Spore Heading to Consoles
Speaking exclusively to SPOnG, Sims creator and quiet legend Will Wright has pointed towards Nintendo's Wii console as a likely host for his upcoming mega-game Spore, with the unique controller giving the famed developer an inspirational shot in the arm.
"We’re looking at all the platforms for Spore, because we’re thinking about Spore as a franchise, not as a PC game. We’re going to do the PC game first, but really, what we’re trying to launch is an entire franchise that will be all across platforms," Wright told us when we caught up with him in San Francisco recently.
"It will probably take very different forms depending on the platforms. We might even pull out parts of the game – so you might be playing part of the game on a handheld platform, you might be playing the entire game but maybe more avatar-based on a console. The consoles are getting kind of different now – I think there’s a really interesting distinction between the Wii and the Xbox 360 and PS3. Something like the Wii offers a lot of interesting creative opportunities for the editors, with the controller."
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Wright continues, "That’s been one of the ongoing problems with consoles: they don’t have a mouse. The mouse is a very good random-access device for putting on the screen; a console controller really makes you want the game avatar-based, so you move on character – that’s why RTS games suck on consoles. With Spore, about half the game is avatar-based already – the creature game and the space game – and it would be pretty easy for us to make the intermediate levels avatar-based, so from the beginning, we thought about how we could move Spore to platforms including consoles."
Stay tuned for our full, no-questions barred (except the one about the release date) interview with Wright in the coming days, only on SPOnG, where you'll learn about the possibility of Spore on handheld gaming platforms and a huge amount more on what is without question one of the most interesting and innovative videogames in development right now.
Believe us, there's a lot more to come.
