Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A new patch for Spore has made a few interesting tweaks possible. Perhaps the most immediately interesting is the ability to build asymmetric creatures. No longer to features have to be applied in pairs, which enormously opens up the possibilities for creature design. And once you’ve designed your creature, as spotted by Offworld, there’s now the ability to export it to your favourite Collada 3D modelling program to experiment with at your leisure.

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Cleverman make cleverthinks! Fresh from the Web 2.0 expo earlier this month is this entertaining and educating half-hour talk with Will Wright about everything including but not limited to his career and games to date, what’s next, lessons learned from Second Life, the intersect between games and reality and -ooh missus – Spore’s controversial DRM and the business considerations around it: “These people have paid money for a game, and you don’t want to be treating them basically as criminals”. On Spore itself, he observes that he wanted it to be almost more of a toy than a game per se – something else for the game’s many critics to chew on, then.

Also especially salient is an observation that gamers are basically narcissitic – “the more you can make the game about that person, the more interested, the more emotionally involved they will get.” A theme which, clearly, has run through a number of his games. LET THE MAN SPEAK.
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Ooh, just a kind of radar-blip news post for Spore’s expansion pack, Galactic Adventures. No firm release date yet, but we understand it’s not far off. So here’s something: Galactic Adventures delivers a whole load of space-stage stuff to do, mostly with missions on the planet surfaces that you can undertake with your creature and his/her space chums. There’s rescuing of princesses, destroying aliens motherships, and of course loads of that user-generated content pollination. Judging by the trailers post after the jump, the planets themselves are massively more detailed than they were for vanilla Spore, and the “massive battlefields” that the expansion reportedly features could make the unhappy endgame of Spore a little more interesting to get through. Take a look at how Spore will change.
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What’s that on the horizon? A storm of controversy, you say? Better batten down the hatches and man the lighthouse, we got some dark times ahead.

For the seventh game of Christmas, my true blog gave to me…

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EA have released a deauthorization tool for their much debated DRM system for Spore. By running it, you get back one of your five installations instantly, even if you haven’t actually uninstalled it. If you try to run it, it’ll require to be reauthorized, but this means that abstractly you can now install Spore on as many machines as you want – it’s just that you can only run five of them at once. Hmm.

The newly released v1.02 patch of Spore has actually caused a minor furore with one of its changes. Is it that you can hold down control in sporepedia to select multiple things? Nay. Is it the improved gait for two legged creatures? Nope. Is it the fact that there’s an occasional cubic planet thrown in? Why, yes, that’s it entirely. Here’s an enbiggened image of the planet. What do you make of it? A poll and my own thoughts on this clearly crucial PC gaming issue beneath the cut…
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Via VG247, early word on what might be for the first add-on pack for the famously uncontroversial Spore. And it’s… Cute & Creepy Creature Parts Pack? Oh, man. That sounds worryingly superficial, though I guess it embiggens the element of the game that’s been most well-received. Still, there’s only so much creature-tinkering I can do before getting bored. New/expanded stages plzkthx.

Time to stick my hand into the angry beehive again… The EA/Spore/DRM issue isn’t likely to go away any time soon. In a funny sort of way, the ridiculous DRM on Spore might well turn out to be a good thing for gamers – like it or not, EA’s weight in the industry means they’re trend-setters to some degree. That a company so big attempted the sort of draconian copy-protection that only smaller publishers had hithero dabbled in, and crucially they now seem to realise it was a mistake, may well set a positive precedent for everyone. So, while I initially decried the mass trolling of Amazon reviews, I have to agree now that a game as high-profile as Spore was perhaps an ideal object for protest. I’d still much prefer it was gone about in a smarter way than fevered screaming, though.

Though EA aren’t behaving in terribly gentlemanly fashion towards DRM-complaint posts on their forums, they are gradually backing down from some of the restrictions they unfairly placed upon Spore installs, and it looks like that trend’s set to continue.
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Spore has only sold 1 million copies. Warhammer Online has a piffling 500,000 subscribers. Ah well. Might as well call it a day for the old IBM Compatible, eh?

Pffffffft. It’s been a grand Autumn for PC so far, and with Left 4 Dead, Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3 (shut up) also incoming our beloved maths-box’s star isn’t going to dim any time soon. Two things worth noting about the Spore/WAR (hey, that rhymes!) success though.
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The good news is this: EA are taking a big step back on Spore’s DRM. From three installs ever and one account per copy of the game, they’re switching to as many re-installs as you want on a maximum of five computers, with a patch for multiple accounts for one machine on the way. That’s a big change of heart. We hinted that there might have been a change from three to five installs last week. This weekend the LA Times reported that EA have “apologised” to customers for the digital restrictions, when issuing their reprise. They report EA Games’ President Frank Gibeau saying,

“We’ve received complaints from a lot of customers who we recognize and respect. We need to adapt our policy to accommodate our legitimate consumers.”

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