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. "

Comments

Someday, Lionhead will realize menus are good ...

[loopback_127001]

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.

Arcade vs. Complex

[skrowl]

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.

Re:Someday, Lionhead will realize menus are good .

[Mondoz]

"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.

I wonder how much of this actually made it in.

[Pluvius]

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