Hands-On with Spore

We were lucky enough to get a visit by some folks at EA this morning, who popped by our offices to give a quick preview of the eagerly awaited game, Spore. The game, of course, has been in development for some time now. Said one of the company's reps, "You know you've been working on a project a while when people have had two children."

Early on, the game was being referred to as Sim Everything--and after our quick demo, it's not tough to see why. It might be a touch hyperbolic to suggest that you can create anything using the game, but after the hour or so run-through that we were given, the possibilities are seem pretty close to endless. And according to that same rep creatures made with the game now inhabit "billions of planets." Fortunately the game's creators have apparently been breeding like mad themselves, and those kids have been hard at work designing their own creatures, so when the full version of the game launches in September, there will plenty of inhabitants spread out across the game's cosmos.

Before the game's full launch on September 7, however, EA will be releasing a Spore Creature Creator, on the 17th of this month, so users can get a jump on making their own unique creators. The Creature Creator is just one-third of the larger game, but EA acknowledged that like the Sims before it, plenty of users may get hung up on this one element and never really expand into the Tribal or Civilization sections of the game.





After a quick demo, EA handed the reins over to PC Magazine Editor-in-Chief Lance Ulanoff, who quickly began the creation process. It's fascinating to watch. There's an impressive amount of intelligence built into the Creator--it's based on a procedural animation rather than traditional animation, meaning that new creatures instantly react to the traits that you give them.



Spore offers an impressive amount of customization--colors, styles, textures, limbs, mouths, and highly customizable spines. Change the legs, and the animal will have a completely different gait. Reshape the mouth, and its call will change entirely. EA did a quick scroll through the creatures that had already been created in-house by beta testers, and by the aforementioned offspring of employees. The sheer number and variety of creations is impressive, especially in light of the fact that the game has yet to launch publicly.

Once they've created their creatures, users will be able to share them through e-mail and third-party sites like social networks and video sites, including YouTube, with which EA has a deal going.

As mentioned above the Creature Creator is but a fraction of the game, which will launch in its entirety later in the year, for Windows and Mac machines. Mobile and DS versions will follow. When asked about the possibility of further console versions, EA answered that it was certainly something they were considering, so long as new versions offered something unique from the PC versions.

The company is referring to the larger game as a "universe in a box." Your creatures will be able to wander the planets, conquer and befriend different creatures (created by other users), and evolve with the help of DNA, which is the game's currency. And while breeding and evolution are easy, death isn't--there's no aging or game over in Spore.

I'm sure we only scratched the surface with our demo. Truly the most impressive part about the game is the incredible depth of the Spore universe--and thanks to the nature of the game, it's only going to keep getting deeper as the game grows. It's for this reason that EA semi-jokingly refers to Spore as "massively single-player." We couldn't have put it better ourselves.

It's really impossible to convey the breadth of the game in a blog post or a quick YouTube video. It's the kind of thing you've really got to get some hands-on time with. No worries, though--the long wait will soon be over.