So I just watched a Spore gameplay video. Game Of The Year (Insert release year here).

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=83...198&q=spore

I've always loved Will Wright and Maxis, but good god... I was never expecting something like this.

His previous games have had a habit of being much more fun to play than their concepts would lead you to believe, and this one looks a hell of a lot more fun on paper than any of them did. Also, it's always nice when a game proves that it's possible to achieve massive amounts of success without throwing equally massive amounts of money away during development. Publishers need to be reminded that hiring Axl Rose to do some voice work isn't the answer.

From the looks of it, Spore will probably run fine with any decent processor from the last three years. High compatability has been a trademark of Will Wright games.

Yay someone watched the video I linked to :P

Oh yeh this game looks flipping awesome, and it's being designed by Will Wright, so that makes it look very promising, given his track record. I don't even believe in evolution but I still think this game looks flipping sweet! Lets not start a debate or anything here this is a thread about a game, not philosophy, it was a statement of my belief and what not so yeh :P but yeh this game looks to be crazy awesome. The video's pretty long (35 minutes) but worth the watch if you have enough time.

Oh yeh if anyone's wondering, the reason Mach said that the development costs aren't as ridiculous as most games is because the entire gameworld is procedurally generated, meaning that everything in the game is generated at the time you play it, rather than the content being premade by artists like most games. This includes textures, environments, actions, etc. If you watch the video you'll see what I mean.

The editor as well is crazy awesome in the level of depth and creativity you can have, this game's really going to give people a ridiculous amount of customizability. I mean, you can customize practically everything; your creature, your buildings and vehicles (when you get to that stage) and probably some other stuff, but the level of customization is just insane. This can be at least partly contributed to the level of procedural generation that this game employs, namely, the entire game uses procedural generation. This means that when you design a creature, the way it moves and all of its actions are generated by the game code based on things like it's bone structure, etc., they call these actions "procedural verbs". The textures are also procedurally generated, I'm not quite sure how they determine that, i.e. whether you say what colour you want your thing or whatever I don't know, we'll have to wait I suppose.

I suppose I'm ranting now but it's just because it looks so damn cool, I mean it's not like procedural generation hasn't been used before, it's been used for years in the demoscene... er... scene, but this is the first time it's ever been used on such a scale, as in a whole game, and it really decreases the disk space the game requires as well, just take .kkrieger as an example - a fully 3D First Person Shooter which is entirely procedurally generated and only takes up 96KB of disk space! Granted, it is a fairly short game, but that's still ri-flippin'-diculous.

Also, Spore is, as Will Wright calls it, a "Massively Single Player Online Game", meaning content is downloaded from other players, which you can interact with. It's not Multiplayer because it's asynchronous, meaning you download other players' content but you don't actually play with them. Because all of the textures are procedurally generated too, the files which are sent and received only have to be very small, Will reckons 1KB each! Anyways it looks really cool... Just watch the video, if you got this far I commend you :P

Oh and click here for more on Procedural Generation and here for more on Spore itself... Anyways thanks if you read that it was quite ranty and probably mostly pointless, at least if you've watched the video but thanks... kbye :P

Have you posted a topic on this before? I couldn't find it at all? That was a huge post dude, you should be opening up your birthday presents. Just joshing, happy birthday man. :) By the way I found the full 1 Hour Video, enjoy!

Hopefully we'll get it before 2007, although it's most definitely a highly complex game, and i'm sure Will wants to get it Wright! :P

Wow, what an amazing looking title! Thanks for the link. Definately a new look at gaming, I'd buy this.

:nooo:

That is incredible, from a coding point of view I couldn't even begin to imagine how they went about creating such intricate concepts over the broad spectrum of the game. That truly is amazing. This is what a game should be like in this millennium.

Well, it certainly sounds interesting. I think I'll leave the 1 hour video loading overnight and watch it tomorrow.

Wow, mods for this will kick ass. The possibilities are endless.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v228/Kit...oreDarkMoon.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v228/Kit...eOceanWorld.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v228/Kit...hiitakeMoon.jpg


original concept art from the guys at SPORE about planets they have in mind. Aren't they uber cool? (Sorry for the file size!) the art makes me wonder, will certain plants behave as predators? You know, will they move? Because there are some that look like swamp tentacles, or they have teeth.

Post edited, since it stretched the page too much :)
borgster

wow that vids cool naa wouldent have expected that

This game is looking nothing short of amazing.

The customisation looks great, and the overall feel of the game seems to attract me (and a whole bunch of others).

It reminds me of such classics such as Impossible Creatures. Man that was an awesome RTS. You basically got 2 animals, mixed them together however you want (Alright i want an elephant head and back legs on a cheetahs body etc) and fought with them. That game needed true strategy.

This game however offers the ability to not keep it just a hybrid of 2 animals, but a whole new creature.

