Spore: Release Date, Platforms, Synopsis, and Screenshots

For those already familiar with Spore, the following information just got released a few hours ago.

According to this article, Spore will be released the weekend of Sept 7th, 2008. As for the platforms it will be released on the PC, Mac, Nintendo DS, and mobile phones.

No X-Box 360, which kind of sucks, since I'm flying an ancient PC with a graphics card that still uses pixel shader 1.1. I guess that gives me about 7 months to build a new rig. Up till now, I've been using my XBox for any new graphics intensive games. Meaning, I'm going to have to pay hundreds of dollars to play a game I've been drooling over since 2005.

Now, for those of you who have no idea what "Spore" is, or why you should care...

Spore is a game by Will Wright (creator of pretty much anything with "Sim" in the title, like "The Sims", "Sim City", etc...). If you're familiar at all with his work, you probably already have an idea why I'm excited.

The premise of Spore is evolution from start to finish. You start off as a single-celled organism that must eat smaller single-celled organism and avoid larger ones trying to eat you. After a certain amount of time and food, your species "evolves", getting a number of options available, like maybe a flagella to help you move quickly, or cilia to help your maneuverability, or maybe a leg or something to help you defend or attack, and you can place it wherever, adjust your color, texture, etc, each thing you do affecting certain factors in the game. Over time, you can more and more evolutionary traits, your species of bacteria eventually becoming more complex till it becomes a multi-celled organism, and then eventually even so complex that it develops sentience.



Now here's the cool part. Each mutation along the way builds upon the previous one, each person making a unique entity that looks completely different from what anyone else might have chosen or placed. Maybe your creature ends up being a ball-shaped thing with one big eye and 23 legs, or perhaps it's a one-legged, one-armed creature with hundreds of eyes and five tails with spikes at the end... the development of your creature and its look along the way has near infinite possibilities.



Eventually, your species develops the ability to use tools and make weapons, whereby you now no longer control just one species member, but rather a whole tribe of them. The game actually figures out, based on the number of legs/arms/tentacles/etc that you gave them, the body size, relative weight of the limbs and their size, head, etc, how the character would hold, say, a spear, and adjusts accordingly. This sort of on-the-fly graphics rendering is completely revolutionary. Normally in a game, everything you see is pre-modeled, pre-rendered, the physics behind each model already figured out, and stored ahead of time. This game renders your creature, based on your own design, and applies the physics surrounding it on the fly. That's something no other game I can think of has done before.



Then once your tribe becomes sufficiently advanced, suriving against competing tribes of sentient beings, it eventually develops cities, competing against other sentient cultures, developing itself, and your job becomes to try and conquer the planet, either through military, political, or cultural might. Now early on in the development, there was talk of the cities being unlimited in potential, flying creatures might have floating airborn cities, swimming creatures might have underwater cities, burrowing creatures might have underground cities, but there's no longer any confirmation of whether or not this will be the case in the final product. It might just turn out that there are only land-based cities. More on this should come out later.



Once you manage to conquer the planet, it's time to turn your eyestalks spaceward. You build a spaceship, and start conquering the galaxy, where...get this... you encounter other sentient creatures that were designed by other players, and try to conquer their planet.



Now you needn't worry about some other player finding your home planet and bombing it into the stone-age and ruining all your hard work. What the game does is take the completed algorithm for other people's creatures and port them onto a massive server, which stores your planets flora/fauna/creatures/location, and then uploads it to other people's games, where they will take on a life of their very own independent of your control.

Of course everyone's worlds that have life will have default life forms placed there by the game, and they will develop on their own, but as time goes on, and more and more players are uploading and downloading content, everyone's universe will become populated by each other's creatures, independent of their creators control, some of whom, in turn, might decide to to about their own inter-galactic conquest.

Anyway, the scale of this thing dwarfs the word "Epic". I've been hyped about this game for almost 3 years now, and can't wait to see the final product. Maybe since the wife has heard me talking about it for 3 years straight now, and since it won't be coming out on XBox, maybe she'll finally relent to letting me buy a new PC... if not... here's to hoping it works on my phone.



[edit on 2/14/2008 by thelibra]

Hmmm... Maybe have to get a new PC myself. wait for my CDs to come out and use that money to buy me a new one. Spore is the kind of detailed game I've been looking for. Tired of games that are so, preset, that you are stuck doing the exact same thing. Why I like Mass Effect, almost want to buy a 360(once Microsoft figures out why 34% are broken) just for that.

But Spore... That game is amazing. Any idea how many DvDs it will take? Or are they going to have the option for Blu Ray(For the PCs with Blu Ray Roms) Since one Blu Ray can hold 50 gigs, now. They are planning on 200gig BR Discs soon, while HD DVD holds... 8gigs.

(once Microsoft figures out why 34% are broken)

They have. It was a faulty heat sink clip. All new 360 Arcade consoles with HDMI built in do not have this issue.

Anyways, I found these speculative system requirements and they didn't make me cringe that much...

Minimum
Pentium 4 1.4GHz CPU or equivalent.
512Mb RAM.
64Mb video card with Direct3D support.

Recommended
Pentium 4 2GHz CPU or equivalent.
1024Mb RAM.
128Mb video card with Direct3D support.

www.sporeev.com...

Hope they are close to the truth and I don't doubt that they are. You can do amazing things with very little processor power and since Will Wright recruited a bunch of algorithm specialists from the Demo scene who routinely produce eye popping graphics on C-64s...

