US, August 24, 2007 - It's hard to do a canned demo of Spore, so the team at Maxis and EA decided just to bring the latest build of the game to Germany and see what happens. In fact, the range of possible experiences is so unpredictable and specific to the decisions you make at nearly every level, Maxis decided just to let us play through for an unfettered hour. Though the team is officially only showing off the Creature and Tribe portions of the game, we decided we wanted to start at the very beginning and see the whole process through from start to finish. We had to take a few developer shortcuts to compress the experience down into an hour but it was well worth it to see how the pieces fit together.
Our play session started with the basic cell level. Our precious little protozoan was equipped with a basic tail for swimming and little flagella for eating the green plankton floating nearby. There are larger, more deadly creatures in this primordial soup as well, so we had to be careful as we looked out food to eat and new parts to affect morphology. Once we managed to eat a sufficient amount of plankton, we had the chance to evolve the protozoan into a more advanced and versatile creature.
First, we switched out our flagellate mouth for a beak that could crush shells and attack other creatures. We moved our eating tentacles to the side of our amoeboid body which made it harder to eat plankton but gave us more opportunities when seeking out food. To eat the plankton we had to basically sideswipe it and get it into our mouths.
In addition to eating more types of food, the new beak can also attack other creatures. We had quite a few that couldn't put up much of a fight, but there was one particularly spiky amoeboid that we had to attack from behind so as not to take damage from his forward facing spikes.
For each creature you attack, you have the chance to gain a new evolutionary part that you can use when upgrading a later generation. Since each new evolution leads you into more and more hostile territory, you'll need to evolve to stay ahead of the action. The evolutions are supposed to occur one by one at each new stage of development, but we wanted to see as much of the game as possible so we jumped ahead a few stages to try out the more advanced cellular options.
We included extra flagella for added movement and the spikes we had obtained from the spiky cell. Since we didn't want to move our mouths, we placed the spikes on the sides of our body to protect us from attacks. Given the increasing danger's we were facing in the environment, a few extra spikes to dissuade hungry predators were definitely a useful addition.
After less than an hour or so of playing, players should progress to the Creature stage. At this point our highly evolved swimming creature pulls itself up out of the surf, coughs out a few lungfuls of water and takes up residence on the land. A few others follow suit and an entirely new life starts.
At first all our little guy can do is sing and eat fruit. Since his only needs are health and hunger, it's easy enough to satisfy him by simply seeking out and eating some low hanging fruit on nearby bushes. Fortunately, our creature didn't get sick from the fruit or else we'd have to seek out some poor unsuspecting creatures to chow down on.
Instead, we can seek out new creatures to interact with in more peaceful ways. By approaching a fellow land dweller and singing to them, we made a few friends. After singing to a number of the same type of creature, we had a chance to become permanent friends with that entire species. Make enough friends and you can even recruit creatures to become members of your posse who can help out when danger strikes. Making friends also earns us important DNA points and crucial new body parts that we could use when evolving to the next stage. We also found extra parts lying around in piles of fossils.
But before we could get to the super friends stage, we were distracted by the attentions of a rather amorous member of our species who wanted to mate with us. Figuring friends are never as important as getting a little action, we blew off the rest of the friends game and got to making sweet love -- to an appropriately mood-setting soundtrack, no less. Once the egg is hatched, you'll have the chance to jump back into the creature editor to change the morphology of your creature.
As with the cell editor, the creature editor requires you to make incremental changes to your creature over successive generations. After using the mouse to select the overall shape of the spine and the basic thickness of the body, you'll have the chance to place a variety of legs and arms anywhere on the battle. You can click and drag each of the individual joints to create the perfect angle or length of each segment of a limb and use the mouse wheel to determine the overall thickness of each part.
For our little guy, we went with a predictable layout with the arms and legs but went a little crazy when it came to everything else. We threw on two heads on each shoulder and put an eye right in the middle of each. Tilt and twist controls for the eye allowed us to set the gaze of the creature exactly as we wanted it, while a broad range of different layers of colors and patterns gave us a chance to add a little more character and personality to our creature.
A variety of other parts gave us the chance to specialize our creature's role in the world. The changes that we made to our creature would normally reflect several successive generations of development but for the sake of our demo we piled a few on right at the start. Antlers on the outer side of each head and a pair of hooves at the end of each leg gave our creature a tremendous charge attack, while a chest mounted spitter offered up a nice ranged attack option. Figuring that combat isn't always the best answer to every situation, we picked a pair of delicate hands that would be suitable for social interaction via gestures.
