Thursday 26 June 2008

Spore of the devil.

Anyone who is not excited about Spore is dead inside:



That video is three years old, and still inspires anticipation with every frame. And now with the release of the creature creator (which everyone is talking about), the scope of what has been developed in the last three years is becoming obvious. Sandbox games tend to be addictive, but sometimes lacking in creativity, substituting storyline for repetitive grind. Addictiveness, I have no doubt about - from the creator of The Sims, we have come to expect no less - but will it be fun?

And that's the one potential worry about the game - will, after the initial burst of excitement, there still be a challenging game to play underneath? Or will it just be a case of doing whatever you like, however you like? The problem with the latter is that total freedom isn't fun, because there's no sense of achievement to anything. I'm reasonably confident, though - with amazing scope and a great looking presentation and concept, it'd take a gameplay flaw of massive proportions to sink it.

Despite mentally pigeonholing myself as a 'gamer' I generally only buy a couple of games a year (time restrictions more than anything else), and this is a dead cert for my Autumn purchase at this point. Short of GTA4 or HL:e3, Spore is the most exciting thing I can imagine having in my hands.

4 comments:

James said...

I have also been excited about spore for some time. And this is partly my worry, if it's taking this long to come out, what's wrong with it?

It could be minor things that they are taking their time over to make sure the game is as perfect as possible (I hope), or, it could be that there is a fundamental flaw in the game play that they are struggling to get around(I fear).

Stalker was similar in inspiring great anticipation in gamers, bordering on it being a revolution in gaming. The developers then found that game was actually way to hard to get right in play and balance and released something that was good, and a bit new, but not what had been hoped for.

That said I've heard that the developers of Spore have a 3-D printer which they use to show off their creatures to their colleagues. It's possible they're all just wasting their time playing with that.

TheTelf said...

I'm less worried about the time Spore is taking because throughout that time there's new stuff incrementally being revealed. The release of the Creature Creator particularly is an indication that not only are they nearly ready to release, but that they are confident of the look and feel of the final game.

Frankly anything that takes less time than DNF is fine in my books...

Hanspan said...

What's Spore? I have surmised it's some sort of kom-pew-tah gaim but what does this involve?

TheTelf said...

It's reasonably well demonstrated in the video in the post, but if you haven't got 40 mins to kill, the wikipedia article should explain roughly how it works.