Eurogamer is dishing out the goods with a celebration of Spore! They declared this week to be Spore Week and will bring you special coverage of the game from a recent visit to the Maxis Studios. To keep things cleaned for SporePrograms, I’m going to post all of their information in this thread to make it easier for me to update, as well as easier on you to find the newest details!
Eurogamer Spore Week: Friday
Monkeychow67 asks: There are supposed to be many many easter eggs within the game, honestly, about how long do you think it will take for the players of spore to find them all? Also…will one of them involve llamas?
Lucy Bradshaw: I can’t reveal the secrets of our easter eggs! We do have some treats in there, and we do have some fun effects etc that you can find in the cheat console that will be fun – stuff like effects that can change the look of the game.
Nextstep: What kind of anti-piracy measures have you taken to try and stop Spore appearing in the wild?
Lucy Bradshaw: We do have copy protection, it is a necessary part of our biz, but we’ve worked to make it something that does not punish the legit owners. You need to authenticate once at the first install. This happens online. You can install on three separate computers and you do need to register for the online features.
Spore executive producer Lucy Bradshaw has put the kibosh on there ever being a demo for the game.
Speaking exclusively to Eurogamer readers in today’s live chat, she said the released Creature Creator will be the only playable way to trial Spore.
Bradshaw went on to reveal that the flora editor will not make the final cut this September, but will be put in eventually “as it is fun to work with”.
Eurogamer will round off Spore Week today with a surprise live interview with executive producer Lucy Bradshaw at 5.30pm UK time (6.30pm CET / 9.30am PST).
Later today you can also look forward to a full Eurogamer TV Show about Spore including loads of footage from our tour of the Maxis studio.
Eurogamer Spore Week: Thursday
Guess what, absolutely nothing! 🙁
Eurogamer Spore Week: Wednesday
That Spore can form the basis of thoughtful broadsheet articles, where Wright expounds on the collective ‘metabrain’ and gaming’s treatment of the human condition, is an unalloyed good for those eager to see the industry taken more seriously. But with the game due for release in four weeks, there’s a rather more pressing question on my mind: is it actually, you know, fun?
To begin to form an answer to that question, I’ve been whisked away to Maxis HQ in San Francisco to spend a few hours with a practically final build of Spore and speak with Wright and his team as they enter the home stretch of a mammoth seven-year journey. (You can read the full interview with Wright elsewhere, and watch highlights on Eurogamer TV.)
Eurogamer Spore Week: Tuesday
Spore Creatures (DS) – Out in the world, you’re exploring simple, slightly stylised 3D islands with plain textures and geometry, but your little creature, his friends and some of the foliage are 2D sprites that rotate sweetly depending on the position of the third-person camera. Getting around is easy thanks to stylus controls, although if you prefer buttons you can fall back on those for a mixture. A map on the top-screen points out items of interest and mission objectives, while the ever-ready Sporepedia tops up your knowledge and alerts you to incomplete objectives.
Eurogamer Spore Week: Monday
“I didn’t expect to hit hot buttons on the atheist side as much; I expected it on the religious side,” Wright revealed. “But so far I’ve had no critical feedback at all from anybody who is religious feeling that we were misrepresenting religion or it was bad to represent religion in the game. It was really the atheists.”
Most criticism of religion in Spore is from “militant atheists”, claims Wright News
Wright on the idea of a Spore MMO:
However, with the advances in technology featured in Spore, as well as the lesson learned from The Sims Online, Wright believes that turning his new IP into an MMO is certainly one option on the table, stating: “That’s not to say that one day we might not do a massively-multiplayer online version of it, but it’s just not the most interesting initial unveiling of it for me.”
What’s next for Will Wright?
“There are a lot of other projects waiting in the wings that I’ve been doing early research on that, when Spore ships, I’m going to sit back, take a deep breath, and look at these projects and consider which ones to dive into,” he told Eurogamer, in an exclusive and wide-ranging interview published today.
As an added incentive to check it out, we’ve teamed up with Electronic Arts and Maxis as part of Eurogamer’s Spore Weekto offer a very special prize to one lucky reader: the chance to have your favourite creature made into a real-life desktop model. As you can see from the photograph to the left, these hand-made models are a bit of a collector’s item – and they will be designed to match your creature’s specifications. They stand around 12 inches tall, although this depends on your creature, and will take EA’s arts and crafts department 3-4 weeks to produce and deliver. Just in time for the launch of the game, then – and you’ll also receive a copy of the Spore Galactic Edition.
Eurogamer: Do you believe in God?
Will Wright: I’d probably be best described as an atheist. I’m open to the idea that there is some creator somewhere. I can almost envision humans one day being able to create a micro-universe. That’s not to say we could ever interact with it, but it could be that the physics equations for a singularity are the same as for the Big Bang, which is that black holes in our universe could in fact be embedded universes that we will never be able to contact or get information from.
But if I can imagine that humans might one day have that power to create these universes, there’s no reason why some other intelligence above us created ours. That’s not to say that was the original designer, or the designer at all – maybe it was just an accident.
So at that level I’m open to the idea that our universe was created; but probably there’s not a guy with a long white beard looking at everything we do, just personally those are my beliefs. [With Spore] we didn’t want to go too far down that path: we leave the whole creation of the universe question open. Obviously as the player you’re coming in and playing something like a god, directing the evolution of a species, but we never really state who you the player are.
