1. There are users out there who want to play Spore but simply don't have internet access. In this day and age, I know it's surprising, however there's still a decent size population. Plus there was a promise that you could play Spore without being online.
2. What if you're on holiday/vacation? Are you simply gonna play Spore for the first ten days and then have the game suddenly die out on you? Or go to a country where internet is heavily filtered and they block these data from being sent to and from the server?
3. Let's not forget that we're depending on EA's servers here to validate our game. Let's say the demand overwhelms the servers and we've seen this happen too with previous games. People had to validate their titles (I believe just once) but people decided to validate all at the same time that validation servers came crashing to their knees. End result: People paid $50.00 for coasters. Imagine having to renew every ten days and the sheer volume of requests it is processing to validate the games. It isn't just Spore they are validating here too; they are also validating mass effect users.

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“My focus started shifting more and more to players, and what they were doing,” he says, “Because I found that fundamentally as interesting, or more interesting, than the actual games [was] parallel play. Sitting and looking at what someone else has done with the same game as you is fundamentally interesting to me.”

Spore uses procedural textures to give players almost unlimited scope in painting their creatures, and groundbreaking animation technology to determine how they move, hunt, fight, mate, and even dance. Less well-publicised is Spore’s procedural sound technology. Unique creatures are given voice by algorithms that take into account the creature’s size, age, biology, structure, and behaviour. Even more amazing is its procedural score. Prog rocker Brian Eno has co-operated with Maxis to write and record small pieces of music for the game. According to in-game events, these elements will be manipulated procedurally to make non-looping dynamic music that suits the action be it a fight, a hunt, or some quiet space exploration.

I got to try out the Creature Creator at Yuri’s Night, and it was very easy and very, very fun, with almost unlimited possibilities for designing both the simple and the complex. From what I saw, little kids were by far the most creative, able to sit down and (with zero practice) create some of the most awesomely bizarre life forms. Adults, on the other hand, seemed very concerned with practicality and mostly made creatures that resembled dinosaurs. Check out a few pics of took, after the jump.

If you want to tally it up, Spore is a god game / strategy sim / life sim / economic sim / action / arcade / roleplaying game / real-time strategy / grand strategy game. But that wouldn’t fit on the side of a box, so I contacted Maxis VP Patrick Buechner, and basically asked, “What’s the deal? What is Spore?”

Buechner prefaced his response, “It’s difficult to classify Spore into any one traditional game category.” (No kidding, guy!) He went on to say that it is a god game with basic strategy sim elements, and that “each of the evolutionary levels has a different control dynamic.” Patrick restated some of what has already been discussed, that each phase “runs the gamut from arcade action at Cell, avatar controls at Creature, The Sims-like controls at Tribe, RTS at Civilization and back to avatar at Space”, and that ”Will sums up the whole content exchange and discovery experience as Massively Single Player.”