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Black and White 2 - How To Construct A Giant
Gamasutra has another GDCE postmortem, this time for the sequel to the god-in-a-box sim Black and White. From the article: "The design philosophy that Lionhead Studios adopted for the sequel to Black and White was to enhance the player's feeling of being a god in the game world by immersing them as fully as possible in that world. What this meant in practice was to largely reject the standard model of game menus and data-panels for an interface that forms part of the game world itself. This presented the design team with all kinds of challenges which were made even harder by the decision to expand the scope of B&W 2 beyond its god game heritage to include elements such as real-time strategy, simulation, city building and a physics engine. "
and that they don't actually 'destroy' immersion. Trying to remember mouse gestures, or figure out the 'right' way to make some things happen when there are no simple menus or keyboard shortcuts? That's a way to ensure my sense of immersion is totally hosed.
One of the things that absolutely wrecked B&W (gameplay issues aside) was the lack of any kind of real, usable in-game menus, icons, etc.
I can't think of any game where lack of menus actually led to a greater sense of immersion, but I can think of plenty of games where an outstandingly crafted UI with menus, buttons, bars, numbers, etc, led to a deeper sense of immersion and a better game experience overall. I suppose Myst would be an exception that comes to mind.
I respect that Lionhead is trying to do something new(ish) with their game design, but since they haven't gotten it right yet, maybe they should try doing something that will actually make for a fun game, and then work on modding that fun game with the EVIL MENUS OF DOOM to match up to their design paradigm of NO MENUS ONLY IMMERSION.
I don't think I'm that far outside the realm of the Typical when I say that I found the no-menus vague world-based feedback (village statues, condition of your animal) requiring a lot more time to analyze to decide what to do next than using a simple menu-driven system.
From the article, it sounds like they are implementing tooltips and things as a compromise, so it might not be as bad. But I genuinely don't see the gain they're talking about from taking tools away from the user. Having complex underpinnings and status in a game is swell, but it doesn't matter if I can only view it through primary colors and simplistic graphics.
Were there really that many mouse gestures to remember in B&W 1? A spiral shape activates miracle mode, and little pictures of the gestures needed to activate available miracles pops up on the bottom of the screen. And the game has a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but you have to read the manual or at least go to the keyboard settings window to find them out. Everything else you pretty much intuitively interact with to make something happen.
And if you want stats, there are keyboard shortcuts to display the basic stats of villagers and the creature (shows up as numbers over their heads, I believe.) And the desires of the villagers were represented by the height of a flag in the original black and white. Not that hard to figure out. I had a lot more trouble balancing the villagers desires than I did trying to figure out what they were.
And if all else fails, simply hover your mouse above the object you want to interact with, and you are given help.
Now, there are other things about the game that frustrated me at times, but I really enjoyed the interface. I think the human mind is pretty adept at figuring out the status of things without menus showing everything... we've been doing pretty good without them up untill the last what... 25 years?
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
I think saying that menus aren't useful for ALL genres of games is incorrect.
Clearly, as demonstrated by classic arcade games (Frogger / Pac Man / Dig Dug / etc), you don't need menus for a very simple arcade game.
However, more complex such as strategy (Warcraft / Master Of Orion / Civilization) would be impossible to implement without clever use of menus.
I don't think you can say menus always SHOULDN'T be included any more than you can say they always SHOULD be included. It's more of a matter of genre and complexity as to whether or not menus are appropriate.
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For a second there I thought that might mean that either GDCE or B&W2 had been cancelled.
An immediate negative response like this is what kills inovation. Are you in the game publishing business by an chance?
I played the first b&w, I thought is was great despite many flaws. I thought the user interface was fine, so immersive that I didn't think, "Where are the menus?"
The worst flaw I thought was the opening tutorial, and the stupid little devil and angel narrations.
I had a great time both with playing god and training my cow.
What ended it for me was the save times reached up to several minutes when my population grew large. Eventually the game crashed and my saved game was corrupted.
I like the original game and its controls. Picking up and flinging rocks/people without a pre-controlled path or some stupid power bar was loads of fun. Slapping your pet around was intuitive. Managing the leash was a little tough sometimes, but it was ok.
Only thing I didn't like was that stupid Shrine you had to fly around in. Could never remember what room stuff was in.
I have to disagree here. I love gesture browsing in firefox, and I love the gestures in Black and White. Mainly because they're fast. I don't have to move to the part of the screen where my back button is. A menu takes longer. You have to move to the menu then find your selection, likely among a tree of choices. Instead you can just do one quick gesture. You didn't even have to remember the gestures because of legend in the lower corner of the screen. There were all sorts of keyboard shortcuts for them too. You're playing a GOD, I think hand gestures has a very mystical jedi-like feel to it. Menus would definitely take away from that. Black and white had an amazingly powerful and simple to use interface. Gestures, navigation, training your pet was all very simple, and fast.
