The Spore Supersite
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GDC Spore Video Review
During the first 6 minutes, Will Wright introduces the topic he'll be covering during the following hour: Spore. There are a few important ideas he emphasizes during this time: He praises an interactive gaming experience over a static experience in which the users are only a part of the story line instead of creating one. To back up the fact that a personal interactive gaming experience is going to become more attractive than a static experience, Wright cites the popularity of the Sims and Grand Theft Auto: two games that are very open-ended.
Wright discusses the idea of quantity of content in relation to quality of content. At this point, when he mentions "content", he's referring to the various objects inside of a game; physical objects, environments, sounds, visuals etc.. He notes a growing problem that newer titles are beginning to reveal: the amount of content required to be competitive with big gaming firms is increasing by an enormous amount and will inevitably be the downfall of smaller independent gaming companies. Since Wright opposes this happening, he mentions a way that he believes this doesn't have to happen: by creating titles in which the content is created by the gamer.
It's a totally logic point of view, the quality of gaming experience derived by creating the story line, greatly outweighs the quality of gaming experience of just being a part of the story line or “going along for the ride”.
The next 3 1/2 minutes he starts off by reminiscing of how back in the day when computers were in their infancy, there was not much data in which to store content. Then with the emergence of CD ROM, game developers were blown away by how much data could actually be stored and thought ways of how exactly they can utilize all of that data. One of the most prevelent games in which the data offered by CD ROM was fully exploited was Myst. The high resolution worlds as show in somewhat of a slideshow became huge as it offered a gaming experience never seen before. He mentions however that while he loved the Myst series, he always wondered how cool it could be if he could have created the world.
"They worshiped algorithm."
Wright points out that while all of the data hype became huge, a certain amount of developers stuck with the old ways and focused on developing code algorithmically. Quantity of data to these people didn't mean as much as creating code that yielded spontaneous results. Nearly all of these type of developers evolved by cracking games. On there releases, they would sign their handle. It became somewhat of a competition. Eventually, as time progressed, their animations grew to be quite impressive. This 3 1/2 minute portion basically sums up that while high data game programming was mainstream, others still made use of procedural coding.
At 9:40, "Probably a more accurate title of this talk, what I learned about content from the Sims; why it's driven me to procedural methods; and what I now plan to do with them. So what I did was recruit a team of elite developers, skilled in the old ways." This is the exciting part where he begins to lead into Spore. He doesn't generally release demos, but since he loves the GDC (Gaming Developers Conference) he decided to show off what they've been working on: Spore.
1. drew130 - Apr 09, 2010 06:26 AM
please...no multiplayer
2. sporeman100 - May 10, 2008 07:03 PM
Multiplayer spore is like starting Age of empire 2 without any resources and villagers. it is a HORRIBLE IDEA TO HAVE MULTIPLAYER!. PLEASE, DON'T DO IT!
3. LePedro - Aug 21, 2007 04:01 PM
They better update this...
4. bulbmin - Aug 21, 2007 01:07 PM
no multiplayer, i don't want my empire blown up when i'm not playing right then!
5. I_WANT_SPORE - Jun 21, 2007 12:11 AM
i think it should be both single and multiplayer, keep this idea he hs going for single player and than have the player be able to create or play a copy of his creature in a mmo style world so they can have the great feeling you get when you blow the shit out of an opposing players massive galaktic civilization formed of thosands of little pink bunny-lions
6. wertyi33 - Mar 25, 2007 09:56 AM
No me awsome!
7. Shady - Mar 11, 2007 05:12 PM
"Well, there is a poibility that Will Write will do somwthing amazibg. Ah..
8. sporeforeverme - Jun 29, 2006 07:32 PM
I watched the video of it.
9. pocketdemons - May 24, 2006 01:18 PM
This article mentions multiplayer - just wanted to note that there is NO multiplayer function and that is sort of misleading.
9 Comments