Set for release this fall, the Wii version of EAs universe-creating Spore is designed for adventure and a heavy use of motion control.
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Few games have transitioned from the PC to the Wii. There is no World of Warcraft Wii, no Company of Heroes Wii, not even yet a Peggle Wii. But EA has been trying, first with MySims for Nintendos home system and, coming this fall, Spore Hero.
EA has shed almost no light on Spore Hero since announcing it in January as part of the 2009 line-up of Spore spin-offs. MTV Multiplayer can change that today.
Last month in Las Vegas, I met with the general manager for EAs Spore and Sims studio, Lucy Bradshaw, who talked to me, among other things, about how Spore for the Wii is taking shape.
Bradshaw said that this Spore for the Wii was built from the ground up. She described a game comprised of a significantly beefed-up version of Spores creature stage, served with a heavy helping of motion control.
The game brings the PC games full creature editor and procedural animation system, enabling gamers to assemble their beasts from a Potato-Heads worth of parts. The mouse-driven interface of the editing tools in the PC game turns into a pointer-driven interface for the Wii.
Players have direct control of the lifeform they are shaping. Adding parts to the creature adds new motion-controlled maneuvers customized to the players creature. New parts, new controls. Thats really fun to take advantage of, Bradshaw said. With the controls of the mouse, its point and click and you do feel a distance. Now were in there and its just really fun as you gain new abilities. She suggested that dancing and singing were just some classic Spore behaviors that would be more fun driven by a Wii remote than by the click of a computer mouse.
The PC Spore started in the primordial ooze of its Cell stage, graduating to a primitive 3D action game in the Creature stage before evolving into strategic Tribe, City and Space stages. Bradshaw said that this game, which wont connect to the PC version, operates in just that creature slice but still presents an expansive evolution-based experience. Your planet that youve lived on has had a catastrophic event and youre essentially plummeting to a new planet on the tail of a meteor, she explained. You arrive there and you start encountering new creatures. This is a new planet that youve got to make as your own. So you start in a series of quests and adventures in a kind of open world that you can take at your own pace. You start encountering other creatures and can interact with them in either combat or social [ways], but you can also do things on their behalf.
Some quests help the players creature evolve. Others, called Evolutionary Quests, require your creature to meet the needs of other species and guide those beasts evolution. So youll be shaping not just your species but a menagerie of planetary lifeforms. Gaining an ability for your own creature, like jump, might allow access to otherwise unreachable areas. In that regard, exploration of the terrain is encouraged in ways that Spore PC did not. Said Bradshaw, Weve brought in action quests [consisting] of games that you play in the overall landscape of the creature that really do take advantage of those evolutionary steps that youve taken.
While no screenshots have been released of the game yet, Bradshaw described a cheerful experience that suits Nintendos image. This is very playful, she said, explaining why the game wasnt slated for, say, the PlayStation 3. It takes advantage of the controls explicitly. And even stylistically, when you see the game, youll go, Oh yeah, thats definitely a Nintendo Wii game. As for the controls, she said that the team is taking a look at the Motion Plus option for even better Wii motion-sensitivity than what is available directly out of the box.
This Wii debut for Spore is sounding to be more like an action-adventure driven by the changing shape of life than the cell-to-stars skip through evolution that the original Spore was.
Spore Hero is one of the many Wii titles from EA, which has pledged to back Nintendos console in 2009 in ways that could rival even the house of Mario itself. It is slated for a fall release, alongside Spore Hero Arena, a companion game for the Nintendo DS.
