Wednesday May 10, 2006 A Look At Will Wright's E3 Spore Presentation

The show floor opened up this morning to early-access press only and I headed straight for EA’s booth to check out some of their offerings. In addition to Crysis and Battlefield 2142 playable on the showfloor, there was a Spore presentation being ran by the master Will Wright himself. Here is an overview and some screenshots of what he had to say.

The demo started with a first look at Spore’s main menu and showing the separations amongst the play-types. On the top are the games (various levels) and on the bottom are the editors. These span from space, to creature, to environment and so on. We were only shown (due to time) the creature editing and level and the space level.


To start, Will showed an overview of the latest creature editing system. He mentioned that almost all parts of the editing system, from hands to the mouth, control the creature in its entirety – from its personality to the way it sounds, etc. In addition, the color system is a procedural texturing system that lays initially colors, then various textures (scales, etc.) and more all on top of your creature model. It looks like an incredibly intricate system, as has been seen quite a bit so far in previous videos. It looked like it was nearing completion and would allow for endless possibilities.


From here he moved on into the creature mode and showed some basics of living the life of your creature. There are a lot of possibilities when it comes to the gameplay here. He showed attacking and fighting using simply the keyboard and mouse, all relatively simple control and movement. In addition there is a social bonding element between other creatures of your species, other creatures entirely, friends, mating, reproduction, and advancing your creature through evolution. In order to move from one step to the next in terms of evolution and generations, you must find a mate. Once this is done they will lay eggs and once you click on one you are taken to the creature creation screen to manipulate your creature and create the “next generation.” From here you are brought back as a baby and must eat and grow again to continue this process.


As has been often mentioned, Spore is a combination of game ideas like Impossible Creatures as well as gameplay from games like The Sims, Civilization, and many other RTS games. Watching this video and hearing Will talk about this it really did become evident that this was exactly what Spore is. He mentioned during the creature mode part just mentioned that this is similar to RTS gaming in that you begin building your culture and start putting together cities. Moving on to the space level he described this gameplay changing more to a Civilization-like game.


As was previously mentioned, the game takes data from other gamers collectively on the internet and populates this data into the system. This ties in almost everywhere, for example, when he chose a spaceship to build to leave his planet it populated the choices with “other people’s designs based on what you may like” taken from how you’ve designed your cities, buildings, and creatures so far.


The space mode has developed quite considerably since the GDC 2005 video (of course) and has a few very nice new features. When navigating across the galaxy and looking at planets, you can mouse over one and there is a small set of sliders that show information about the planet, specifically whether it has wildlife, an intelligent civilization, or the atmospheric features (cold, hot, forested, etc). Another really cool feature is the Sporepedia. The Sporepedia is a card deck where there is a card for absolutely everything that you create and is available in the game – from galaxies to creatures to cities to buildings. The galaxy is incredibly vast and has many different possibilities of alien races to be encountered and planetary conditions.


To give an idea of just how vast the galaxy is, Will stated that there would even eventually be wormholes discoverable and used for navigating and showed us a brief glimpse of a blackhole appearing and providing a similar effect. The final new feature that Will showed was the com screen. When he was attempting to communicate with a newly discovered alien race, it messaged him after he attacked and he had a choice to apologize or respond in a few ways. In addition, his own species back at his home planet contacted him. Will said that messing with aliens could be disastrous because with friends and allies you could turn a whole lot of people against you if you anger an alien race because of their allies and friends (across the galaxy). Definitely sounds awesome to mess with!

Another awesome feature Will mentioned was bookmarking. If you have a friend who plays and you find his planet and want to keep receiving his creature data, you can bookmark it to receive that. Basically a way of actually staying in contact with friends when it comes to the data that is constantly being downloaded from their databases.


The game looks much more complete and just as exciting as the GDC 2005 video. Will Wright’s presentation was quite entertaining, with a lot of comical “oh whoops” when he accidentally ran his creature into more powerful creatures that were going to kill him. The game is truly a combination of many different games and ideas and in that aspect continues to be of the most unique games coming out soon. Will Wright’s ingenious nature behind it has brought together almost all of the games that he has developed to present a much richer and vast offering. Spore should definitely be a game to look forward to no matter what your favorite genre may be and no matter how much you enjoy RTS, turn-based strategy, RPG, The Sims, or almost any games out there. Spore will most likely be released in early 2007.

- Written by Alex Billington

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