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Will Wright's SPORE

Visbhume

Prophet
Joined
Jun 21, 2004
Messages
984
I have read elsewhere that Will Wright's next will possibly be a space exploration/simulation game. Has this been confirmed ?

I hope it's so. This kind of games coming back to the mainstream would be great. Fond memories of playing Frontier until late hours of the night ...

Also, somebody should make a "realistic" space trading game based on the Orbiter engine. No hyperspace, no aliens, no "photon torpedos". Just a heavily settled Solar System with foreseeable future technology. O'Neill colonies, space elevators/tethers, mass drivers, solar sails... Not that realism should be a requisite for all space sims; but except for Frontier (somewhat) and maybe for Independence War, there are very few games of that kind.
 

Screaming_life

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Joined
Oct 29, 2004
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On Maggie's Farm... No More
X2 is ok but it feels like each sector is a room with 4 walls.

Have you heard of Entropy?

Website


Entropy is a space trading/piracy/bounty hunter/free form styled 'Elite genre' game, attempting to bring modern technology to the era. The feature set includes:

* Transitionless, seamless game play and graphics, from Galactic to Planetary to Cityscape scales
* Elite style space-trading game in space, with Hardwar style game play on surfaces, with many new and unique features to both themes
* A universe consisting of billions of unique planets, cities, cultures and trade items, with both real and procedural star systems
* Server based massively multiplayer economy, resources, story and universe, influenced by singleplayer gaming
* Fully realised planets with cratering, canyons, polar caps, trees and alien flora and fauna
 

PennyAnte

Liturgist
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Dec 10, 2004
Messages
769
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Here instead of playing an RPG.
@Screaming - I haven't, but thanks for the link.
@Vis - On Will Wright, I could have sworn I read that too and am looking for more info.

EDIT:
In a Feb. 27 interview with GameSpy, here's some Q and A, but it doesn't say much.

Fargo: I heard through the grapevine that you're working on a new franchise, a totally new project.

Wright: It's kind of important. You know, EA especially is very good at taking franchises like The Sims or Madden or whatever it is and doing them year after year and building a very predictable income stream. And what's really important is, that's part of the business, and the other part of the business is how do you take the money you're making from that, and reinvest it into new, creative cool things? You know: How do you build the next franchise? So yeah I think Maxis is actually one of the groups within EA that I think that they're expecting more in that direction than some of the other groups. Because its not, say, sports: It's out-of-the-box thinking.

EDIT #2:
Sorry, I haven't found more. I've searched a ton of sites, including Slashdot, Blues News, Shacknews, GameSpot, GameSpy, SPOnG, Boomtown, IGN and some lower-end sites. It's possible I missed a newspost or missed a section off a main news area that might have had it. I know I've heard that Wright's next thing will be space focused and feature a living universe and such. I read it yesterday, March 4, before heading off to sleep. I'm sure there's more info out there somewhere.
 

Visbhume

Prophet
Joined
Jun 21, 2004
Messages
984
I haven't played X2, I'll try to find it for cheap somewhere.

Screaming_life, thanks for the link to that Entropy game. It appears to have all the things I liked in Frontier, to the nth degree. I hope that guy doesn't pull a Derek Smart, and the game delivers.
 

Fez

Erudite
Joined
May 18, 2004
Messages
7,954
X2 has terrible and unbalanced combat. Seems like it has good modding capability though. There is an expansion pack due out soon, you could wait until a gold/multi pack edition comes out and get them together. I'm hoping they've worked on the lackluster combat system.
 

Sol Invictus

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Oct 19, 2002
Messages
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Pax Romana
X2's biggest flaw is the interface and controls. Even on a joystick the game plays sluggishly, nothing like Freespace 2, or Freelancer which was a mediocre game with the BEST controls.

Combat is pretty shitty, too.

