Friday, February 15, 2008


They were showing “Spore” in Manhattan this week, in the back of a club called Branch.
And the rumor I heard was that they’d let you play it.
I did play it — for maybe 20 seconds — and also sat for an informative presentation by the game’s lead designer, Alex Hutchinson.
I had seen “Spore” before. I had read the saturation coverage on N’Gai Croal’s blog, my mind blown by Will Wright’s explanation of the Flickr and Facebook touches incorporated into this already-ambitious game.
I thought I knew it all about “Spore.”
I was wrong.
Hutchinson was already showing the game to other reporters when I wandered over last night. He was sitting on a semi-circle couch, driving the game’s creature editor on a Windows PC. I had used the creature editor before — two E3s ago — and made some creatures, poking and prodding bulbous aliens to life. Hutchinson was doing that too, every few seconds shaping them with the ease of plopping pieces of Play-Doh together.
“I expect a portion of our audience to never play the game,” he said as he clicked an icon to make one of his creatures walk. “They will make stuff, share stuff, and send it around.”
I realized I had walked into a demo by a designer who was eager to show that his game wasn’t really just a game. In fact, from what he kept on saying, hardcore gamers should really think clearly about what they want to get out of ‘”Spore.” They won’t be getting hardcore gaming thrills.
The developers at Maxis have thrived making games that have broad and casual appeal. This — to an extent — is one of them.
So to find out who this game is for, whether Maxis expects the graphics to turn off middle-aged “Sims” fans, to learn a lot of small details, and to find out what you can do if you see a giant phallus walking through a world in your copy of “Spore,” read on.

