Spore

[manny_c44]

shhhhhh, don't let the others know

[lailoken]

ok let me elaborate on that (gimmick I mean):

two examples of monumental game ideas that ended up as mere gimmicks:

Black and White which was supposed to be the end all be all of all god-games with this neat idea that you would have this creature as a representation of your personality within the game. As we all know it ended up being a god game with this gimmick that you build this creature and teach it new stuff. Not a bad game but just not what it was supposed to be!

Fable which was supposed to be completely open, where you could do anything and the world would just respond to that! And you were supposed to be able to write your own "epic adventure" with that. Well that didn't happen did it? The gimmick here was that for the first time you had a character who could be completely customized by the way you played... wait that sounds a lot like the Black and White gimmick... but it's different since it's an RPG ok?

So I am afraid that this ground breaking game is going to make one of its groundbreaking features work really well and because implementing everything would take too much time they will only go part of the way and use what is working so far and make a good but not groundbreaking game out of it that has this gimmick.

In general I think trying to do something different for the sake of differentiation is wrong! Yes you should always think about what can be done differently but only if it serves the purpose of the game!

[hermes]

Well- both of your examples was games made by Peter Molyneux - and while being a great game designer he has a tendency to overhype his own games - thus creating exactly the situation you describe.... Will Wright on the other hand is - in fact - not Peter Molyneux...

I see your point - and one should of course always be careful with ones own expectations. But to judge it different for the sake of difference is just unreasonable bad hype - especially when Will Wright is behind it....

[Chris]

Also, Will Wright's games tend to be fairly concept-driven, whereas Molyneux at least lately more often just promises a bajillion features. Wright's games often have lots of distinct features as well, but they tend to be built around a grand procedural design that seems way more scalable than the games of most designers. Spore is just even more scalable than any game ever. I mean I'm taking this game with a grain of salt but, honestly, if anyone can do it it's Wright.

[baconian]

"if anyone can do it it's Wright"

a concesus (SP?), it appears.

I played simlife and simearth and couldn't believe it (didn't get to simant yet, supposed to be the best one). The complexity that he gets away with isn't there in other designers' work.

He somehow manages to sell these longshot ideas while being able to prove their mathematical rigourousness in stability, as if they were theorems, but proving that they won't crash. It's consistency of design more than anything else, I reckon.

What do I know, I'm on opium tonight.

[loonyboi]

What I saw looked smooth. I can guarantee that it will be easier to pick up and play than Civilization.

As someone working on Civ 4...

HEY!

Them's fightin' words.

[manny_c44]

Loonyboi I thought you said you did PR?

Anyway I thought Civ was always pretty easy to get into. ...I'm not sure a visual presentation of Spore is enough to just write off one of the most intuitive games of all time.

[loonyboi]

Loonyboi I thought you said you did PR?

I do. Civ 4 is one of my games.

My impression is that it's more of a toy version of Civilization. Same for SimCity. The idea isn't to give a full-on super simulation of running civilizations and cities, but to get a distilled essence of that stuff.

I think it's a bit early to make guesses about what it's going to be like...the reports I've read make it sound like a souped-up version of Populous, which is totally awesome as far as I'm concerned.

[Marek]

From CGTalk:

This was, quite simply and with no hyperbole, the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Even a small part of it, such as just being able to edit and design creatures, would have been groundbreaking alone. But with the massive scale Wright demonstrated, from editing paramecia up to editing your own buildings and cities and spaceship designs, it was just breathtaking.

With the creature part, you could edit and modify the spanes and scale up all parts. You could ad on all sorts of things to them, like limbs and graspers and wings and all sorts of facial parts. The skin would wrap smoothly around whatever you added, complete with procedural textures wrapping appropriately too. And whatever you created, it would walk! He stuck a third leg on a two-legged creature... It walked. He showed a weird 8-legged thingy, and it walked. He showed a creature like a push-me-pull-you from Doctor Dolittle, with 2 heads and 3 pairs of legs, and it walked. He showed an awkward mega-encephalic 8-beaked parrot thing with legs and vestigal wings, and it walked, its top-heavy head lolling back and forth ("Like driving an SUV," Wright joked.) He ened shoed whis bizarre creature (as if the others weren't) with 4 linbs, but two of them branched out into two more limbs each bearing a foot. And yes, it walked. It was just incredible: Making any kind of bizarre life form ytou can think of and seeing it in some environment moving around, attacking prey, fleeing to avoid being prey, comminicating, dancing, the works.

