Will Wright still working on Spore

By Robert Purchese Published 22 April, 2009

On expansions and future versions.

Will Wright has explained that he will continue to work on Spore despite having left EA earlier this month.

He'll take up a consultant role and meet with the Spore team regularly to guide his creation and franchise into the future.

"I don't think it was widely reported, but alongside this whole thing I also entered into a consulting agreement with EA," Wright told GameDaily. "I'm spending a certain amount of time every month actually working with the Spore team on future versions of Spore and expansions. So I will be involved with EA on developing the Spore franchise as well.

Wright believes fans will have as much input on where Spore goes as the developers themselves, but he also wants to push the game and in other directions, too.

"We're now at a maximum learning where the fans are going to be steering the franchise as much as we will - they have their hands on the steering wheel too," he said. "We're listening to criticisms of parts of the game, we're looking at parts that were unexpected successes and we're going to go in other directions with Spore."

"Part of it is stuff we wish we had done, but it's more what we see the fans wanting us to do. We're going to probably add more depth to different areas of the game - and we're certainly already doing that with the Galactic Adventures expansion pack - and we're also taking output from the tools in different directions, so you can take your creatures you made in the creature creator and bring them into different experiences."

Spore: Galactic Adventures is due out on 26th June, according to retailers. EA also has three other Spore games in development: Spore Creature Keeper for PC, Spore Hero for Wii and Spore Hero Arena for DS.

Will Wright left EA to run Stupid Fun Club, a think-tank studio that concentrates on dreaming up new IP not just for games, but for a whole host of entertainment opportunities as well. EA will be the exclusive gaming partner.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (8) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Eraysor #1 3 years ago

    All they really need to do with Spore is complicate everything and actually make the ecosystem function, rather than just randomly placed nests with a few animals around them, and it would be brilliant. The simplification really killed the game.

    EDIT: One of the other big problems is that Wright and Maxis suffered from the Molyneux effect. So many features were not delivered, including the working ecosystem feature.
    Edited by 1 at 22/04/09 @ 11:53

  • stevetuck #2 3 years ago

    who cares? just make the sims in space already :/ it would sell 10x as much as spore did :/

  • booner #3 3 years ago

    Agreed, they took a great concept and then altered it for kids and mass market.

  • anomagnus #4 3 years ago

    wow, so much for spore changing the gaming world

    User content is NEVER going to change the gaming world. Even if you had a system that made a game, simply by shouting a screen 'make me a shooter!', people are still not going to be arsed

  • Skire #5 3 years ago

    I only found the very first sims pretty fun. Sims 2 was more of the same, nothing refreshing. Spore wasn't really that fun after you had left the cell phase. Sims 3 is looking to be more of the same again.

  • FWB #6 3 years ago

    Spore was far too shallow to hold my attention. I spent a lot more time with the architecture tools and then quit when I realised I wasn't playing the game because it was so repetitive and simple.

  • Scimarad #7 3 years ago

    The creation tools in Spore are incredible but unfortunately the attached game isn't.

  • the_mtfr #8 3 years ago

    "fans are going to be steering the franchise"

    Translation.

    "Dear customers, we're not even able to milk this cow by ourselves. Please help us milk this cow. With this cow being... you... dear customers. So please help us milk you. Dear customers, would you be dumb enough to just milk yourselves and give us the milk?"