Spore
 

new game by will wright, as a fan of the old school E.V.O. im definately looking forward to creating my own beings.

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/595/...html?fromint=1

Wow.
 

This game looks so cool.
My dream come true...
At the beginning I read "a New Way to Think About Games", and I was like, they always say that about games that are gonna come out, and they're is nothing new or groundbreaking about them...
But the ability to toy with evolution...that rocks :cool:
I'm always reading books about how life evolved, and about spatial exploration and all that. And here it is, made virtually possible at our hands.
I love the concept. Now I just hope it won't be a deception.
But the Wright team seems so motivated I believe they'll make this good. And big.
Can't wait.

Looks simply amazing, I really can't wait

Holy shit. That has to be one of the coolest concepts I've heard in an awfully long time. We need more smart people like him running the show.

Saw this at the GDC. Still images don't do it justice. Definitely the wave of the future. Procedural methods eliminating the need for excessive amounts of content. Will Wright is the fucking man.

Downside being that I'm an artist who's whole purpose is to generate content. :(

Wright has been proclaiming the virtue of open-ended gaming for 20 years. In SimCity, users were given some content and were told to come up with a direction for it to go. Now, he's giving us an interface and the framework of a game and telling us to come up with the content and the direction.

Who knows where this guy is going next. In an age when game companies are buying out competitors rather than making games innovative enough to win against them on the market, it's good to see that there's at least one guy like Wright that still has control of his own vision.

exactly. we need guys like him.
After 20,847 games on WW2, and those on Vietnam starting to pop out from everywhere, its good to know one actuallly demands the player to be creative..We get to start from the unicellular organism...and from there evolve to an intelligent creature, form a society...conquer, explore, expand..thats just real cool. can't wait.

http://www.gamingsteve.com/archives/...f_wil.php#more

More screenshots with explanations!

I'm almost drooling over this game, I can't wait till E3 so we can get a better idea of what it will be like

I love Will Wright. His games have always been so fun. He is the kind of person the gaming industry needs more of.

Awesome. I love the concept!!! I cannot wait until we get more info about this.

That's amazing.

E3 is fast approaching... This is my most anticipated game of the year now

Ohh, You are right. When exactly is E3?

Wow, that game looks freakin awesome.

I can't wait to learn more about it.

May 18th-20th

I'm really hoping this game will come out this year.

The idea for this game is not new.

There was a game created a few years ago called "Critters" if I remember correctly that functioned similar to this game.

You created a critter who functioned by a core set of rules, but then evolved depending on what it was doing (and what you told it to do) at the time. The creators of the game then started to notice that some of the critters would actually look as though they were having sex (I'm not sure if the concept of reproduction was available in the game). The programmers did not explicity program that functionality into the game.

I've never gotten a chance to play this game, and I don't even know if "Critters" is the correct title, however, Will Wright certainly wasn't the first game designer to think of this idea.

Does anyone know of the game I am referencing? It was created in the mid-1990's.

"Creatures" was the game you're thinking of, trache. My buddy was pretty into it. I think Spore is much more interesting. I can see similarities, but this game covers a lot more ground and has a longer arc; the problem with "Creatures" is it got old quickly.

This game has a lot of potential, but so did Black and White, and that game ended up being more frustrating than fun. I like the idea of an open-ended game, but without framework, it can spiral downward.

^ Peter Molyneux fully admits that he needed framework in the game. Black and White 2 is supposed to be more structured.

Sweet! Will the creature actually remember things from level to level?

Don't know about that, but he's promised to have more conflict and semblance of a storyline instead of having disparate sandbox tasks.

I was just happy about Vanguard at E3 now I have two games!

Yes!

<a href="http://www.wired.com/news/e3/0,2879,67581,00.html?tw=rss.TOP">A Wired interview with Will Wright:</a>

I'm looking forward to this one.

I like how they're leaving religion in the player's hands, as an artifact of culture.

http://www.pqhp.com/cmp/gdctv/

Video of the presentation at the GDC. You have to "register", but you can make up whatever you want. Nothing is checked. Video is about an hour long.

