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GamersGlobal has posted an interview with Executive Producer Lucy Bradshaw about Maxis and EA's upcoming god sim, Spore. The lengthy Q&A covers a variety of topics including specifics about gameplay and the importance of user generated content.

Spore will allow players to build single celled organisms and guide them from the primordial ooze to the expansive reaches of outer space. At each stage of evolution the game will open up new options for play, eventually leading from simple survival to city building and galactic conquest.

GamersGlobal: How many planets are there in your simulated galaxy?
Lucy Bradshaw: There’s a couple million stars in any one galaxy, and any star can have four or five planets. So you can imagine just how much territory you can discover. The planets are all generated by the program. The ecosystems are generated from collocated content. You can terraform planets and give them your own expressions. We really want Spore to be a game where you can find new things even if you’ve played it for a long time.

GamersGlobal: With millions of worlds, and maybe having only a couple of hours to play every weekend, won’t many players feel terrible small and insignificant?
Lucy Bradshaw: It’s tractable in terms of you being able to play and achieve. It’s wonderful to continue to explore. You can let the simulation kind of drift and find those other races that you saw at just their creature phase and see how they have evolved [because they are from other players who continued with them through the game stages. –Editor] into space faring civilizations. So it depends on you as the player what territory you want to explore: Do you want to beat the game by following the quest? It’s much like The Sims, where you can try to get into level 10 as fast as possible, and get the biggest house on the hill, with all of the possible stuff in it. And in Spore, you can spend your time exploring the galaxy, terraforming worlds, contact other races -- or drive right to the goal of the game. Which you do not need to try to reach at all to have fun with the game!

GamersGlobal: Spore Q&A

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