Everything you wanted to know about Darkspore,<br /> but were afraid to ask

Diane, Emily, Mike & Tom catch-up with Michael Arsers one of the guys behind upcoming Sci-Fi Action RPG Darkspore

Can you tell us about Darkspore and, for those of our readers who haven't played it, Spore too?
Darkspore is a Sci-Fi Action RPG that's online, so it focuses heavily on 4 player co-op and PvP, it's really about playing with other people and your friends. The big thing we wanted to bring to the Action RPG genre really links back to Spore. Spore was really a game about creativity, it used a lot of great technology to let you create any creature you wanted, and that was a really great experience for our creators and for the community who were making some really cool stuff for the game. So, what we really wanted to do is take that creative technology and bring it into a more hardcore genre like an Action RPG. So we brought over our creature editor and put it in an Action RPG setting, so when you get loot in the game, instead of just putting it in a slot, you can take that loot into our creature editor and essentially put it where ever you want, allowing more the creation of diverse creatures and deeper customisation in a “hardcore” setting.

So is this game something of a departure from the first one, or is it more of the same Spore we know?
The new game is a complete departure from Spore and when you play the game it's very apparent it's an action RPG now, and it's really all about special abilities, faster combat and collecting loot to create a more hardcore gameplay experience, very different to the first game which was more casual, more slow paced and a lot more about exploration and creativity.

How does the gameplay in Darkspore measure up to the gameplay of the first Spore game?
Pretty different on all fronts, the game is very easy to get into but difficult to master. It's very point and click, it's in a third person perspective and you're running around, shooting fireballs, finding loot, punching things, which serves as the core gameplay, but on top of that we have some new and neat things for the genre. As well as managing all the individual creatures, you're bringing down squads of new creatures to the planet, and the time they spend on the planet gives each creature a unique set of abilities to bring to the table. So if you're in a situation where you’ve been badly injured and need to heal, you can drop in a healing character who will focus on healing you and your party. There is a lot of variety coming from the fact we have so many different creatures.

The original Spore was known for its simple yet power creation tools, how do they feature in Darkspore, and what role do they play?
Simple yet powerful is very much present in our creature editor, really at it's core. We pulled over the entire creature editor into Darkspore and then began modifying it. If you've played Spore and you play Darkspore, it's just like riding a bike, you're familiar with it.

Obviously the creature creator allows players to create their own creatures but can you give us an idea on where the design and your artistic inspiration for the actual game came from?
Early on we wanted to make a Sci-fi game, and we wanted to take a big departure from not only Spore, but also all other action RPG’s too. So we put in a lot of hard work defining the look for Darkspore; we wanted it to feel not as cartoony, but also give a very unique feel and give each character lots of personality, and that is where a lot of our focus has been, making the characters “pop” and stand out. But on the other side, you are going through these BIG alien worlds, and we have a bunch of different alien worlds which have a diverse visual look. The world we are showing here at GamesCom is Cryos, a big ice planet and on the show floor we have Nexus, which is a planet torn apart by a black hole, so its loads of pieces of rock connected via high tech bridges and teleporters. There are a wide variety of different looks and feels across different worlds.

Talking about the variety of levels, do you know exactly how many different levels there will be?
There are many, that's all I'll say right now.

Back onto the topic of artistic inspiration, did you find that you’ve taken a lot of inspiration from creatures made by the modding community for the previous game?
It's actually been an interesting experience because a lot of the art on Spore was trying to set it up so that we enabled other people to make more really cool stuff, and I think it has kind of been a breath of fresh air for our artists because we're letting them go crazy. We wanted to use their abilities and their creativity to make really cool looking stuff, as almost like the basis for the game, we then threw that out to the players to encourage them to make creatures, gobble up all the loot, and really make their guys look the way they want them to by using the loot they collect in the game.

Now, we've spoken a lot about Spore and how Darkspore differs from it, but can any of the content from the original Spore be transferred over in anyway to the new game?
Not directly, but what we are trying to do, we have a very active creative community in Spore, and in order to engage them we have put out some contests. We started them before the game development even started so we are calling them template challenges, we had the base creature we wanted as an NPC in the game and then we sent that out to the community and said “do whatever you want”, make some cool things of this base, and we had a ton of entries from these contests, we then looked through the best of the best, validated which ones would work with our animation and developed a process where you can import them into the game, and even now we have player created content showing up in Darkspore.

You mentioned at the start of the interview that Darkspore will feature PvP, will the PvP Arena have a ranking system?
I am not allowed to talk about the PvP yet, but I do think it would be kind of lame to have PVP without ranking.

Are their any plans for a release on consoles?
PC only.

Is Darkspore still set release in February 2011?
Correct. They keep reminding us of that! (laughter)

Are you going to be supporting Darkspore with any post release DLC?
Nothing specific is planned yet, we are just focusing on the core game right now.

Well, Michael Arsers, thank you for your time.
Thank you.