But Spore... That game is amazing. Any idea how many DvDs it will take?

They can do it in one dvd. Most of the actual data is going to be downloaded from a central server. Oh the joys of algorithms

What timeline are you guys gonna spend the most time in?

[edit on 14-2-2008 by sardion2000]

[edit on 14-2-2008 by sardion2000]

Originally posted by sardion2000
Hope they are close to the truth and I don't doubt that they are. You can do amazing things with very little processor power and since Will Wright recruited a bunch of algorithm specialists from the Demo scene who routinely produce eye popping graphics on C-64s...

I loved my C64. I actually had an Educator 64, which had higher resolution, but monochrome graphics. Defender of the Crown FTW!!! At the time, I about freaked out when I saw how good the graphics were in the jousting. "Hacker" was also pure gold.

As for Spore, the wildcard is the algorithms. Since the game will render on the fly, it doesn't need an insane amount of modelling and throughput, but the actual graphics processor itself will figure in heavily. Further, pixel shader... I mean, if they end up requiring like, Pixel Shader 3+, then I'm pretty much screwed.

My rig is a 1.6Ghtz equiv, it's actually an AMD chip, so hard to tell exactly. And I've got 1Gig of RAM. My gfx is a crappy old Radeon 9200 (128MB w/400clock) and PS 1.1

So I would be really surprised if it runs on my system. Really surprised.

Originally posted by sardion2000
What timeline are you guys gonna spend the most time in?

No idea yet, they all look so great. Probably the evolutionary phases though. I love the idea of being able to create my species in a nearly infinite number of ways.

That's it for the specs? Dang, I match/beat that. 2.4ghz, 1gig ram, and 128card. So I won't have to worry. Well, still want a new computer. Get a quad core proc with a BR Rom... put all my porn on like 4 BR Discs. Gah it sucks being old and single...

Those requirements don't seem bad, but even recommended isn't optimum. My computer is a few years old now and surpasses those standards (AMD 3500+ (2.2 GHz/3.5 GHz Pentium equivalent), 1 GB RAM, 256 MB video card).


They are seriously considering it for PS3 and 360.

Read an article about how controllers on consoles don't work well with RTS games built for the mouse. I think that is a bit of a cop-out, since the analog sticks should work quite well. Gran Turismo 4 used an arrow controlled like a mouse, the PS3 browser uses an arrow controlled by the analog as well. It is just mapping the sensitivity to work best for it this purpose (or user adjusted sensitivity mapping as past GT games have had).

I own both, but, my PS3 is more reliable. Doesn't freeze up, doesn't suffer framerate issues. BUT, my 360 is still working. Hasn't overheated and I have run it for many, many hours, 20 GB version (no HDMI).

Whichever one you feel that has more your style of games and controller. For me, that is the PS3. To others, it is the Wii. Get what you like and be happy for yourself and other regardless

Should be a good game. They still should have given us the option to play online with other people, though. They could have allowed us to play single player and online, instead of limiting us to only one of the choices.

Originally posted by ThePiemaker
Should be a good game. They still should have given us the option to play online with other people, though. They could have allowed us to play single player and online, instead of limiting us to only one of the choices.

Well, yes and no.

I mean, sure, it'd be really cool to ALSO have the option of an MMO style gameplay, but that complicates matters to the Nth degree. There's a whole different code base for an MMO vs. a Single-Player engine. It'd literally be almost like having to code an entirely separate additional game, it'd require a lot more resources on the company's behalf to maintain the servers and bandwidth necessary to handle all those connections at once, as well as the staff to monitor it. Then, to make matters worse, there would end up being a LOT more nerfing because in an MMO, people are going to find a way to exploit the balance for the sheer purpose of ruining other people's gameplay experience.

However, if the only interaction between between you and the server is the occasional squirt to transmit a lifeform algorithm and coordinates to your game, and from that point the lifeform acts independently of the creator and server, that requires a LOT less resources, and is more easily fit within the framework of a Single-Player game. And considering the sheer mega-scope of the single-player game, the size of the universe involved, and the revolutionary way the graphics and physics engines will work with non pre-rendered objects, that's already biting off 3 years worth of R&D.

Maybe Spore II will feature MMO gameplay, but first they have to get the SPG right.

True enough. The online mode that this game would demand is probably better suited for a sequel or an expansion pack. I don't know if I'd even want it to be a MMO, but I'd at least want some sort of interaction with real people.

It's been confirmed for the DS: Lite. So I think it'll be on the Wii before the 360 and PS3.

blog.wired.com...

[edit on 15-2-2008 by sardion2000]

Now I'm not saying that Penny Arcade reads ATS, but it is kinda interesting that one day after the OP, this comic gets posted:

I've been waiting for Spore for so long that when they finally set the release date (I read it on the BBC news site at work) I spat my coffee over my desk in suprise and ruined a QA form I'm just been writing out.


I just hope it lives up to the hype. My pre-order is in already

Since I heard the release date I've been thinking of interesting creatures to create. Drawing weird looking things everywhere.

I've got an important question. If they do bring it to the Mobile Phone what phones do you think will run it. If needed I'll just get a DS so I can play it at work.

One question though.. How do they expect to be able to download any new races to the DS system? It has no on-board memory.

Puzzled,

TheBorg