During the Electronic Arts press conference, game designer Will Wright pointed out that there's an intersection between science and creativity, an amazingly fertile zone of new ideas and fun. "Science," he argued, was a theme that no other entertainment form has really grabbed on to and mined for its potential. Experimentation, exploration, discovery... these are the rich ingredients that power the gameplay behind Spore.
Earlier this month we got our first hands-on time with the title, and we focused on the cellular level and the creature game. This time around we decided to pick up where we left off, starting with the tribal level. What's the word? The addictively open-ended gameplay of the earlier levels appears to remain intact throughout the whole game.
Carrying a Big Stick
The "Tribal" part of the game is one of the five stages of your creatures' journey from microscopic blob to galaxy-trotting superbeing. You can start the game at any phase so we jumped straight to Tribal mode and had the opportunity to choose an already-formed creature. The beta version of Spore is now hooked up to the same live creatures database that everyone is contributing to via the recently-released Spore Creature Creator, so I literally had nearly two million creatures to pick from. I chose a fishy-looking critter and was off and running.
This phase of the game opens with your creatures dancing around a tiny hut in their newly-formed village. We noticed that every creature is given a randomly-assigned name, including the most important member of the tribe, the Chieftan. The Chief is larger than the other creatures and carries a large stick with a skull on top as a symbol of his power.
In the early modes of the game, you manipulate an individual critter. But here you're responsible for the welfare of your whole tribe, which means the gameplay is very different. Now it's a real-time strategy game: You could click on an individual creature to order it around, or select groups of creatures to engage in pack behavior. As Producer Thomas Vu explained to us, for many gamers, this may be their first experience with a "real-time strategy"-style interface, so the team has tried to keep the interface as simple as possible. You could now select multiple units, but most of your actions were listed along the bottom of the screen, just as depicted in the creature phase of the game.
