GameSpy have a lengthy feature on Will Wright's fascinating new project, Spore.The article is a little old (from a March presentation he made at the Games Developers Conference), but interesting reading nonetheless.
The man behind SimCity and The Sims idea with Spore is partly born out of a lesson he learned from The Sims - namely that players like to create their own content and customize their experience.
In Spore, rather than having an army of artists create thousands of different animations for players to construct their characters with, Wright aimed to let the player take control of every aspect of that building process by using a dynamic modeller built into the gaming engine.
As such, Spore lets the player build their characters literally from a micro-organism, creating the bodily features that let it first step out of the ocean, gaining "upgrades" like brain-power and the ability to build, and eventually the knowledge to build a UFO, achieve space-travel and explore the universe:
Spore populates the universe with creatures and cities created by players from all over. There's almost nothing in the world that wasn't at some point created by another player. Wright discovered someone else's civilization, a curious four-legged race who carried tridents and lived in cities with pointed walls and towers. What happened next was entirely up to Wright: he decided to try to communicate with the other species using a bizarre Close Encounters style mini-game. His UFO played music and waited for the aliens to respond.
They responded by shooting him with lasers. What followed was a crazy War of the Worlds space invasion shootout, with Wright's UFO blasting the city with ray guns while missiles and lasers bounced off his ship. It wasn't going well, so Wright flew up into space and then fired off the ultimate weapon. Suddenly, the alien planet exploded in a cataclysmic orgy of molten destruction, forming a new ring of asteroids around the sun.
Will Wright Presents Spore... and a New Way to Think About Games via Waxy.org/links
Spore: six different themes of gameplay: tidepool, evolution, tribal, city, civilization and invasion
Will Wright wows GDC with new Sim
Will Wright on the Wikipedia
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