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Review: Black and White 2
- Title: Black and White 2
- Developer: Lionhead Studios
- Publisher: EA
- System: PC
- Reviewer: Zonk
- Score: 7/10
As your people's almighty, you are tasked with propping up and expanding the influence of their civilization. Gameplay to accomplish this is an interesting blend of the open-ended structure of the previous title and more traditional RTS elements. Your presence within the mortal world is personified by a great hand, which you can use to manipulate the physical realm. Using the hand, you can harvest grain from a field or turn trees into lumber. You can dictate roles to your citizens, instructing them to act as fieldworkers or breeders as you see fit. Via interface elements, you can indicate where you'd like to place structures within your civilization's sphere of influence. Structure placement is very intuitive, and every building has some effect on the well-being of your people. The goal is to be as impressive as possible by placing structures on high points, ensuring that the citizenry is happy, and designing the city with certain elements in mind. Simple rules like placing homes a little ways apart to ensure privacy add a layer of strategy to what might otherwise be a mindless mechanical process.
In this fashion you can take on the role of caretaker, and usher your people into a new golden age. Impressive cities attract people from other villages, and if you manage to impress the citizenry of the entire island you are successful by default. The only problem is that if you're dedicated to using this tactic to defeat the game, it may take you longer than some television seasons to work through the title. In a word, the 'good' gameplay is boring. While it's fun to get your civilization up and running, once you've run through all the building types you'll spend hours and hours breeding more citizens, building more homes, seeding new fields, rinsing and repeating.
Besides playing caretaker to your people, you have a pet to look after as well. The Creature was one of the most entertaining aspects of the first Black and White, but training it was often a source of headaches. The attempt at a realistic AI meant that it was hard to determine what exactly your critter felt about any given activity. Thankfully, the sequel has made the Creature's AI more transparent in the interests of playability. If your Creature (be it Cow, Lion, or Wolf) intends to do something, it vocalizes the intent via a large and obvious thought bubble. "I'm going to poop on those trees" might be something you see hovering over your critter's head. At that point you have two options. If you want him to fertilize the trees (not a bad idea), you would click in with your hand and rub his tummy. If you wanted to discourage him from doing that, you'd smack him back and forth across the chops. When you start modifying your Creature's feelings in this manner, a meter will appear above his head. "I'll always poop on trees" is at one end, and "I'll never poop on trees" is at the other. Like the interface elements included to ease city construction, the meter allows you more direct control by stepping back from the free-form nature of the previous title. The Creature is generally more helpful as well, running to and fro to assist your citizenry with their tasks and defending your walls from encroaching invaders.
On that note, placing nursing homes in your cities will make people happier but won't let you kill the enemy any more effectively. (Though the idea of crack trained granny ninjas is appealing.) Armories are the structures that allow you to build military units, platoons of swordsmen and archers. These platoons are your offense and defense, and along with your Creature are your only means of waging war against your enemies. By placing a flag from an armory, you call your citizens to arms and form a platoon. Platoons can vary in size from 10 men to more than 50. The number of able-bodied men available in that particular city dictates the maximum size of the platoon. Once you've formed your platoon, they start consuming a lot more food. They consume even more food when on the march, meaning that quickly your idyllic city will start craving grain.
This is where your evil side can quickly gain hold, as it's tempting to turn your cities into nothing more than food producing slave factories. Waging war at all is regarded as an evil act by the game, meaning that if you enjoy the combat elements of the game you'll gain at least some evility. Raising some platoons to take vacated towns is generally taken in stride by your enemy forces, but converting settled villages by converting their altar is not. Unfortunately. reactions to your military conquests are really the only response you'll get from the enemy AI. Battles are tumultuous and dramatic, with hundreds of individuals involved in final and climactic confrontations. The slow trickle of attacks you'll face, though, means that you can safely reserve your forces with no fear of a campaign unless you start one.
Besides the city-building and war-making, you'll also be presented with mini-quests or challenges. They're somewhat variable in amusement. On the upside, one of them features you acting in the role of catcher as projectiles are tossed your way. The switchup is that they're placental rockets, newborn lambs being shot from a very pregnant ewe. Less entertainingly is the task that has you tossing casks of beer from island to island. It's an easy to hit or miss task, and the last throw requires you to make your toss with a bad angle and no perspective on your target. Good or bad, they're welcome diversions from maintaining your city or moving your efforts forward against the enemy. Successful completion of the task nets you godly currency as well, allowing you to purchase new elements for your city.
Besides graveyards and better lodging, you can purchase some impressively godly things. Miracles allow you (or your Creature) to cast spells of healing, destruction, or plenty as you see fit. Epic Miracles can also be purchased, each with a dramatic effect on the environment. In a single deific moment you can raise a volcano beneath your enemies, shake their cities to rubble with earthquakes, or convert their people with the power of a Siren. These elements are beautiful looking icing on the cake, and are moments that can remind you of the level of power you're capable of wielding.
Above and beyond the gameplay, Black and White 2 is a stunning game with a unique soundscape. The production values of the Lionhead game are top notch, with an incredible amount of detail in every moment. While the hype for this game didn't include being able to zoom in to observe a worm in an apple, the freedom the game gives you to zoom in and out makes for some breathtaking views. Pulling back to observe the entire island you're currently on is as easy as pushing in to monitor a single citizen. The audio environment is just as lush, with warcries from clashing armies and crashing underbrush from deforestation adding highlights to gameplay elements. The musical cues are few and far between, but just like the original game are beautifully orchestrated.
