14 DAY TRIAL // Electronic Arts and its development studio Maxis have announced that the Spore franchise has successfully made the move to Facebook, the most popular social networking platform on the Internet. The new game is called Spore Islands and is set to offer all the fans of the series an easy way to connect with others and to take care of their creatures without engaging in the original Spore videogame or in the recent mobile releases.
Caryl Shaw, who is a senior producer on the Spore Islands project, stated that “In Spore Islands, players get to invite friends in their social web to play on their island, so creating this game exclusively for Facebook was a natural choice for us since they are the largest and most popular social platform for games. What sets Spore Islands apart from other social games is that it offers a different kind of social interactivity where a player’s gameplay experience is directly affected by the choices and decisions their friends make. It’s an ongoing game, so player’s creatures and islands will be active at all times, whether the player is logged into Facebook or not.”
Those who sign up for Spore Islands will choose an area where they want to live, create creatures that suit their style and their aesthetic sensibilities and then try to make them evolve. The whole process is based on interaction with friends and strangers.
Creatures can be sent to other islands in order to do battle and the overall idea is to gain as much territory as possible. In order to make creatures evolve, players will need to use DNA, which can be earned in the game or bought, for those who do not have the time to do so, and the most successful players will be tracked through leaderboards that can be set to show only friends or all the players in Spore Islands.