Spore – Multiplayer or Single player?

Spore features an innovative playing mode which lies almost half-way between Multiplayer and Single player. Will Wright calls it "Massively Single Player".

In Spore, each item created in one of its many editors will be uploaded to a Maxis’/EA’s server (unless you opt-out of this). These items will then be distributed among other players automatically. This means that each player will meet vastlydifferent creatures and it is almost impossible to meet the same creature twice.

Your creature, for example, will be uploaded automatically to Maxis’ server. Eventually your creature will be downloaded to some other player who will meet your creature. (Furthermore, the game actually checks if the creature is needed to your ecosystem, which means that the game will not download the creature if it will unbalance the ecosystem).

The advantage of this method is that if another player attacks and kills your creature (perhaps while you are not playing) your actual colony will not be touched. Instead, you will receive a report which will show you what happened to your creature on other computers. Another advantage is the fact that this method will allow you to be able to do more things. In real Multiplayer games your ability to manipulate your surroundings has to be limited, so as to not mess up with other players.

As an example, in a real Multiplayer game you will definitely not be able to blow up other players’ planets. It would be really unfair if suddenly your whole planet blows up while you are still in the tribal phase because you would have no way to combat it. On the other hand, in Spore if you do blow up a planet no actual damage will be done to the other player (though the planet and its ecosystem was created by him).

This does not mean that Spore will be unplayable offline. The Spore CD/DVD will be supplied with thousands of other creatures and items so you will have a rich experience nevertheless. This is possible as the items will be only a few kilobytes in their compressed form.