On top of that, the rendering engine is poorly optimized. The game plays fine for the most part, but the game completely chugs during cinematic sequences. Speaking of which, those cinematics are awful. Having to watch a 5 minute sequence of some guy walking down a corridor to talk to another guy about delivering cargo is completely unnecessary.
 

chiefnewo

Liturgist
Joined
Jun 18, 2003
Messages
118
My X2 experience:

Watch cinematics.
Fly into space.
Fire on pirate.
Pirate runs into me and we both blow up.
I uninstall X2.

Considering I wasn't moving around a whole lot in the fight, it would be nice if the AI had some "don't suicidally ram the player" code in there.

Luckily I had just borrowed the game from a friend, so I didn't lose any money on it. :)
 

Screaming_life

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Oct 29, 2004
Messages
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On Maggie's Farm... No More
Visbhume said:
Screaming_life, thanks for the link to that Entropy game. It appears to have all the things I liked in Frontier, to the nth degree. I hope that guy doesn't pull a Derek Smart, and the game delivers.


Yeah it does look good!

I love his FAQ Thread:

4) What is the final number of ships in Entropy?
Infinite.

5) How big is the Entropy universe?
Infinite.

10) How many galaxys or stars will be in Entropy?
Infinite.

:D
 

Ortchel

Liturgist
Joined
Apr 11, 2004
Messages
830
My brother works for Will Wright at EA, I'll ask him next time he calls. Probably gonna get the NDA again though.
 

Fez

Erudite
Joined
May 18, 2004
Messages
7,954
The best part in X2 is when you have your business empire up and running, but then you realise the economy is fucked so bad it's broken, and then you have to fake it with insane looping factory production routes. It ends up becoming a boredom simulator and the feeling of doing work more than play is what you'll come to associate with X2.

I struggled through a large portion of the game and got bored of the feeble story very quickly. The freeform aspect does not make up for it either as it is as shallow and half-hearted as the story or economy.

I played it with a joystick and the controls were shit, I feel sorry for the poor sods who had to work through it with the keyboard.

The AI isn't much better than what was already done in Frontier. You can expect to see ships smashing into each other when their paths cross. The combat is pathetic and I would suggest that the developers have all combat work out automatically, along the lines of Civ, as a solution, but I know they cannot even get that right. If you set two teams of ships to AI control and have them fight while watching in 3D, you will get a different result than you would if you were out of that sector and the game just told you the results. It is consistently different to the point where some ships are known as good for "out of sector" combat and others for "in sector combat". Madness.

The game could have been the spiritual sequel to the Elite series, but instead it makes both the baby Jesus and the ghost of Elite cry.
 

Sol Invictus

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Will Wright gives a sneak preview of his upcoming game Spore, delighting those present.

SAN FRANCISCO--On the final day of the Game Developers Conference, Will Wright's "Future of Content" presentation contained a special treat for the bursting-beyond-capacity audience.

The treat was an extended demonstration of his next game, called Spore--a sim that allows the players to control life on all conceivable scales--an emergent and beautiful simulation game that ranges from the cellular level all the way to the galactic level.

The game allows the player to begin with developing a creature as a cellular entity and eventually creating a creature with more sophisticated brain functions, which will change the nature of the game to a more RTS-type game (he cited a particular favorite of his, Populous), where players will control herds of creatures. Once you upgrade the "hut" around which the creatures centralize, the game changes into what he called "a simple version of SimCity" where the player manages technology and interacts with other cities that have sprung up around the world.

He demonstrated how the player can eventually purchase a UFO to travel between planets--and eventually star systems--to populate, conquer, or simply observe. Particularly impressive was the game's emergent gameplay and seemingly infinite possibilities for playing creatively--two qualities that define Will Wright's celebrity status in game design.

His demonstration of Spore was framed through a design lens, as is the custom at GDC. The "hub" of the game, he asserted, was its compression. Since all the creature meshes, textures, animations, and behaviors are procedural (based on a set of algorithmic rules), this allows for an enormous quantity of player-created content, which he emphasized as another key element of the game's design that he has always fought for--the encouragement (in Spore's case, perhaps the necessity) of player creativity.

