Spore

Written by Jason Cisarano  on June 04, 2007

First Impressions: Not a game for the creationistsЧ or is it?

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Will Wright is nothing if not ambitious. First he created the sim genre with titles like SimCity, SimAnt, and SimEarth. And then he hit it big with a little game called The Sims, which spawned seven expansion packs and a sequel with six expansions and six УstuffФ packs released so far. Not content with simming individual lives, cities, or even the whole Earth, Will Wright has now set his sights on bigger game [ed. note: the working title was SimEverything]. He's currently at work on Spore, an all-encompassing life sim that starts players out with a single-celled organism and allows them to evolve it into intelligent beings who will eventually be capable of intergalactic space travel. How will developer Maxis make this huge amount of material and turn it into a manageable game experience? Well, it looks like at least five playable phases, shared user content, and a really well-designed creature editor are the order of the day.

The phases in Spore look a lot like the different islands did in the old game Black & White. In each one, you'll have a variety of tools at your disposal, and you'll be learning new skills and building on what you did in previous phases. Like Black & White, there won't be a predefined end to the phases. If you enjoy playing the Tide Pool Phase, you can keep at it even after you've accomplished the goals and earned the points necessary to pass on to the Creature Phase.

The Tide Pool Phase will have players controlling simple organisms at the cellular level and competing for resources against other, similar organisms. It'll be a 2D, top-down perspective as if the player were looking through a microscope. Players' creatures will chomp up resources in the environment and even fight against other creatures as they learn the skills needed to survive. After the player wins small victories and accumulates enough УDNA points,Ф they gain access to a УCreature EditorФ that allows them to spend points and customize her creature to make it more competitive.

Maxis has spent a lot of time on the Creature Editor in order to make it as powerful as possible while keeping it user-friendly. It seems like the goal is to allow any player to jump in, edit a creature, and have it look good with a minimum of effort. In the early stages, the creature editor options will be simpler: the editable creature starts as not much more than a gelatinous blob with a simple spine. Options increase as the game progresses, and the player will be able to add literally hundreds of different appendages and features ranging from benign stripes and feathers to tool-capable hands to offensive armaments like claws and spikes. The team is likewise putting in a lot of work to make sure your creature behaves right when you get it in-game. That is, no matter how many legs or arms or tentacles you add (or where you add them), they're making sure that it will be able to walk around and interact with the environment and other creatures.

Beyond just defining the look or abilities of a creature, modifications in the editor will also define the creature's behaviors. For instance, giving a creature a mouth full of sabre-toothed-tiger style fangs will define it as a carnivore. Other features and limbs will define other behaviors and characteristics which become a permanent part of the creature's personality, so how you build the creature will define its disposition to a certain extent.

At the same time, the play in the early phases of the game will also help determine what kind of УpersonФ the creature will be when it grows up. In the Creature Phase, the player will work to increase the gene pool by breeding with other creatures. Behaviors will also be defined according to how the player has the creature interact with others. If the creature fights constantly, the creature will become aggressive and violent. In the Tribal Phase, the player will be able to develop all sorts of tools for the creature, and the character of the tools will help define the character of the creature, although it hasn't been revealed yet how many or what sort of behavioral parameters the creature will have.



Play in the Tribal Phase and beyond will become more RTS-like, since the player will no longer be in control of a single creature. From this point on, the player will control a village, a city, and eventually a whole planet populated by the creatures they've nurtured since pre-infancy. As already mentioned, the Tribal Phase involves developing tools while developing the creature's character. In the Civilization Phase, the creature's technology will have advanced to the point that they will be using vehicles and building complex cities. Two new interfaces, the Vehicle Editor and the Building Editor will allow players to customize their technology just as much as they customized their creatures. The final Space Phase will also have a UFO Editor so that the player can build spacecraft and venture out across the galaxy.

During the Space Phase, players will be able to either colonize uninhabited planets or visit planets already home to other species. Once they've achieved sufficient technology, players' creatures will be able to terraform distant words, changing their geography in order to make them more hospitable. In this phase and the previous ones, the player will always have the choice as to how to interact with the cultures encountered there. Options will include everything ranging from trade and diplomacy to forming alliances and waging war.

It's not clear yet exactly how many phases the final release will include. The official site shows five phases: Tide Pool, Creature, Tribal, Civilization, and Space, while a recent presentation added an initial Molecular Phase and inserted a City Phase before Civilization. It also split the Space Phase into two parts: Terraform and Galactic. But no matter how you slice it, Spore will offer up a full plate of action, since each phase will include player generated content, and the final space phase will offer a galaxy full of planetsЧmore than anyone could explore in a lifetime of play.

Which brings me to one of the most impressive tech elements of Spore. Sure, the graphics will be good in a light-hearted, cartoonish kind of way. And it can't be easy to allow players to seamlessly zoom from a closeup of an individual building to a view of a whole planet from space. But what's most exciting about this game is that all of the content of those tens of thousands of worlds will be either user created or generated on the fly by the game itself. Every creature that you or your fellow players create gets uploaded to a central database, and then downloaded to your machine as needed by the game. This includes not only appearance, but also all that behavior you taught it as it was growing up. So as you explore unknown territories in the Creature Phase or unknown planets in the Space phase, the game draws from its database of creatures designed by other players. Areas and landscapes will be created on the fly by the game and adjusted for your creature and your style of play. So if your creature is so tough that it's walking over all its neighbors, the game will find an opponent of suitable skill to provide a greater challenge. And if you send a UFO to an uncharted planet, there's no telling what you might find there, since the game created that world specifically for you. Players will also be able to swap content like vehicles and buildings and track how popular they are with others. Even though content is shared this way, there will be no true multiplayer component in which you compete directly against other players.