Crisis averted - Wii version of Spore still in the works, confirmed by Will Wright (Spore DS info as well)

I was pretty upset to see the most recent Spore press release not include a mention of the Wii version. I thought for sure it was going to be quietly squashed. Little did I know that N’Gai Croal would save the day by linking me to his interview with Will Wright. A little talk on the Wii version below…

NC: A Wii version has already been announced. What can you say about what that’s going to play like in terms of structure, control, etc.?

WW: I can’t say much about it except the fact that the overriding kind of factor in my mind and Lucy [Bradshaw]’s, in terms of looking at what direction that team goes with it, has been to make really good use of the controller. What interests me about the Wii is that in some sense you have a much higher bandwith controller than you have with any other console or even a PC. How do we abstract the maximum Because one of the biggest advantages we have is our procedural animation system, which means that we can have an infinite of variety of animations that we can make the creature do because it’s done procedurally. So that’s a natural kind of strength of having a higher bandwith input device–it should really feel like I’m puppeteering this creature very directly, as opposed to I’m just indirectly controlling with a few buttons here and there. The rest of the design is totally going to evolve around that.

A lot of the prototyping they’ve been doing is, “How do we make you feel like you have the most control over this creature, even in a very subtle ways, by moving this controller around?” and then make the gameplay serve that, because I think if I had nothing else, but a really fun creature to drive around the environments, and I felt like I was really controlling in a very expressive way I would have a blast with just that alone. So that’s a really good starting point.

This is just one section of a three-part interview with Mr. Wright. Click the links to check it out. Part three of the interview contains info on Spore for the DS.