Each of these qualities is listed next to the item's picture in the creature editor so you won't have to guess at what a particular part does. As with the rest of the body parts, you can rotate, stretch and otherwise modify the shape of these parts until you get something that you really like.
Our new hatchling headed out from the nest to find its way in the wide world. In search of fruit to eat and friends to meet, we encountered even more advanced creatures, not all of whom were inclined to be friendly. Heading up to talk to one particularly happy looking creature, we were jumped by a couple of sneaky creatures armed with spiky tails. This is one point when having a posse would definitely have come in handy. The spike-tailed creatures were too fast for us to get enough range to use our spitter or our hoof charge but we were able to just barely escape with our lives thanks to a handy health cheat.
After gathering up two other friends among our own species and inviting them to become part of our posse, we were able to finally make the transition to the Tribe portion of the game. A 2001 style cutscene kicks off the Tribe game. Whether or not you approached the creature stage as a violent or a more social creature will determine the overall character of the world during the next phase of the game. Since we were relatively warlike (not that we had much choice), the rest of the tribes in the game will be a bit more competitive.
The tribe portion of the game starts to play a bit more like an RTS. Our main creature has become a sort of chief or shaman and you can lead him and the two other members of the tribe in a variety of important tasks. First, as always, is the acquisition of food. Picking fruit from nearby bushes is all fine and dandy, but by now our creatures deserve something a bit more substantial. At the main hut, we spent some of the food we'd accumulated to build specialized huts that allow us to assign different roles to the tribe members. The fisherman's hut, for instance, allows them to take spears out to the shore and collect fish.
While our tribe was gathering fish, members of another tribe of our very own species waltzed in and started stealing the fruit we had stored up. At this point we ordered the fishermen to drop what they were doing and attack the invaders. We were far enough away at the start of the fight to really make the most of our hoof and antler charge combo, so we were able to kill the invaders pretty easily. The construction of a medic hut healed the worst of the damage suffered by our own units.
Fearing a second attack, we wanted to both come up with some decent weapons and increase the size of our tribe. The construction of a hunter's hut takes care of the first problem by giving us the chance to assign some members of the tribe as club-toting warriors. The warriors can be put to use purely for hunting the wild animals around camp, but they're also useful for fighting against other tribes.
The second problem can be addressed in a couple of ways. First, the chief can simply order two tribe members to mate. (There's no more changing the morphology at this point; your creatures now evolve based on the tools you give them and the social relationships they develop.) We could also send our hunters out to attack another tribe and steal their population. Or we could build a recruiting totem and assign certain members of the tribe to go invite other tribes to join us.
As we built more and more roles into our tribe, we took the opportunity to differentiate them a bit visually. There's a handy accessory and color editor that you can use for each new role so you'll be able to spot your hunters from your recruiters. In this case we equipped our hunters with two hats (one for each head), a modest fig leaf and a very non-threatening paint scheme.
Heading out into the wild, our recruiters stumbled upon the village of the tribe that initially attacked us. Since we had wiped out so many of them so early, the village was inhabited by just a single individual whose hatred of us seemed unquenchable. He wasn't willing to risk an all out attack against our sizable party, but he still wouldn't agree to join our tribe even after we brought him a sizable donation of food.
Seeing that he wasn't going to budge and fearing that he should cause problems later if left to his own devices, we decided to forcibly incorporate him into our tribe by razing his hut to the ground. Since he was unable to prevent us from destroying his home, he had no choice but to join us. With more and more numbers being added to our tribe, it wasn't long before we had the fifteen members required to advance to the Civilization stage of the game.
Now the view shifts from a simple stretch of beach to a fully developed spherical planet and things start to get even more like a real-time strategy game. After placing our city hall, we had the option to construct a number of other buildings we'd need to keep your society going. The first concern you'll have is the creation of a harvester to collect gas from vents scattered around the planet. Where food served as the overall currency in the previous phase, now you'll have to spend gas in order to produce the structures and vehicles required to keep your population happy and secure.
Unfortunately, other members of your tribe will be forming their own cities in other areas of the world and competing with you for the precious gas resources. To help protect your right to the gas (and deny them theirs), you'll need to send out military vehicles to escort your harvesters. From here, of course, things escalate until you've managed to eliminate all your rivals.
Unfortunately, just before getting our military going in this phase, it was time to move on to other appointments so we had to leave the story of our antlered, two-headed chest-spitter behind, leaving the rest of the civilization chapter and all of the space portion of the game untouched. Given the relatively complete state the game appears to be in, we're hopeful that we'll get some more hands on time with it soon.