture players of all ages. Sales will be huge. But, Wright has established the width of this game but little is known about the depth. I am personally guessing that for the hardcore sim-enthusiast, this will be boring. There are of course creative nerds out there who love sandboxes and will experiment with the editors to no end, but what about the rest of us? I want to create life, destroy galaxies, engineer diseases and discover the 8th dimension. You see these people who are deviantly lurking every little Spore forum on the web, hunting new bits of info and going to bed at night with the word Spore on burned into their retinas after a hefty flame war about intelligent design, are actually the ones i think will get bored first.

Not only will they get burned out on the game before it's even released, but once it is, they will realise it's just a game and not Hitch hikers Deep Thought. It's just a compilation of minigames with some nifty editors built in. I'm not saying Wright is full of shit, but it isn't quite "simeverything". It's more like a Tamagotchi/Marioparty hybrid powers of 10. I myself got caught in the hype for a few weeks and this game seemed like a gaming-heaven tailored just for me. But then i remembered Fable and Black & White 2. What makes this different? Oh right, user-created content. So, you're telling me that having my personal universe invaded by half-assed, homemade, bullshit, pokemon-wangs is the answer? I've seen the ideas, the problem with user-created content is that regular people dont create good content. It's just a bunch of spiderhounds, ligers, dragons etc. "Yeah you see, it's like a Zerg, with the head of an Alien and it can fly... Cool huh?!". The whole game is gonna look like a drawing straight out of kindergarden.

But hey... Its Will Wright.