EDIT: partway through, and I've already had a joygasm :crazy:

Wow. joygasm indeed. Jesus Christ...I was allready into the game, but that video was amazing...
Also, Wright is funny in the video, seems like a nice guy.
I really can't wait for this game, its the contrary of linear. Thanks a lot for the video.
Anyone have any idea of when its coming out?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...559198&q=spore

This is what (I assume to be) a fairly newish video of the game. It's a bit over a half hour long, has good pictures, and audio commentary. If this video has already been posted, I apologize. This is the first I had heard of the game though, and I have to say, it looks pretty fascinating.

My fear is that since there appear to be so many levels of the game, that it runs the risk of falling a little flat at each stage. But who knows, it may be a very satisfying sandbox type game. My other fear is that I think EA is behind it, but who knows.

Um. Wow. I have NEVER bought a game the day it was released. This will change when Spore comes out.

Holy crap!

This is the kind of game that reminds me that what we have today will look like Pong mighty soon, not in terms of visuals, but rather in terms of limits.

I'd like to see people really take up the gauntlet that Wright has thrown down here and cast aside a lot of the safe, tried and true formulas and experiment with a medium that has limitless potential.

that video is actually almost a year old... it was from wright's presentation at last year's GDC

I've been stoked about this game right from the moment I first saw that video last year

Yes...BTW, does anybody have news about the game? Release dates, new pictures, anything? I can't wait to get my hands on it. I believe that they won't fuck it up. In fact, I think that it has the potential to exceed our expectations, being so original.
E3 is soon, right? I hope to hear from Spore, and MGS4 when it happens.

best I've found is a release date of 4th quarter of this year. Too long to wait if you ask me ;)

I prefer to wait for a well polished game then get a mediocre one early...

Wright's games are usually fairly polished, SC3KUltimate being a notable exception. . .

I imagine that's why it's taking a while to come out...

Yes, that seems logical. I believe you may have mistaken my enthusiasm to play the game when it is released as a criticism of Wright and EA. It was not.

Nah I get you, I'm just saying it's not too long to wait, because I expect it to be worth the wait.

when i saw the video i almost busted a nut, that being said. This is one of those games that i'll be playing till I'm 100 tinkering with different ways to eveolve and how i can make my species better.


what Lifeform are you guys going to try and replicate for your first species.

im think im going to try and make a turtle, then find a planet with rabbits and race them

i'm gonna make a humanoid race. as close as i can to humans as possible. then make a seperate colony and make them mutate in an evil flesh eating zombies with claws etc..
will be fun to see the 2 races fight!

or i could just make a super quick herbivore that looks like a monkey with 6legs that live in trees.

i think that's one of the things I'm looking forward to the most

building competing species and putting them together on a planet and watching them fight it out.

I wanna make the cartoon characters..like Taz, Daffy Duck..
or even real animals, like tarantulas. This game is gonna rock.

Well positioned sources within the PC software industry inform me the game has been ready for some time. Delays are due to the Department of Homeland Security, who are considering blocking domestic sale of this game for fear it could cause widespread drops in productivity. They're petitioning the DOJ to ensure sales go first to China, India, and Russia so they can observe effects on adversarial economies.


Seriously though, this game looks like it could be the crack-cocaine of software. M-U-S-T S-T-A-Y A-W-A-Y.

Does not compute.
I'm already hooked, and haven't tried it yet. Just thinking about it makes feel like a 6 year old on the night before christmas.

i dont think it'll affect me too much. even the craziest games dont keep me interested for long. and i mean lenght of a session. i still play games that came out 10years ago. i just dont play for hrs on end.

