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The Epic Story of Black and White
Disgruntled Goat writes " The Guardian Gamesblog recently visited Lionhead Studios, and had a chance to talk to Peter Molyneux about the future of the Black and white series. From the article: 'Among lots of other interesting details, Lionhead chief Peter Molyneux reveals that there will be five installments to the series, each game following the progression of the relationship between the citizens in the game and the god, represented by the player.'"
I'd like to believe you about all of the wonderful things you'll be giving us, but after Fable (possibly the most overhyped game I've ever played) I just can't trust you. What you promise today just might not be there tomorrow.
In separate news John Carmack announced that there will be a total of 6 games in total in the Doom series, and that everyone should keep buying them based on his name.
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
Lionhead should focus on the game at hand instead of projecting 5 total games in the series. It's a bit worrysome that they're already talking about having 5, and the hype machine might get rolling incredibly early on all these games.
Going along that thread, it says that by game 5, the citizens will outclass their god (player), with examples such as throwing rocks vs. cannons and fireballs vs. atomic bombs. They then say that B&W as a series is focusing on letting the players feel all-powerful and do extraordinary things (at least in the early ones). It seems a bit contradictory, and with the last installment of the game, I have to wonder if it'll even be worth playing. I personally like the theory of manpower vs. godpower in the philosophical sense, but I'm not too sure on the gaming sense. The allure and fun of the B&W series is being omnipotent, and if you strip that out, what will be the game's selling point?
Molyneux and Friends come up with some interesting game ideas on a regular basis. I liked the concepts behind Black and White, and thought it was a marvelous-looking game, but after you played it for maybe ten or fifteen hours, you started to realize that there were serious problems in terms of execution (competition against the computer was repetitive and boring, and training your creature was often confusing) (not counting the bugs).
It's sort of like the concept of the MMORTS. SOE worked on that concept for a couple years with Sovereign, but cancelled the project when it became clear that while you could come up with an interesting concept, you couldn't execute it properly without creating significant problems for some segment of the playerbase (generally, that you had to pick between hardcore gamers and casual gamers, if you planned to have persistence in the game).
I wish Molyneux the best of luck. He's a thinker, and there aren't enough thinkers these days in an industry that just keeps cranking out FPSes, fighting games, and GTA. Unfortunately, he's also very proud of what he thinks of, to the point of blindness of his games' flaws, and that means I probably won't be buying another Lionhead game before I get the chance to read several reviews of it and peruse some message boards about it.
Now I can spend another 8 hours trying to get my creature to poop in the right place.