Hutchinson had been keeping busy. I know this because he didn’t appear to have received the press release earlier this month indicating that “World Of Warcraft” has reached 10 million paying subscribers. Nevertheless, he made a confident point — and really summed up the goals for “Spore” — when he compared the “WoW” crowd to that of “The Sims.” With the new game, he said, “We would rather get that 120 million than the nine million.”
And how to do you get that “Sims”-size audience? Maxis hopes the answer is by making “Spore” the world’s coolest version of Photoshop or YouTube…by making it the wildest content-creation tool available on people’s computers… by making sure that people can’t help but create, create and create some more. It’s not as important that it’s a gamer’s game, he was saying. The five playable stages of evolution — Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization, Space — have been tuned. But, he said, “the games are specifically designed to not be that complex.”
Remember that quote above about how he expects a lot of “Spore” players to not even play the game? He’s serious. This game is all about user-generated content. And showing that stuff off. (Neat surprise: while Hutchinson was showing me the creature editor, he clicked a camera icon and it produced a pop-up window with a YouTube logo. It prompts you to send a clip of your creature directly to that famous site.)
The creatures players create will be sprinkled throughout the game’s servers. When new aliens amble over a hilltop to hug your species or chew them — when you land on a new planet to see what’s what — you can rest assured that the aliens were created by someone else “playing” “Spore.”
Earlier this week news broke that the game’s creature editor would actually be released for free before the September 7 release of the PC and Mac game. That will get the content-creating going before the public plays the full title.
But, wait. Doesn’t that mean that the many people Hutchinson thinks won’t go beyond the content creation tools won’t need to buy the game? Actually, he explained, only the creature editor will be released for free. The game’s other 15 or so editing modes — UFO creators, building creators, vehicle creators, etc. — will only be in the boxed version. (An EA PR rep told me that a release date for the creature creator hasn’t been picked yet but that it will likely be available a month or two before the full game ships).
Given all the user-generated content coming even before the full game comes out I asked Hutchinson if Maxis was going to create any creatures to ship the game with. He said they would create a “few thousand” to ship with, for people who want to play the game offline, without a connection to the game’s content-rich servers. But a few thousand is a small drop. He said they are expecting “millions” of creatures to be created and available by users on day one of the game’s launch.
I wanted to know if Hutchinson had created himself in the creature editor. No. Realistically-animated humans aren’t really possible, at least not intentionally. “We made a conscious decision to make the rigging blocks not one-to-one with real humans or animals,” he told me. Future “Spore” creators, consider yourself challenged.
As for the game parts of “Spore,” the five stages — Hutchinson skipped showing me the cell stage. It’s “Pac-Man“-esque and designed to be played through in 15 minutes. By adding parts to their cell creature it will be destined as a carnivore, herbivore or omnivore.
He showed Creature mode. This is when I asked to play. It’s a 3D action game at this point. He used the mouse to move his creature near another, and clicked a red button (it’s next to a green one) to activate mean actions. The only one available was bite. So I took the mouse, putting finger on button, and clicked. My creature started biting, repeatedly (damage-over-time-style, it seemed). A herd of other creatures walked over and killed me. Such is the way of the wild.
We dashed through the RTS-like Tribes mode, skipped Civ and went to Space. He selected a spaceship shaped like a unicorn and flew it to a barren planet. There was a time when the “Spore” developers were going to let players create planets. Not anymore. The computer does the work. He selected a unit code-named the Genesis Device and, with a spreading burst of light, the barren planet below began to be covered with life. He landed and was met by new aliens, all of them googly-eyed.
I asked if there was a problem with the graphics. Not that they weren’t working, but were they possibly a little too cartoonish or goofy to appeal to the crowd who like “The Sims”? Were middle-aged moms going to be turned off? “That possibility was inherent in the there to begin with,” he said. “When you say you’re going to be making aliens, exploring space, that’s kind of a nerdy thing.”
I asked about missions. A year ago, at the 2007 DICE Summit, Will Wright hosted a panel featuring his “Spore” design team, and they talked about missions in Space level of the game, computer-generated tasks to kill monsters on distant planets or make peace or whatever else might be possible. Hutchinson said the thinking has change. Those on-the-fly missions will now be available in multiple phases of the game. They’re color-coded as red (mean) or green (nice). Kill this. Be nice to that. That sort of thing. Again, it’s not too deep. The game is, for a game, sounding simple. The glory is supposed to be in the creation.
Back to the idea of creating things, then. It should be noted that there is no button in “Spore” to randomly create a creature. You can’t do what you might do in a face-creator in a sports game, just hitting the randomize button and seeing what pops up. You either build stuff yourself, go into the game’s theoretically infinite Sporepedia interface and find cool creatures and things created by other people or you just explore “Spore”’s five million solar systems and discover what kind of content the game has pulled from the servers itself. The content in that interface, by the way, can be filtered by name or type or other categories. And it can be accessed by the Web, so that people who are at work can find creatures and have them zapped to their copy of the game at home.
All of this was exciting, but I wanted to know how the game was designed to deal with the more nefarious side of humanity. What if I created something in “Spore” and decided to try to charge people for it? (Actually, is that nefarious?) Hutchinson pointed out that no one would pay for it. “Why would you, when we’re giving it away for free?” he said. There’s no way to “own” content, so chances for a “Spore” gray market seem slim.
Okay, but what about illicit content? “You can have a penis car flying into a vagina house,” he said, more colorfully than I expected him to. “If you want to live in penistown, that’s fine. We’ll give you the filter to ban it out.” Hutchinson didn’t show me any filters for that kind of content in the Sporepedia, but he did show me the ban button. If you’re playing the game and see content you don’t like, click on it and it will be banned. It won’t vanish until the game is restarted, but after that, it will be banned.
The game was impressive. Everything I described was conveyed in 30 minutes that involved consistently engaging creature-creation and adventuring. The game didn’t look any deeper — any more like a hardcore game — than Hutchinson said it was. But it still looks irresistible, something you want to touch.
But my PC at home isn’t that powerful. Am I boxed out? I have an Apple laptop. “Your MacBook will be fine,” Hutchinson told me. That’s all I needed to know. Demo over.

This content was originally posted on http://entertainews.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

No comments: