I'm on vacation this week, but before I left I wrote five brief essays considering the five stages of "Spore." Late Friday I interviewed "Spore' creator Will Wright and asked him to share his thoughts on why each stage is essential. You can find his thoughts, shared during a half-hour phone call, at the end of this essay. The second installment of the series covers the Creature Stage. The remaining Stages will be covered over the next three days.
My Take:
The opportunity to add legs to the player's "Spore" Cell Stage animal signals the beginning of the Creature Stage. This second stage is the first one that allows the player to decide that they may not like the game or that they're hooked.
(Read on for the rest of my take and for Will Wright's.)
The Creature phase is played on land in a manner that feels like solo-ing in "World of Warcraft."
The Creature phase is played on land in a manner that feels like solo-ing in "World of Warcraft." There are other beings on the land to see, many of them created by other players whose avatars have been sucked into one's own copy of this single-player game. The player embarks on basic quests to befriend or eat other species, sometimes to follow his or her pack to a new migratory nest, sometimes adding to their numbers by forming a small posse. As in the Cell Stage, each time the player's creature mates with one of its own, new parts can be added to the newborn, evolving the species with a toolset that is determined by type of diet.
Unlike Cell Stage, Creature Stage isn't likely to contain everything the player could hope for in the depiction of its prehistoric life phase. For example, because there's no gender in this or any other stage, there's no chance of the game allowing the player to explore the primitive social dynamics and ramifications that may have arisen from the subtle but distinct differences between genders of a species. Also, this stage only allows fighting, singing, dancing, posing, but not, much by way of strategic action other than clicking, clicking, clicking on a small number of buttons to trigger those moves until they succeed.
The stage's rudimentary quests are clearly designed to excite the player's zeal less for gameplay than for for zoological tourism.
As in the previous stage the player's actions and the adaptations he or she has added to the species enable more gameplay -- with the addition of this horn, for example, now my species can charm others. But the level of strategy offered proves not to be the draw, not when the stage's rudimentary quests are clearly designed to excite the player's zeal less for gameplay than for for zoological tourism. Creature Stage is, therefore, the stage that suggests that maybe "Spore" isn't going to be purely about playing, but a lot about gawking. It's going to appeal to browsers of flickr, users of Facebook, people who want to see what other people were making in their copies of "Spore" and then, from afar, comment on that stuff, feel entertained by that stuff, or use sharp teeth to devour that stuff to extinction.
Creature Stage is letting players know: you better like to look at things, or else you're not going to have a lot of fun with this game.
Will Wright's Take:
"In the Creature Stage you're primarily dealing with whether you're going to be social or aggressive with other species."
"In Creature Stage you're designing your own body. By the end of Creature Stage it's locked in. You're going to end up with that body for the rest of the game. Aesthetically and functionally, that's what you're going to want to focus on, especially going into Tribe phase, where the strength and speed of your creature is going to matter a lot. Once you get to the Civ phase it's more about technology, so it starts diminishing at that point.
"In the Creature Stage you're primarily dealing with whether you're going to be social or aggressive with other species. You can actually do pretty well if you are social within your own species. For example, I can have a small guy that's fast and -- once I get to a higher level creature -- I can have four of my buddies help me fight and help me socialize. One of the things a lot of players don't realize at first is they don't have to [do that only] with their own species. I can have a posse with other creatures."
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Next: My take and Wright's take (plus more tips) on the Tribe stage. To check out the entire series, click here.
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