Spore article in Newsweek

Another post about Spore today. Turns out Newsweek got an exclusive interview with Will Wright that published yesterday. Wright gives some great information about the things that delayed Spore for so long and provides a few exciting insights about the social-networking-inspired features in the game.

The interview is divided into two parts:

• Part 1
• Part 2

Here's a paragraph from the first part describing a change they made recently as a result of focus group feedback:

For instance, one of the things that we changed late last year was....We noticed universally when people were able to just drop into any editor that they wanted to and play around with it--that was a much more entertaining experience for them to start understanding what the gameplay was. The gameplay made a lot more sense to them after spending time in the editor designing something. Originally we were going to force the players to start at Cell and play their way up through every level, but we decided that we wanted to make it feel more like a toy box of the universe. So we let players drop into any level they want to, right off the bat. We have an entry path for every level, straight off the bat, where you grab somebody else's pollinated content as your starting point if you didn't play Creature for instance. We found the players enjoyed browsing the levels lightly at the beginning, and trying a little bit at each level, then they would generally go back, start a full game from the Cell level, and play the whole thing straight through.

I'm planning a more technical post later this week, so please don't fret that my blog is devolving into a run-of-the-mill video game news blog. It is still decidedly a run-of-the-mill game production blog.