WW: I don’t think it was widely reported, but alongside this whole [Stupid Fun Club] thing, I also entered into a consulting agreement with EA. I’m spending a certain amount of time every month actually working with the Spore team on future versions of Spore and expansions. So I will [still] be involved with EA on developing the Spore franchise as well.
IG: Well, fans will be happy to hear that. With that in mind, considering a theoretical Spore 2, what about the first Spore would you like to change or improve upon for a sequel?
WW: As soon as we released it, because we’re giving so much involvement to the players, we ended up learning a lot from seeing what the players do; we’ve already seen a lot of unexpected stuff happening in the player community that we’re learning from. We’re finding out cool areas the fans want to bring the game in, what direction they want the tools to go, what experiences they’re enjoying in the game the most, which levels they enjoy the most. So I think now we’re at a maximum learning where the fans are going to be steering the franchise as much as we will – they have their hands on the steering wheel too. We’re listening to criticisms of parts of the game, we’re looking at parts that were unexpected successes and we’re going to go in other directions with Spore.
I think part of it is stuff we wish we had done, but it’s more what we see the fans wanting us to do. We’re going to probably add more depth to different areas of the game – and we’re certainly already doing that with the Galactic Adventures expansion pack – and we’re also taking output from the tools in different directions, so you can take your creatures you made in the creature creator and bring them into different experiences.
When you get Will going, you get alot from the dude! He chats with Industry Games about many topics – the Stupid Fun Club, whether we’ll see Spore on PS3/Xbox 360, Artificial Intelligence – and more!