And who knows what kind of online content there might be, such as mods, and "show off your animal" online threads.

Awesome

What will your race be like? My first creatures will probably be orcs dunno why just might be some fun i'll try and keep it looking very tribal even in space age bit, but then again i might think differently when playing the actual game.

My race will probably be deformed and twitchy due to my hands shaking with boyish glee when I'm attempting to sculpt them.

Well seems very advanced in coding, with good graphics too... Cant wait to try this out and how all the coding will fit in together... *DAMM i need the source code to this, could be a good learning project :)

Check this out, It's the latest build and was filmed back in March 2007. Totally awe inspiring.

Army men. That way I can share them across all other players' planets and they may witness the mating call of the army!

However, I am skeptical of the game. Besides customization, it doesn't seem like you can do very much. You are a little thing, then you grow out of the water (or stay in it if you wish) and then kill stuff and mate with another animal of your time. After doing this, you get a tribe and do some stuff, then a civilization and do some stuff, then go around in a space ship and blow stuff up and repeat the whole thing over again and again on new planets. Sounds a bit too much like the Sims.

This game will *snip*

/backslash: keep it clean

That's nice.

I think it looks fairly interesting simply in concept.

Well dang it, now the curiosity is killing me.

he basically said "this game is going to be totally awesome" - I couldn't agree more, Jim. Couldn't agree more. ;)

For some reason I thought Spore would also be on the 360, could have sworn I saw it on the "coming soon" line up for 360 games on Gamespot.
I just saw a vidoe of it yesterday, and I was all hyped then I checked to see what it would be on and got all dissapointed. Maybe my PC can handle it though

yeh I think there's been speculation about it being released on all sorts of consoles, so we'll see... Even so, it'll be a long time yet before it's released...

Will Wright said something about Spring-Summer 2008, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does a Stalker and lands somewhere in 2009.

The project is hugely ambitious. It's impossible to set a realistic release date in all honesty. It's tough though, because I'm desperately looking forward to this.

The universe shall crumble under my imperialistic hand! :P

I dunno though...I can see Spore being flawed. Once your species has conquered a few planets, I can see boredom setting in pretty quickly, just like The Sims. Once you've succeeded, there's very little do to. That's one of the problems of having the game as one giant sandbox.

I agree. It appears that Spore has little going for it except customization. Now if we add the price to this, which I figure will be about $50 then you will essentially pay a lot of money for a creature creator. Seeing eight-eyed monsters and teddy bears gets old after a while, so why buy it? I'll stick to Capitalism II, pinkos.

While going farther then it's brothers, Capitalism II could have gone farther still. Why not take advantage of the SeaPorts and Airports (Shipping tycoon) What about some Cities Services (Banks, Garbage, Power, Water, Internet). Hopefully CAP II raises the bar for a CAP III.

Regardless, I really want to like Spore, but it just seems repetitive as anything. Can anyone convince the skeptics? Or do you pretty much admit it is repetitive.

If anything Spore is the opposite of repitative, to me it's the most creative, random game ever.

I think its repetitiveness depends on your imagination, but it seems incredibly deep and the opposite of repetitive, to me. Practically everything's customisable, I suppose if you think creating things is repetitive, then maybe it could be repetitive... :huh:

The Sims 2 is pretty customizable too. Granted, not nearly as much as Spore but that isn't the point. The point is that whatever you will be doing WITH your creations will be repetitive.

Lets quote Mrdie again:

(Why did he get banned?)

Long story short, he just talked a lot of crap.

Shame. He seemed like an intelligent man.

He seemed like he spent a lot of time trawling up wikipedia articles to regurgitate :P

Enough of that though, Spores the topic on hand :)

When I first heard of Spore I thought it would be some game where your a demon from hell or something..

Anyway, yeah it looks like a lot of fun :D

We get a demo two weeks before release as stated by the Maxis team! :D

so late 2009, then :P

yeah I'm really excited about this game along with Crysis. I am gonna have to upgrade my PC by the end of the year though, 8800 here I come

I'd just like to point out that if you're planning on running Crysis at high detail, you'll need more than an 8800GTS 320MB, because a friend of mine's in the Crysis closed beta and he has a 320MB 8800GTS and he can only run it at medium detail at 1280x800. I imagine you'd have to have 2x Geforce 8800Ultra's in SLI to run in full detail...

Anyway, back on topic :P

I am really excited about this game, we don't know a lot about Spore, except you create life, you whole life.

I am really impatient, EA and Maxis have focused all their strength on that game.

We are an original game, just hope it will be good.

Wii or PC? If you have a really old computer, and have no desire to upgrade, but do own a Wii, then the Wii version would be the way to go.

I'm still not excited.

It hasn't been confirmed for Wii yet has it? I know Will Wright mentioned he enjoyed the Wii. So I'm hopefull for a Wii release!