This has "microtransactions" written all over it.

Will Wright is a genius.

Will Wright had nothing to do with this. He's been gone from Maxis since Spore's release.

Erm... how Will Wright is a genius if he is not on the studio making this game?

Or he is still working on it?

Also, I always tought that spore is too much like A.I. Planet retail sequel project, that was pitched to EA (but rejected...) and alike other Maxis games (like, simearth, simant, and one about creating animals and fighting over a island, but I forgot the name)

As someone who thoroughly enjoys Spore, I have absolutely no idea what they're thinking with this game. The technology behind the game is incredibly interesting, but the main draw is seeing your creature grow from only a few cells up to a space faring civilization. It was a cute, charming, light-hearted game. I really don't see what this new project has to do with Spore at all, except that big companies love throwing recognisable names on completely unrelated projects.

Sounds a bit like a generic "gotta catch 'em all" game with the now-inevitable four-player co-op mode, all of which is strange coming from Maxis.

There's nothing terribly wrong with such a game; people do seem to like Diablo/Torchlight. It's just strange that Maxis is choosing not to build on its unique and widely known identity as a developer of games with simulationist depth. That's not "bad," exactly -- just sort of surprising in a marketing sense.

That said, I will admit to being a little sad to see EA pushing Maxis to divert its resources away from the "software toys" and simulation-rich kinds of games. There's basically no one else making those kinds of games with high levels of quality and depth... so who's going to make them if Maxis stops?

If no one steps up, where are the gamers who enjoy that kind of thing supposed to go? Or are we simulationists (along with the "deep" RPGers who rather enjoy playing with inventories and character stats) a market segment that no one cares to service any more?

At least one former Diablo designer works at Maxis... hmm!

Robert,

It is actually those things though. It's a Diablo-like loot-driven action RPG with a sci-fi setting developed for the PC, using Spore's character creation tech. What about that do you find gratuitous? Those are all true things. Obviously you wouldn't casually use all those modifiers in a conversational sentence, but in a report trying to accurately describe the game, they seem perfectly fitting to me.

Integrating the "spore" technology seems to me to be taking the loot gathering (armor, weapons, upgrades, etc.) to an entirely new level integrating AI and evolution into it, instead of merely increasing stats on a particular player. I dunno, article made sense to me, sounds like it could be pretty cool!

Robert,

"Diablo-like" implies it's a top-down action RPG where you, essentially, run around a dungeon killing things and leveling up your character. And yeah, that's similar to Rogue, and some people call these games Roguelikes, but these days I think people often refer to these games as "Diablo-like" because they specifically emulate the kind of click-and-attack UI and general presentation that Diablo features. Also, Diablo is a reference more people these days are likely to actually know.

Loot-driven means a big draw of the game is collecting tons and tons of stuff, usually procedurally-generated stuff. Doom wouldn't be described that way; the loot in that game is basically incidental, or just facilitates the main combat dynamic or exploration of a level, whereas in a Diablo-like game, it's a huge centerpiece. Torchlight was also described as loot-driven when it came out. The whole group of Diablo-like games tends to be focused on that large-scale item collection in a way most games aren't, even though most games have some kind of collection mechanic.

I don't think there's anything wrong with using descriptive terms or comparisons. Obviously EA itself doesn't call this game "Diablo-style" in a press release; that's a phrase that Kris, the author of this news story, wrote because it's a quick way to frame the genre of the game.

I mean you (presumably) wouldn't consider it a buzzword if somebody described a new game as an FPS or an RTS or an RPG. "Diablo-style" is just used here as a genre descriptor, because we don't have an actual self-sufficient term for that genre. Even "Roguelike," a genre term, refers to another game. Back when Diablo was actually released, Blizzard referred to it as an "action RPG," and the Torchlight team still calls its game that. But if you say that now, people will immediately think of games like Mass Effect, so it wouldn't be very helpful as a descriptive term in this case.

I'm just glad this didn't reignite the debate over what defines an "RPG"!