Spore

Spore
From micro-organism to galactic god

Perhaps the most discussed game of E3 2006, from Will Wright, the man behind all Sim games; Spore.
The release date of this game has been pushed from september 2006, to Januar 2007, to June 2007. Yet all the true fans keep hope, and the fan community has grown amazingly fast.

Spore is a so called MSOG, Massive Singleplayer Online Game. Massive singleplayer? That’s right. Every creature, plant or object you see in this game, are made by other players. Every planet in this game, is made by other players. But I’ll explain that later on in the article.

Tide Pool Phase
You start this game in 2d. You are a little micro organism, and you have only one goal in your life: to eat little green blobs. Isn’t that awesome?! Ok, well maybe not, if that was the whole game. But as you eat green blobs (and avoid enemies, who try to eat you) you gain so-called “evolution points”. After a while, you use these points to evolve. Maybe you want to be faster, to avoid your enemies, or maybe you want a weapon, so you can eat more types of creatures. As you evolve you grow, and the camera will zoom out every time you evolve.

Creature Phase
After you’ve zoomed out enough, and your creature is complex enough, the game will become 3d. You can now leave the tidepool, which was in fact located in the ocean, and you try your chances on land. Just like during the tidepool phase, there will be creatures here that are stronger then you, faster then you, bigger then you. But, thankfully, there will also be creatures smaller and weaker then you. So lets eat some, shall we? Again, after you’ve eaten enough and gained enough evolution points, you can evolve. This time, however, you will have to look for a mate first. After you’ve found one, you will have to protect your children (which are eggs at first), but generation by generation your species will become more advanced and developed. And if you’ve collected enough points then you can also start improving your brains, which will bring us to the next phase!

Tribal Phase
You’re now not just controlling your one little creature (or, huge creature, if that’s what you want it to be), you are now controlling a whole tribe of your species. And alongside with your natural enemies; the wild creatures, you will now also have to fight other tribes! Though the behavior of those tribes will also slightly be decided by how you designed your creatures. If you went through the creature phase as a herbivore, never attacking anyone, not even to defend yourself, well then you can be pretty sure that the other tribes will be quite friendly to you, or at least neutral. But if you spent your creature phase, evolving into a deadly killer (maybe you even designed your creature to look like a T-rex or something, it’s all possible in the creature editor) then you might want to prepare for some pretty hostile tribe raids! but, after you’ve brought your tribe to greater glory by buying them strong huts, superior weapons or a complex culture, then you can go to the next phase.

City Phase & Civilization Phase
Your tribe with a few huts, has become a city! This phase can pretty much be compared with SimCity. Build your species a cool city, that takes care of all their needs. However, after you’ve created a good running city you go to the Civilization phase. there comes a bit of RTS into play here. Because some of the other tribes have also made it to the city phase, and they’re building tanks and other gears of war to crush you! You must defend yourself, or maybe take down their city instead! Or maybe you’ll want to play a bit more diplomatic, and create alliances between the cities, establish trade routs, and bring your entire planet’s population to a greater glory! (the species that you were initially controlling in the tidepool, as a supersmall, simple organism). Well, either way, you can gain points again here (only in the form of currency), and if you get good enough, you can buy a spaceship, which brings us to the next phase again!

Space Phase
You zoom out of your city, out of your planet, and suddenly you find yourself in your star system. Your star system! You can go visit your moon, even colonise it if you want, or maybe one of the other planets circling around your star! And even better; after you’ve bought some more upgrades, you gain the interstellar drive! This upgrade allows you to take your ufo further away from your planet.. and you can visit every planet in your entire galaxy! And there is going to be about 1 star system for every single player that buys the game, and you can visit each and every one of them! you won’t actually be interacting with these players directly (Wright didn’t want this to turn into one of those “Hey look, he’s AFK! Let’s raid him!!”-games), just like the other tribes on your planet acted the way you “raised them”, will these other civilizations act like their creators raised them.

So now it’s time to explain a bit more about the MSOG part. Massive Singleplayer means that every little thing you see in the game, that was not created by you, was in fact created by other players. And there are editors for EVERYTHING! You can design your own huts, buildings, vehicles, creatures, plants, planets, everything! However, if you dont want to design your own stuff, you can also use something your friends made (there will be some kind of reputation system, that will bring good designers’ stuff to the top, but you can also search on username, and just type in the username of your friends, or the name of their species/building).

Here are some screenies to show you how it looks:

Creature editor: skin

Planet view

Creature Phase

City Phase

Two creatures; both made with the very same editor. The possibilities are endless!

Article by P-Luke