Will this be a strictly pc game, or will it also be for consoles? Anyone know?

word on the street is that EA is hiring people to port it to handheld consoles...

i doubt it will be on TV consoles, this is one of those games that wouldn't be as fun on console, just like sim city and warcraft 2

Well then, I hope I don't need to spend an arm and a leg to upgrade my pc to play. :)

Thanks for the info, Ace & paca.

prolly going to need around a gb of harddrive space, and a decent video card

I've seen two posted release dates that say 16. October 2006 and 24. October, and a handful that teeter across Q3/Q4 of this year. Also, to the earlier discussion about this being like Creatures and not being a new concept... that's like comparing a matchbox car to a Saleen S7. Sure, they both physicall look like cars, but one you roll around, the other you DRIVE. The concepts of the two are quite different. Creatures allowed you to build a creature, sure... but not with as many dynamic options. It also didn't have RTS elements or extended sim elements or interaction with other players content. Silly people! :-p

i dont think it'll take too much room on your HD. i mean everything is procedural and you create all your creatures. nothing is preset as far as i saw from the video.

i wonder if the sound effects are diffrent depending on the structure of the creature. ... i hope this comes out soon!

Yeah, specs-wise I'd be suprised if it was too intensive. The screenshots show the graphics to be GOOD, but not "life-like" per se, so the poly count is probably reasonable enough. And yeah, the procedural coding of everything means the actual data footprint of the game, including downloaded content (asynch content), will probbly be pretty small.

What quarter of the year do new video cards come out in? Or does it change from card to card?
Also, when they do come out, do the older cards always drop in price as a result?

Woa, wow, wowza...how did I miss this? Can't wait to see how this turns out.

Freman... video cards can come out year round. There's some ryhme and reason to it, but it's mostly marketing and PR, so, who knows. And yes, older cards will inevitably drop in price. I really doubt, however, that you'll need too much horsepower, video-wise, for this game.

And yeah, Zeraph, I'm in the same boat. I first saw anything about it yesterday. It's the sleeper hit of the year apparently.

I also just ran across this yesterday, and was/am still amazed with it.

I picked up the April 2006 issue of Wired magazine today. It has Will Wright on the cover, and has a very small "sneak peek" of the game. If you've seen the video, you've seen everything this has to offer, except it says "EA will release Spore next year." Quite a wait ahead... dammit.

I wonder if it will be Vista only. . .

haha Shakran, I doubt it. Halo 2 is only going that route because of Microsoft Game Studios. I REALLY doubt MS can convince Maxis to go that route. Especially since I'd be shocked if it wasn't dual-platform right from the beginning (Mac/Win) and that would make it laughable to say it "required" Vista.

Can't wait to see it.....

And like some of the previous posters, I hope I don't have to spend an arm and a leg to upgrade for it.

I dunno that you really will unless xepherys is wrong - in which case you'd have to upgrade to run Vista. And xepherys makes a convincing argument. . . I'd bet he's right.

I think it was the gamespy article (but I'm probably wrong) that compared Spore's graphics processing to the processing-on-the-fly graphics they used to have in the demo scene. From what I understood (and again I could be wrong) it's essentially the same concept. Anyone remember Future Crew? They were getting stunningly good graphical animations to run on a 286. I wouldn't be surprised if this game will run on even low end systems.

Well, the procedural calls that build the creatures, make them work and design the world you play in means that code is pretty slim (events don't have to be coded as much) which means less CPU intensive decisions in the game (for the most part).

My guess is the only actual traditional graphics will be the interface. . .

It seems that way from what's been shown so far.

Yes, they said that the focus was to make it as small and efficient as possible. Each creature file should only be a few Kb each. And the system requirements should be laughably low compared to most contemporary games, and this game will probably blow them out of the water in the FUN department.

Play games not graphics!!

It's on my list.

I'm buying it as soon as it comes out. Normally I wait for a few months, to see what reactions are, but I can't see any reason to wait for this one.

Trailer:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...=spore+e3+2006

Demonstration:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...=spore+e3+2006


And:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...=spore+e3+2006



w00t!


Also note that GameStop is now taking reservations!

fuck that looked good!

Robin Williams demos Spore ... +50 for being awesome

ahha! that was freaking awsesome! plus, now we know how easy it really is. :thumbsup:

So the program crashes at the end of the Robin Williams demo? Oof.

Yeah, I heard about this in an interview with Wright for The Week magazine, and he definitely made it sound really cool. You can tell that the man is a genius.

He definitely has put a LOT of thought into this project himself, so I think we can count on it being pretty damn intricate and encompassing. Not to mention fun.