Spore - the E3 preview

The Space game

"I'm going to skip ahead here. In the Tribal phase you create a series of tools and homes, and we'll have like a hut editor, so you can decorate that. We'll also have a City game, where you design a town, much like Sim City.

The editors are all pretty similar - once you've used one you can use them all. We're then into the civilization game, where you're designing vehicles, building and the like. Cities can interact culturally and economically with each other.

This is the same species many hours later after they've evolved a global civilization and we're about to get into the Space game."

"Now the game watches what I've done, watches what I've built and it determines the aesthetic and the style of what I'm doing, and those are the options it gives me to build. It matches the style of my civilization to my spacecraft.

So we're going to have a little celebration for our creatures to mark going into space, some fireworks. We can go and explore other cities. One of the things I can do is collect samples, for example if I'm trying to terraform another planet I can take biological samples of my home world with me, and I can put that in my cargo bay by sucking them up with my tractor beam.

One of the things we discovered, it was a bug at first, was that you can throw things with your tractor beam. If you get it just right, you can throw somehting into orbit and it will just stay there, orbiting around."

"And now we can pull away and see our entire solar system. This is our home star. We want some planets to be realistic, other ones we wanted to be very creative, so there's a great diversity in the universe. Now one of the things I want to do is come out here and start looking at the wildlife. and I might want to test an ecosystem on this planet."

"What I can do is scan these guys, and I can add them to the database of the Sporepedia. Every piece of content I come across is added to the Sporepedia, and the metaphor here is of a trading card deck. Everything in the game has a trading card. I can actually see other people's creatures, creations, look at the trading card and decide I like it, and I can have that added to my own planet deck. There are going to be collectable aspects of this, like a card game.

So this is kind of a 'first conact' scenario. They're pretty intruigued, we might try impressing them with some fireworks. Now the relationships in this game go a number of ways, they might be valuable trade parters, or we might form an alliance. In this case, they're impressed with me, so they're going to start worshipping me. "

"We can pull away from our home planet and home star, and now we're actually into interstellar space, and there are several thousand planets and stars here. Each of these stars has planetary nebula, etc. A lot of the worlds here are procedurally geranerated by the computer, but a lot of them are actually generated by other players, and the system goes and grabs them from the central server. The computer basically looks at how the player has played the game, how he has used this planet and does the same thing. They might be peaceful or warlike. Basically, profiling their personality."