Will Wright's new IP focuses on players' individual, everyday lives

SimCity and Sims creator Will Wright elaborated on his next game at today's Game Horizon conference in the UK. Wright wants to bring gaming back to "normal, everyday life" with his new IP, and it'll be something "more mobile-based" than the likes of EA's SimCity.

Wright, speaking via a video stream, said he wanted to make games that "are extremely relevant to the player, and extremely unique to each individual." To Wright, the ability to have different player experiences with single games is what makes the medium unique.

"That really is the most important advantage that we have in games," Wright said, "And I don't really see us grabbing that and going down that path as fully as we could."

With his new start-up, Syntertainment, formed with former Stupid Fun Club members, Wright wants to make a game that speaks to players' individual lives, as he revealed when pressed further on his new IP:

"Well, I am very interested in basically how we build a game about the player, around the player's life, around the things that they they know, the places they go, the people they hang out with."

While the source material sounds familiar, Wright's new game likely won't come to PCs. When asked if DRM could present issues as it did for EA's SimCity, Wright said, "Well, what I'm working on now is going to be much more of a mobile-based experience, and it's in a totally different ballpark economically and business-wise from the old shrink-wrap model."

It's coming up to five years since Wright's last major game, namely 2008's Spore. Since then, he left his position as head of Maxis to focus on EA's Stupid Fun Club think tank. He eventually left the company proper to create two start-ups, Hivemind and then Syntertainment. It's been a long wait for one of gaming's most celebrated developers to make his return, but with details emerging, chances are it may happen sooner rather than later - well, relatively sooner. This is Will Wright.