What Spore May Spawn 205
ches_grin writes with "A new look at Spore, including a slideshow that examines the broad influence that the game is expected to exert on fields ranging from law to education. From the article: 'Spore's unprecedented level of user-generated content is sure to send ripple effects through and beyond the video-game world. Could the mass-market game provide the tipping point for the burgeoning retail trend of mass customization? How will it redefine the roles of game designers and publishers alike? We asked a variety of experts to predict the economic, educational, legal, and other effects of the game.'"
Sounds cool... (Score:3, Interesting)
I read it - sounds interesting - but come on... (Score:3, Interesting)
Does this mean that my "planet", which I spent 2 months building after I spent 3 months evolving my race, can be wiped out by an evil player who simply wants to nuke everything in site? I hope I have time to spend 2 months on defense systems...
Another year to release...wow. Nothing ever lives up to the hype.
The jury's out... (Score:5, Interesting)
With that said, even if Spore isn't as great as everyone makes it out to be, I'm hoping it will spawn a new class of games that use procedurally generated content for some incredibly unique gaming experiences.
Re:None of the above (Score:5, Interesting)
The interesting thing is that his target hasn't been 'gamers' for a while, if ever.
And I still see non-gamers playing with their Sims and virtual doll-houses longer than I could think humanly enjoyable.
They don't play his games because of his creativity, inventiveness and reputation. They don't have any idea who Will Wright is, and to be honest, they would never call the Sims 'creative' or 'inventive' in any way.
They still play it because it is just a game, and they enjoy playing it.
And maybe because they didn't have to spend a quarter of their free time honing reflexes and virtual skillz to 'p0wn and not be p0wned'.
Re:news story? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I read it - sounds interesting - but come on... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, your planet (or your species, rather) will appear on planets in other players' game instances. Interactions between those players and your species will be local to their game only, and not affect yours. Imagine it this way: instead of Spore shipping with a set of "other" creatures, it will reach out to a central DB and pull back creatures created by other players. Your creature may end up dominating my puny one-legged hoppers, but you'll never know.
Re:I read it - sounds interesting - but come on... (Score:4, Interesting)
then get back with us..
But serious to answer your question the online portion is not true multiplayer. Your creatures and buildings characteristics INCLUDING your playing style will be uploaded to a server in which other players can download from (purposfully for some things like architecture that you want in your city or automatically like other competing races). The computer will then play these races against you. From what I understand these competing races will be placed based upon your current level meaning you will never face an enemy that completely outmatches you and can wipe you out with a flick.
What idiots. Spore != only game with customization (Score:2, Interesting)
When you made a D&D character in table top games that was customization, games are adding more and more options in for that, but it's been around for ever. MMORPGs tend to have a great deal of customization as well. And Spore isn't even the only game that has such indepth customization. Remember a game called The Sims? Maybe you know the lead guy on it? Will Wright?
Customization is a growing area of gameplay, however there's a problem with it. Once customization grows to large games have to be built around customization, rather than customization built into the game. The problem is 99 percent graphics. If I could have any type of character then either hit detection suffers, or level design suffers. If my character can be 7 feet tall or 1000 pounds of blubber, then every door way I should have to go through needs to be those dimensions which looks odd to the 4 feet tall character. This isn't a problem when you work in a world system where you make homes as the player. But in a large scale world, there's limitations, in most games the world has to be designed with every player type in mind.
This brings us to Hint 2: customization is good, as long as the game doesn't suffer for it.
Will Wright makes free form customization games, Sim City, Sim ant, The Sims, all of these are simulations where you can create what ever you want in the game, where there's no real win condition, and where the player plays how he wants to. There's "scenarios" in these games but that's about it. That's his goal and that's what he excels at, I'm happy for him.
But that doesn't mean every game is going to have aliens that you can design. They won't. People want to play humanoids at worst, and humans at best. They might want to grow aliens, and that's a possibility, but you won't see it "ripple" through the field. You'll likely see the same levels of customization. Saint's row is currently coming out with decently indepth customization, this is coming out before Spore, so does that mean Spore is copying it? or it is copying spore? Neither. Customization has been coming for a long time, we just needed better systems and programmers to generate it.
Does will wright have a lot of flux in the world and a lot of people copy his ideas? YES but Spore isn't going to revolutionize the industry, the Sims already did that. And it was already being done before that point. We will see crap like "the singles" or what ever crap they made based off of the sims, there was a couple of them, and each one was a fraction of the sims. Those same types of games will be based off of Spore, but no, the level of customization that Will Wright touts is not going to exist in the entire industry. FPSes will continue to use humans, RTSes will continue to use set standards, the only games that will allow you to create new monsters and such is... that's right, Will Wright-esque sim games (as well as stuff like Monster hunter and so on) The rest of the industry will keep using the customizations we've had in the industry for years, which is growing pretty indepth.
Which leads us to Hint 3: Brains are for using, not for sitting on.
Optimism springs eternal (Score:3, Interesting)
I assert that it WILL prove to be a fantastic game; but that the rest of the game industry will be notably UNrevolutionized... because this is exactly what happened before.
2000. The Sims is released. This is a totally new type of game; in some ways, a totally new form of fun. It sells through the roof, and to this day, there probably hasn't been a week that's gone by without The Sims or one of its sequels or expansions being somewhere on the Top 10 best-selling games list.
Logically, this should be a watershed. In terms of the game industry's history, this should be on the level of the release of Wolfenstein 3D, or of Dune. In other words: a game this fun and money-making should spawn many other games like it; which will at first be sneered at as "rip-offs"; but in fact people come to realize that this is a new genre, and each new entry brings something new to the table. Then, sooner or later, someone (e.g. Blizzard in the RTS and MMO genres) will create a fantastically polished new entry that pushes the genre to its next level.
But what happened with The Sims? We got "Singles" and "Playboy: The Mansion." That's pretty much it. There was no rush to make new "people simulators." The Sims still has essentially no competition - it is its own genre. Why hasn't it spawned a new genre? Lost Garden has some ideas about this. [lostgarden.com] I think it's a combination of being unwilling to take on the difficulty of a really hard game design problem; combined with an ironic risk-averseness (what could be less risky than following in the footsteps of The Sims? oh, I know, continuing to crank out FPS and RTS games); combined with developers being too proud to make something someone might call a "rip-off."
Whatever the reason, I think it's going to repeat with Spore. Game developers have become too narrow-minded. Not only do they not try to conceive of a radically ambitious new type of game - like Spore - but even when one plops in their mist and draws the multitudes to it like the Monolith in 2001, they look at it for a moment and then go back to picking fleas off each other (i.e. making platform games) like they've always done... because they like doing that... and that's they're used to it... and they'll be totally safe doing that... until they get their skulls bashed in by the few apes that were smart enough to learn from the Monolith, that is.
The game industry as a whole - mainly publishers, but many developers as well - is resisting change. They didn't attempt to adapt to The Sims, and they'll be similarly complacent in their response to Spore.