Spore: Will it Change Gaming Forever?
 

Yes.

Procedurally-generated content will find its way into other games, eventually. I think right now, people are thinking small, not really seeing the potential that procedural technology has, in all game genres.

I mean, think about it -- in Spore, the game learns how to render, texture, and animate your characters on the fly. Think about that.

Imagine an FPS with this technology applied to the environment. Shoot a concrete pillar, and the game re-renders and re-textures the pillar according to where you shot it, and with what. The result is hyper-realistic destructible environments. This even surpasses the stuff we're seeing in games like Alan Wake -- advanced physics engines are great, no question, but they're still limited. I don't know if you've seen the recent Alan Wake demo, but if you haven't, the developers plopped a tornado down amidst a few buildings, which were subsequently ripped to pieces and thrown into the air. Entire buildings, totally demolished. Freakin' awesome.

However, objects of a certain size stayed intact. There was no splintering wood, no twisted metal, just a bunch of objects in pristine condition, which, when put together, make a house.

Similarly, in current games a concrete pillar dissolves the same way every time when shot. Think of Black, which had incredibly interactive environments (read: you could really blow shit up). Still, when things were destroyed, it was in a scripted manner. With procedural games, it would simply be according to the physics.

Extend this even further -- a tank shoots several concrete pillars, which happen to be support pilars for a building. Depending on which side of the building was hit, how badly, etc., the game would be able to animate the collapse of the building, based realistically on physics.

The building could hit another building, domino-style, damaging both (and the game would re-render and re-texture accordingly), possibly bringing them both down.

Or, for all those who love gratuitous violence (like me), if you hit someone in the knee with a 14mm armor-piercing round from a sniper-rifle, it could rip off their leg. The stub would be rendered and textured procedurally, and the game would also be able to procedurally generate new animations for the maimed character (crawling, or perhaps hopping). Armor would reflect the damage being inflicted on it in battle, in a completely dynamic, unscripted way.

So, given how ridiculously awesome this is, why isn't anyone doing it? Also, when the hell is Spore going to come out?

I've said it a number of times, and I'll say it again: Spore is not a game. Sim games are toys.

Although the concept of the game figuring out how to nicely work user-generated content on the fly does kinda blow me away.

I just want to get the game so I can make Ottsels. Or the other precursors, the big, bronze bug-eyed ones. I'm not too amazed by this whole 'texture revolution' thing.

I'm making me a Hunter race.

You'll see, You'll all see!

I think Spore could potentially have a large effect on sandbox games such as GTA if Will Wright manages to pull it off. But I don't think it can have much of an impact on mainly linear games that are very plot driven.

After all, it is hard to have a Half Life style scripted sequence when you have complete freedom. I think Crysis is more towards the future of FPS's.

So, games aren't toys?

What exactly is your criteria for "game?"

What I think is important to realize is that it can't be all one or the other--while I agree that procedurally-generated content should be a larger focus of game developers in the future, we can't expect twitch gameplay to simply die off. At a certain point, why would you want a SHMUP or a fighting game to be that byzantine? Of course it will greatly impact the future of games (hopefully), but they can't all be Spores.

At the very least, games have objectives.

The distinction is that while you play games, you play with toys.

OK, so obviously no one read my whole post. I need to remember to write shorter posts...

Answer to the first...while I share your opinion of the complete awesomeness of your writings, I don't think even the algorithms of Spore stand up to the kind of complexity you just mentioned. Problem being of course, I don't know the real technical details of either Spore procedural-programming or the hypothetical hyperdestructive cities of a totally awesome FPS. I always figured, logically, the systems in Spore were just generated at random with the algorithms as you travelled to them.

Answer to the second, there is no official release date stated. Will Wright has been caught saying April or March 2007. I think it was Gamespot that reported June or July 2007. If the game is set back, it might even be Q3 or Q4 launch.

Which made me wonder exactly what they aren't finished yet. I've assumed it's all the stuff they aren't showing us in the presentations (if you watch closely, every demo they show is just a different aspect of the same base model).

I know I read the whole thing, and your post wasn't particularly long. Why do you think that nobody did that? Is it because they aren't responding to the particular element of your post which you believe is most important or interesting? If so, consider the possibility that these responders disagree, and chose to discuss what they found most interesting.

I'm sure procedural generation will become important, but it's just one more amongst a number of new and important things. It's also still very new, and FPS is a rather old, and therefore well-defined (one might say ossified) genre. One might say that every FPS is just different content for the same game - indeed, many different FPSes share the same engine. I doubt that the early adopters of any innovation in gaming will focus on the FPS.