More so than in other games, he explained, he wanted to create a sense of both ownership (of the unique creatures and civilizations the player creates) as well as mastery (over the interface, which becomes more complex as the game's scale increases). The goal is to give the player simple tools to make them feel like they have tremendous leverage on the nature of the game itself. The game, then, becomes what he called "a creative amplifier for what the player has done."

Because of the compressed nature of the content, he went on, it allows for the generation of enormous content libraries. Moreover, the small content is easily portable. Players can interact with creatures, buildings, societies, planets, and star systems that other players have created.

Wright's presentation indicated that the passion that went into the design of Spore spoke to particularly inspirational television shows and toys from his childhood: Star Trek, Care Bears, War of the Worlds, Kid Pix, Pac-Man, Legos, and erector sets, to name only a few. Seemingly, Spore's emergent editors are the embodiment of the toys, and the content and gameplay the embodiment of the films. It made it seem almost as if he had been waiting his whole life to design this game.

When he fantasized about Spore years ago, Wright admitted, "My own imagination was my biggest bottleneck." He encouraged designers with ideas for games that are far outside the box not to give up on those ideas, but instead to cultivate them and revisit them later, when the time, the team, and the technology might be right. The demonstration of the "stellar zoo" that is Spore might have given hope to a new generation of game designers.
This game is turning me on.
 

PennyAnte

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Here instead of playing an RPG.
Wow, I can't wait. I've briefly played some versions of SimCity, Sim Chopper and the Sims (my least favorite), but the concept behind this one really has me hooked. I wonder if it will satisfy on a strategic level more than games like Civilization?
 

Visbhume

Prophet
Joined
Jun 21, 2004
Messages
984
Well... it sounds cool. Especially the "all procedural" approach. I hope Wright hasn't biten more than he can chew.

The results of each phase should profoundly impact the gameplay of the next one, otherwise it's going to feel like a bunch of different games pasted together.
 

Selenti

Liturgist
Joined
Feb 8, 2005
Messages
223
Procedural actually creeps me out, as that usually is a codeword for ugliness.
 

Balor

Arcane
Joined
Dec 29, 2004
Messages
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Russia
Well, demoscene uses procedural stuff, and look a look at the kkrieger, for instance. Less then 100 kb, and textures are simply awesome.
 

Selenti

Liturgist
Joined
Feb 8, 2005
Messages
223
Balor said:
Well, demoscene uses procedural stuff, and look a look at the kkrieger, for instance. Less then 100 kb, and textures are simply awesome.

kkrieger is impressive technically, but sorry, it really is ugly by any modern standard. I'm not a graphics whore, but I *am* an art whore. If art sucks, I'm out of there, most of the time.
 

Balor

Arcane
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Dec 29, 2004
Messages
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Location
Russia
Well, models were ugly because of procedural design, yes. But have you look at wall and floor panels? Those freaking awesome! Beat the crap out of Doom3 and the like.
So, normal models + procedural textures...
Or, I guess, all procedural - but with no 100kb limitation :)
After all, who cares if it'll take 100 or 1000 or 10k kb?
And for a gig you have it 10k better. Emagiine - kkrieger - but 10k times bigger and better!
Of course, it's not that easy. But I guess such approach does have future..
Btw, it's, in fact, almost literally 'game of my dreams' - you start off at generating a planet from space dust, then have it cool off, develop atmosphere (does not have to one like on earth), see living creatures emerge, evolve, become sentient, and then have all kinds of adventures as them - from hack&slash to RPGs :)
Talking about God simulator, huh? Makes you think aren't we in one.
Well, such level will not be attained in next 10 years or so, most likely. But, after singularity... pretty much anything is possible. Including LARP PA for everyone :)
 

Visbhume

Prophet
Joined
Jun 21, 2004
Messages
984
Frontier: Elite II used procedural methods to generate an infinite universe. It felt "real" in a way that no other game universe has felt for me, except for Ultima VII. Maybe the (relative) physical verosimilitude helped, too.

I used to be an explorer. I got the self-repair and the gas planet fuel extractor modules, and sailed to the farthest reaches of space.
 

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