[Roderick]

I'll pretend not to have read that to preserve sanity.

[loonyboi]

This was, quite simply and with no hyperbole, the most amazing thing I've ever seen.

True or not, that sentence is total hyperbole.

[Erkki]

I just read it. Didn't I predict something like this a year or two ago?

[Fum]

True or not, that sentence is total hyperbole.

If you really work in PR, then I'll trust whatever you say on the matter of hyperbole, since that's pretty much the foundation of your profession.

I played simlife and simearth and couldn't believe it (didn't get to simant yet, supposed to be the best one).

Oh my good god, SimAnt! I'd forgotten about that game, had so much fuckin' fun with it growing up.... Man, just the thought of that game makes me want Spore ten times more then ever.

[Marek]

Photos from the presentation.

Edit: and here.

I'm pretty much owned by those screens of the creature construction tool.

[SiN]

those look absolutely stunning!

SiN

[hermes]

Photos from the presentation.

Edit: and here.

I'm pretty much owned by those screens of the creature construction tool.

Marek, you really are a bot - trawling the internet for news about spore.... I can just sit here and wait for the stuff

[Marek]

At your service. New previews here and here.

I just look at what other people link to on different industry forums.

[Kolzig]

Here's also one site.

[Ninja Dodo]

I have my doubts about procedural content. Computers are not artists, animators, writers or designers... If you look at something like Endorphin which is supposed to replace motion capture and even animation by simply generating character movement through algorithms, the results are not actually that convincing. It's cool and could be used for some stuff, but I don't see a computer coming up with The Incredibles or Grim Fandango.

Having said that, the game definitely looks and sounds promising.

[MrHoatzin]

...the results are not actually that convincing.

I beg to differ, son. Also note that their demo mainly shows people being kicked and shot and herds of horses running into a stray cloud of sarin gas. I assume that the running algorithms are also theirs, and they too are not that bad. Hell, Poser has some decent walking algorithms to play with.

[baconian]

I have my doubts about procedural content. Computers are not artists, animators, writers or designers...

sort of missing the point. Can programmers be artists, animators, writers or designers? Doing something yourself (eg. creating a texture) and writing software to do it are similar things. You have to think about exactly how you're doing it when you write the program, and include your own ideas on exactly how it's going to be done, just like you do when you're making it by 'hand'.

[MrHoatzin]

The artistry unique to video and computer games lies in this sort of game moreso than in any adventure or action game. Adventure games and action games get their artistic legitimacy from their movie-like qualities.

True games are things like Spore -- a shotload of tweakable processes that create something.

[Chris]

Agreed. I do think that projects like Facade are beginning to show that such procedural approaches can be undertaken in a narrative setting too, however. I mean I don't think it's necessarily as "pure" an example of it as a Wright game, particularly something like Spore, but it's interesting.

[Ninja Dodo]

Don't get me wrong. When I say 'not convincing' I'm not saying Endorphin is not a seriously impressive system. I'm just saying the end result does not look to me like a person doing stuff. It looks like a robot that's been taught to walk like a human. It's moving, but it's not alive.

You can code a program that understands the mechanics of a walk, but you can't make a piece of software that understands emotion. The same is true of all procedural things. They may be scientifically accurate, they may even look nice... but at the end of the day it can't compare to something that was deliberately created a certain way by a person with an idea.

Looking at the screenshots of Spore I'm going to guess they are using some handmade artwork as well as procedural stuff - which I think is the way to go, really... combining the strengths of both.

What's interesting though is that in a way the gamer becomes the artist, sculpting his vision of the world. My point is, without an artist, be it the designer or the player, procedures can do nothing but sit there and generate random stuff.

[Ninja Dodo]

I agree with you though, Kingz, that there's a time and a place for grand artistic visions and that's probably narrative games moreso than games like this... but even then I think a healthy combination of creative material and flexible interactive systems is a good thing.