Spore: Why The Best is Yet to Come

Maxis Executive Producer Morgan Roarty reveals what's in store for Spore, and talks us through Galactic Adventures.

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While the tool-set isn't quite as dauntingly cavernous, we suspect, as that of the PS3 dream factory (due to the lesser role played by physics) it comfortably stands comparison with the developer's reputation-making Sims games. Roarty puts Galactic Adventures through its paces for us by selecting a pre-fabricated dragon template, pasting it onto a planet, enlarging the beast, giving it a health bar, assigning it a few lines of dialogue and ringing it with an "awareness" field indicating how close a player character needs to be to get a response.

Each mission is broken into a maximum of five stages with their own completion criteria. Creatures can be assigned to opposing "teams" (e.g. dragons versus bunnies) if you want a bit of friction, then given territories and patrol paths or instructed to track another beastie or object. There are buildings to be assembled, traps to be laid, timers to be set a-ticking, doors and keys to be maliciously separated, collectable objects to be sprinkled on and around the beaten path. Discreet sound emitters give your level a dynamic score, and a visibility/invisibility switch lets you "spawn" creatures when triggered. All of which, we're assured, is just scratching the surface.

Returning to Spore itself, we ask Roarty whether Maxis is irked by the publicity storm surrounding LittleBigPlanet's user creation features, having announced a game with similar functionality a good two years prior to the latter's E3 2007 unveiling. He insists that there's "no ill will", and reminds us that despite garnering fewer headlines Spore is out-performing LittleBigPlanet in many respects. "They don't have anywhere near our numbers of things created, I don't think their base editors are as easily accessible as our editors, I think we really have that on them - just the ability to make creatures, make anything in the world. But we didn't add in a lot for people to do with them."

Somewhat surprisingly, Spore has escaped the ruckus over copyright infringement which cramped the LittleBigPlanet community early on, with a small but well-publicised number of parodies or pastiches falling foul of Sony's lawyers. "We haven't had any problems with the IP stuff, to my knowledge," Roarty reflects. "I've been on Spore for the last three years, and even with the editors out there... You can go to the website and type in "Zelda" or "Mario" - there's probably ten thousand Marios in there, about a thousand Sackboys - but to my knowledge there haven't been any legal issues with that."

Nor, it seems, has there been much of a problem with 'misapplied' player creativity, despite the Freudian fixations of the average PC-owning pubescent. "On the penis-monster side of things, that really got blown out [of proportion]. I get the weekly customer support incident calls and it's not really an issue." The lashing Spore's standard received for the inclusion of Digital Rights Management software with the retail disc cuts a little deeper. "It cast some negativity over the studio which was a bummer for a lot of people that put a lot of hard work into that product, not management but core people."

If this negativity has damaged Spore's uptake in any way, it's not evident from the figures. Galactic Adventures can look forward to an enthusiastic welcome when it launches later this month. As an attempt to engage with the underutilised aspects of a successful product, rather than a mere raft of additional content, it's proof of Maxis's dedication to the franchise. Will Spore match or even exceed its creators' past successes? Roarty isn't resting on any laurels. "We'd obviously love to be as big as The Sims. But I think it's going to be different, I think we're going to be more of a windy road."

Spore: Galactic Adventures is due out on 23rd June in North America and 26th June in Europe.

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