[:plant:] Spore some sugar on me

Originally Posted by IGN

Now, when players create objects themselves, while their own stuff is being uploaded, other things will be downloaded to populate the environment based on the creature they've created or choices they've made. For example, after creating a creature, the game will functionally search for other creatures that can be placed in the environment to fill out a functional ecosystem with creatures of the appropriate strengths and habits.

The game will choose from the huge share of content provided by what will undoubtedly be a very large player base to fill out the necessary content. More importantly to many of us, Spore will allow anyone to add any players of the game they like, whether that's family or just some crazy dude they saw had cool stuff on a website somewhere, to a friends list. At that point, the game will pull first from content provided by friends on the list, but only up until it doesn't make sense for the game.

While functional matching is one thing, the game will also attempt to match created content aesthetically. This means players will be able to go into the catalog and pick styles that they'd like to have used and the server will accordingly choose others that roughly fit this aesthetic style and download them to the game as well.


Maxis is really hoping that this will help to sort through the thousands of pieces of crap that will undoubtedly be uploaded into the servers. While they're trying to pull the level of quality for custom creations from where it is now in games like The Sims by providing great tools, there's still going to be some people that just have no eye for quality work.

I know a bunch of people were wondering about the whole "penis architecture" aspect of the downloadable content, so it's nice that there will be filters in place based on player's choice and creature compatibility.

Apparently creature downloads are about 10K, and they hope to reduce that to 2 or 3K when all is said and done, so you won't be burning a whole lot of bandwidth just to play a single player game.

My concern right now is the kind of bugs that might spring up as a function of putting all these different gameplay types into one package. Whatever the case, I think this is a game I'll have to preorder.

Jam it back in, in the dark.