Will Wright concerned by Spore hype

Legendary games designer Will Wright has admitted that he believes his upcoming release Spore has been over-hyped, and that the building anticipation for his game is concerning him.

Speaking to Game Informer, Wright stated: I think it’s too much hype. About a year ago, we were realising how much hype we were getting and we decided we should start to say that it’s going to suck just to de-hype it. That is a certain amount of pressure.

When people don’t know much about something, they tend to fill in the blanks the way you want them to be filled in. That’s true of almost anything. Then, when the actual thing comes out some people will be disappointed that it’s not ‘hardcore enough’ or it’s not ‘easy enough’ or that we didn’t do this or that.

We’ve gotten to that point any additional hype isn’t serving us well. It’s a concern.”

In addition, Wright added that whilst he expects Maxis to continue developing new expansions for Spore, following the model the firm adopted for its hugely successful The Sims 2, he sees Spore evolving in a different way.

I think it will be similar in extent but hopefully not the same strategy we took with The Sims,” he explained. With The Sims, we were basically selling expansion packs to the same customers over and over. I think Spore lends itself more to horizontal expansion, where we take components of the game like levels or editors into totally different formats and hit people that maybe never even played the hardcore PC game, but would enjoy a lighter experience using one of the editors. Or, using the content in new ways outside of Spore the game.

I think we’re going to see Spore expanding in a much wider variety of ways than The Sims did, but to the same extent. Different systems, different game styles, things like that. Once you have this much content there’s a lot of things you can do with it, gaming and otherwise.”

Spore is due out in the UK on September 5th.