Split-Screen :: The Game-Geek’s Daily Read

As noted some time ago, Will Wright departed from EA and Maxis to pursue his entertainment hub for the offbeat, Stupid Fun Club (which is partly owned by EA too).

Though VP and General Manager of Maxis Lucy Bradshaw stated that Spore’s future was bright, Wright himself confirmed today that he’ll continue consulting on Spore and other projects for EA.

“I don’t think it was widely reported, but alongside this whole [Stupid Fun Club] thing, I also entered into a consulting agreement with EA. 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 [still] be involved with EA on developing the Spore franchise as well.”

Do Maxis and Wright have a solid guide map for a hypothetical sequel or expansion? Turns out they do. And it also turns out it’s you, the gamer.

“We’re finding out cool areas the fans want to bring the game in, what direction they want the tools to go, what experiences they’re enjoying in the game the most, which levels they enjoy the most…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. I think part of it is stuff we wish we had done, but it’s more what we see the fans wanting us to do.”

Wright also spoke out on the absence till now of a console port of Spore. Long story short, neither he nor the team at Maxis want a straight-up translation.

“You can sort of look at a straight port to the PS3 and Xbox 360 and basically have the same game we have on the PC… or we could say, ‘What can we do on this platform that will help us explore different parts of the design?’ I think the Wii is really unique in that sense, with the things you can do on Wii that you can’t do on other platforms right now. It’s represented a lot of learning for us in terms of the directions we might take it. So I’d say that’s one of the under-appreciated aspects of how we choose to deploy this on different platforms.”

Stay tuned for more details, especially on Stupid Fun Club’s developments.