Black and White isn't for everyone. Neither is gestures in your web browser. However, calling either one complex is a ridiculous.
"I think the human mind is pretty adept at figuring out the status of things without menus showing everything... we've been doing pretty good without them up untill the last what... 25 years?"
I wish my last girlfriend had a better status meter above her head or a control panel of some sort. Making gestures at her just seemed to make her mad. Unfortunately, I couldn't tell exactly how mad until she flung some poop at me and left.
If she only had a nice indicator panel to show me just how mad she was... My mind is rather worthless at figuring out the status of things, especially the mood of things without a number or gauge showing everything.
That's something I missed in the first B&W.
When I slapped around my pet, I wanted to see exactly what that meant to him immediately. I don't recall seeing detailed feedback, other than he might have eaten some of my villagers later. This might have been a random act or a response to my beating... which made me wonder how to properly dicipline the beast.
/sig
Menus affect games in different ways...it all depends on the game. For me, I usually only use menus when I am first playing a game. During that time I am also trying to figure out the hotkeys so I can skip the menus (much faster than gestures or selecting from a menu). I understand that some games can't make extensive use of hotkeys because of the mechanics of the game, and perhaps these fall in the B&W variety. BUT, I loathe the game (or app) that forces me to open up menu after menu to do the same thing again and again and again wihtout ever having an option for a hotkey.
If you are reading this, then you are one of those people whom I just can't take seriously.
Wish I had mod points. That was dang funny!
Clearly I forgot to equip my +5 Codpiece of Karma.
This presented the design team with all kinds of challenges which were made even harder by the decision to expand the scope of B&W 2 beyond its god game heritage to include elements such as real-time strategy, simulation, city building and a physics engine.
Good old Peter Molyneux, always promising stuff that he can't deliver. I'll be surprised if most of the stuff on the above list isn't really basic, assuming that it's there at all.
I at least hope that they, you know, actually fixed the problems with the first game while they were adding all of this stuff.
Rob
I think you gave the gf insufficient bananas.
This is what I'm talking about. It's ambiguous.
Did I try to give her my banana too often? Not enough? Was she displeased with the banana itself?
Or did she just enjoy flinging excrement and eating villagers?
Attempting to evolve the concept of visual feedback is a noble goal, but there are times when a simple informative display can save your banana when angry girlfriends want to fling villagers and excrement at it.
/sig
In the article they make a big deal about the use of a hand to manipulate things - but it just sounds like they've redesigned the mouse cursor. If you replace 'hand' with 'arrow' in the article then it sounds like a normal application.
The menu-less aspect is interesting. Context works well in a lot of places (eg file browsers) rather than a global menu. Although having pop-up/drop-down menus rather than obscure gestures would make it more intuitive for me.
Shame they took out the sun moving idea, that did sound pretty cool...
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What Lionhead should have done, IMHO, is implement a UI modding system such as the one in WoW.
Different people prefer different ways of controling their game - no menus might work for some, but trying to force people into a gaming style that doesn't work for them is a sure way to lose customers. IMO one of the best selling points for WoW is that it provides a way to customize the UI using a relatively simple scripting language (Lua).
It's a win-win situation - the gamers get a way to view and control the game the way they want, enhancing their enjoyment of the game and giving them that feel of control that non-FOSS apps always seem to take away; heck, sometimes playing with different mods becomes half the fun of the game :)
The game company not only sells more copies of the game but also develops a more vibrant community around the game, that of the mod developers and users. In addition, the mods add value to the game, sometimes opening up usage and play directions which the game developers simply didn't think of.
It's probably too late for B&W 2, but you know what they say - three's a charm ;-)
I learn from all my mistakes, I intend to be a genius at the end of my life.
First, I have to say that I loved the original Black & White. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but it was a lot of fun. One day I spent something like an hour throwing flaming rocks at an opposing city that was out of reach of my normal spells.
I understand what they're trying to accomplish with their avoidance of menus, and I think it's a noble goal. They just need to remember that there's two types of menus in a game (three counting options and all, but you can't do without those):
First is boxes telling you what's happening in the game world. How much money you have, how many people you have, etc. Getting rid of these is great if they can make it easy to get the same information across through the game. If it's easy for me to glance across my domain and see I've got lots of really big houses, cool. If I can look at my creature and guage his health and happiness in a glance, awesome. I'm all for doing away with these.
Second is menus telling you what you can do. These are the ones where you'd select a spell to cast, and things like that. They tried to replace these with mouse gestures (that I mostly liked), but this was a very imperfect system. You can easily come up with something simple and unobtrusive to replace this that doesn't make things difficult for people. The radial menus from NWN are a great example - I use a similar thing for Firefox through a plugin, and love it. As long as there aren't too many options to choose from, it can become as quick and intuitive as mouse gestures without all the haphazardness of those.
Bananas contain serotonin precursors, they would have made you GF more happy and she may not have left.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.