The most important achievement for Team Dakota’s Project Spark seems to be making the distinction between world building and game building. Where as games like Minecraft and Little Big Planet, Civilisation and SimCity may well have offered limited gameplay the focus has always been about the joy of building, of creating masterpieces from nothing. What Project Spark’s is offering is the ability to do both and with more flexibility than ever.
For those who haven’t seen much on this game yet it does look very much like its predecessors. Multiple toolbars offer options for constructing your world, from buildings to trees and layerings to hills and mountains. You can also populate your constructed islands with people and monsters and in here is the first hints of just how huge the scope is for this game. Once you’ve created a character, and you do create them rather than choose them from a stock roster, you go about outfitting them. You choose their look, their weapons and their behaviour including the way they think, how hostile they are and what they want to do in your world.
The thing about Project Spark is the worlds you are building are meant to be played. The choices for creativity seem to be unbelievably expansive, the options arguably bigger than anything thats ever come before and yet that’s only half of the game. The developers have talked about the options for first person shooters, RPGs and racers, all from the same tools. To that end characters created are upgradable and can level up. This means that a player can build the world, write the story, set the tasks and guide the intensity. Designer Claude Jerome has stated that Project Spark is all about controlling detail down to the tiniest minutiae.
For the sake of showing off the range of Project Spark a single player immersive story will also be included. But of course what a game like this is really calling for is a valid multiplayer, and it looks like it is going to get it in spades. Not only can players join up on Xbox Live and explore each others worlds but they can create together, fight together or against each other. For this reason alone there will be thousands, if not millions of pre rendered levels for new gamers to explore and get their own creative juices going.
The game is not out officially until this fall but the beta version has already drawn a near fanatical following. So if you have an Xbox One or a Windows 8 computer you can get on and start playing the game right away. So is Project Spark bigger and better than Minecraft and LittleBigPlanet? You tell us.