caraig | Spore.

Just... WOW. This game by Will Wright has got to be one of the the most innovative and amazing things in gaming I've yet heard of. (Apologies about it being a link to GameSpy; it is a good and descriptive article, however. By the way, this vectored in to me from Penny Arcade, so any readers of PA have probably seen this article already.) It's even more... different than Katamari Damacy. Spore is mostly proof-of-concept, I think, but there are some gems awaiting mining in that idea. Will it be the Next Big Thing in gaming? I don't know. I'm pretty confident in saying that it'll be big, though.

It's really pretty exciting to me, or maybe it's just because it's late for me. I can't see this style of game being used for games with licensed franchises. But a game with such dramatic scaling ability, and the very way they're going about making the game -- 'smarter' not 'harder' -- it's an interesting twist and like I said there are some cool things waiting to be mined from this game. (Of course, the cynical part of me is thinking that this will dramatically eliminate the profession I want to get into, but on the other hand, computer animators aren't going to go away anytime soon. There's always cinematic/broadcast animation, after all.)

Watch for it. This game, and not merely the concept of the game itself but the way the game and it's content is made, are going to be strongly affecting future game development. In about a year, as Spore's release date is announced and it goes to gold, we'll start seeing some ideas based off of it.

Pax,