Maxis: 'Spore expansion can top LBP'

via Computer and Video Games


Spore senior producer Morgan Roarty has been weighing up the similarities between the Maxis game and Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet, as well as their relative strengths.

Speaking to us at a recent EA event, Roarty contemplated whether LittleBigPlanet had stolen all of the hype surrounding user created game content in recent times.

"We've had plenty of noise on our day," he said, later adding, "I was already at Maxis for a couple of years working on Spore before I heard about LittleBigPlanet so I don't know if they were inspired by us.

"They don't have anything near our numbers of things created," he asserted, noting that around 200,000-250,000 creatures, buildings and vehicles are created daily by Spore players.

"I don't think their base editors are as easily accessible as our editors, I think we really have that on them," he continued.

While speaking passionately about his game, Roarty insisted there's "no ill will" between Maxis and Media Molecule and also acknowledged that there isn't "a lot for people to do" with their creations in Spore, "where as in LittleBigPlanet you can make stuff with those things".

He went on to explain that Maxis will address this shortcoming in the upcoming Spore expansion, Galactic Adventures. It'll allow you to completely customise planets and create adventures to share with other players using new editing tools.

"They can't give people our 64 million [Sporepedia entries]," Roarty, who's Galactic Adventures' executive producer, added of Media Molecule. "We want to get that 64 million to have that kind of functionality and then we're going to be happy."

Roarty went on to reveal that Galactic Adventures "wasn't our original expansion pack idea", saying "it was [originally] more of an added fiction" across all of Spore's stages that allowed gamers to replay "all of the levels in a different way".