Oh, very very different.
First, there's the gameplay. As I understand it, it's in real time.
Then there's the creature editor. Once you eat enough to be able to add limbs, you'll go into the editor and be able to plop and pluck to your heart's content. You will also be able to push and pull the body, ala Silly Putty, making any creature you like.
Check
this out for an idea of what the early part of Spore might be like.
In the game, everything- from the creatures to the architecture (which you also design) to the environment, is procedurally generated. This means instead of using pregenerated and prerendered models and textures, the engine creates the creatures and environments on the fly using mathematical formulae- and if you wish to see an example of the power of such, take a look at the screenies for the forests in Oblivion.
Procedural modeling and texturing results in extremely
small file sizes, enabling the ability to include a database shipped with the game of potentially hundreds of thousands of possible combinations.
Once your creature reaches the size where it crawls up onto land, it will start to evolve in that new environment. Creatures will be added to the environment of the planet according to categories or, if you will, environmental niches; that is, if the planet requires a large, roving predator for some reason, it will have one, and your tribe will have to fight it off. This involves teaching them how to use spears, which they will wield using the limbs and skeleton you gave them. Rolling creatures are definitely possible, and could be quite amusing.
The creatures your tribe will encounter will also be downloaded from a database provided by the creations of all the players of the game. This will-
undoubtedly, will- result in a vast database of creatures your game will be able to draw upon depending on the environment of the planet you're currently trying to develop. Yes, you will be able to move to different planets, some of which will have intelligent life, some of which will have been developed by other users.
edit: In the presentation, it was offered that you could even make an underwater civilization that uses the UFO to colonize planets with no water by using a dome full of it to house them, like we might use a dome of air. In this game, apparently, necessity indeed IS the mother of all invention, and the engine determines what is necessary and picks from the database- which will include user content.
This is not, however, an online game. The ONLY online component of this game is in the downloading of new creatures and architecture from the database and the uploading of how that creature does compared to other creatures. As I understand things, there will be an online internet ranking system; if you would like to create a species of rock slug, for example, and name it 'Santora', your Santora would be ranked, but you would never have your Santora planet invaded by something else
in your game that your are playing. It would really, really suck, for example, to be a kid playing the game and have your planet suddenly invaded by a civilization of giant wangs. For example. They thought of things like that and decided a database would suffice.
For this game, though, it would seem to. With a 1-2 KILOBYTE file size for each creature (love that procedural generation), the database, if it grew to megabytes, would contain more creatures than you would ever have the opportunity to see, thereby guaranteeing that only the creature that is
just right for its environmental niche fills that niche. Since the game is all about evolving your own creature, this approach makes perfect sense.
I'm taking what I "know" from interviews, preview articles, and internet forums. I "know" nothing, other than that the game apparently will be released this fall.
I personally think Spore will rock.
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