Following the recent news that veteran games designer Will Wright (Spore, Sims) was leaving publisher EA to form an "entertainment think tank" called Stupid Fun Club comes an update of sorts. It seems Wright will still be involved with EA on a consultancy level.
I'm spending a certain amount of time every month actually working with the Spore team on future versions of Spore and expansions. So I will [still] be involved with EA on developing the Spore franchise as well.
More interesting are Wright's thoughts on how Spore could be improved in a sequel.
We're going to probably add more depth to different areas of the game – and we're certainly already doing that with the Galactic Adventures expansion pack – and we're also taking output from the tools in different directions, so you can take your creatures you made in the creature creator and bring them into different experiences.
More depth can only be a good thing. I always felt Spore couldn't decide whether it was going for Sims-style accessibility or the harder core strategy market and sort of fell somewhere in the middle. With Sims 3 likely to mop up more casual players – in theory anyway – Spore 2 could go a little deeper and tap into some of the huge potential that was only really hinted at in the original game.
But what about a version for the consoles? Unsurprisingly given EA's increased Nintendo focus it looks like the Wii could be the frontrunner.
So you can sort of look at a straight port to the PS3 and Xbox 360 and basically have the same game we have on the PC... or we could say, 'What can we do on this platform that will help us explore different parts of the design?' I think the Wii is really unique in that sense, with the things you can do on Wii that you can't do on other platforms right now. It's represented a lot of learning for us in terms of the directions we might take it. So I'd say that's one of the under-appreciated aspects of how we choose to deploy this on different platforms.
So what do you think? Like to play Spore on the consoles? And what about Spore 2 – what would you like to see in it?