Despite some gameplay frustrations, Black and White 2 is a solid experience. The design has stepped back from the free-form environment of the original, and I think the decisions made to allow for greater awareness and control were wise ones. While I wish it were possible to play as a 'good' god without going stark raving mad, in exploring the various moral decisions it seemed as though the mixed tactic of improving your city while raising armies was the most enjoyable way to go. If you enjoyed the first Black and White title you're definitely going to want to come back to the series, as the freedom and morality play aspects of the game have been woven successfully throughout the sequel. If, on the other hand, you didn't like the original you still may want to give this title a shot. The more approachable interface elements have removed much of the ambiguity of the first title. Black and White 2 is a game first and foremost, and nothing like a toy.
If your Creature (be it Cow, Lion, or Wolf) intends to do something, it vocalizes the intent via a large and obvious thought bubble. "I'm going to poop on those trees" might be something you see hovering over your critter's head.
Please, please PLEASE tell me that there's no option for online, ah, "interaction" between different Creatures.
Some of the things that a god thinks should remain mysterious.
Despite some gameplay frustrations, Black and White 2 is a solid experience. Let's try a parallel: "Despite some graphic design frustrations, Adobe Photoshop is a solid experience." Excuse me? If gameplay is a problem, then this game is not ready to go gold, especially given the frustrations over the first version. Additionally, Zonk describes being a "good" god as completely boring and the AI as predictably dumb in war. For a game the promised open-ended choices, it's pretty sad to see that it's one sided in practice. I'd call that a major flaw more than a "gameplay frustration." Personally, I enjoyed the original immensely and found the gameplay just fine, so hopefully Zonk just has a different perspective. My problem with Black & White 1 was the bug that crashed the game every time you tried to save. I didn't have the time or patience to try to play through Black and White "savage."
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Screw B&W - I want Populous and Syndicate back!
...and I love it. I've managed to beat it once already, now I'm going through it again.
:)
This game really makes you feel "Godlike" than the last one; Your hand feels real, as it has a physical effect on things around. You can pick up almost anything, too... I dunno, it's hard to describe. The miracles are pretty sweet, too (The Siren, one of the later ones, is beautiful to watch).
Your alignment seems less important this time around. There aren't as many morality quests, as the ones you do get are fairly cut and dry.
Building a city is tons of fun, as is doing the war stuff... watching a 40 foot cow kick a platoon of the enemy down a cliff never gets old
All in all I'm quite impressed with this Lionhead game, for once. I'd recommend it if you have a few hours a night to kill.
hookers and grits.
I hope upon hope though that they have fixed the game save issues they had with Black & White. Several computers I tried it on you never could save at all and the computer it would save on would often corrupt the save game after 3-4 worlds.
Black & White 1 rocked... but fighting crud like that made it get old fast.
Here's hoping Black & White 2 fixed all that.
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
Does this game play well with Wine, or any of the Wine derivatives, on a fairly modern Linux system?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Does anyone happen to know if they will be adding multiplayer to B&W2 in a future patch?
I found many parts of B&W2 rather annoying, mainly because the enemy AI is terrible. They will sit outside your city with armies, never taking the offense and attacking you when you aren't ready.
Multiplayer would at least allow me to enjoy this game more.
Yes, a Mac version is in the works (being ported by Feral Interactive). Of course, there is no stated release date on the press release, but what can you expect?
I've been playing with Black and White for a while now and, while the game is impressive, there are some worthwhile complaints.
First, all replayability (if that's a word) is derived from going through the same storyline each time. You can change your behavior or your creature's, but ultimately there is no multiplayer capability and no "skirmish" capability as most of us are used to it in RTS games.
Second, the game, much like the first, as a tendency to want to overeducate the user. Skipping the tutorial section is optional, but you're still bombareded with tutorial style quests throughout the first two lands. Moreover, many of these quests are tied to Tribute, a strategic asset in the game. Skipping the quests, obnoxious as they are, hurts you in your godly persuits.
Third, your citizens desires aren't terribly clear. There are certain desires, such as a want for grain, ore, houses, etc which are obvious. Other times, your citizens want more free time, or more sleep. No where in the games documentation do we find out how to give citizens more sleep... and while things for people to do DURING their free time abound, there's little in the way of methods to create it.
At the same time, B&W has other excelent characteristics. The creature is less personable than in the previous version, but is also more intelligent. He helps now more than he hinders. I for one spent most of my time in B&W1 trying to get my creature not to destroy everything.
Overall the world as presented is spectacular. While it's easy to be distracted by the constraints placed on what is supposed to be a God game, the fact of the matter is that a great deal of freedom exists in the B&W engine. If you can get past the tutorials and deal with the fact that you can't just toss a fireball into an enemy city on a whim, the game is a lot of fun.
I'd highly recomend it. On a side note, I'd also highly recomend making sure your PC exceeds the system reqs quite substantially. By all accounts, the estimations of Lion's Head as to what runs their software are off kilter.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Having played BW2 through from beginning to end, I can say that it is a very fun game. I encountered a few bugs, none of which were gamebreaking. It was a little disappointing in the later levels to have little flexibility as far as strategy is concerned, but the humor of being able to create 50 story high apartment skyscrapers that loom over your temples and fields more than makes up for it. Oh, and the fact that my cow insisted on "pooping on those defenses" and henceforth damaging my city walls with projectile stools. Definitely worth the purchase price, IMO. Multiplayer will make it a no-brainer, if it happens.
I submitted a story this morning that Civilization IV was out today, including a summary of the big changes, as well as a link to the 94% IGN review and the Wikipedia entry that described all the major changes made to the game.
It was rejected so that Zonk could post another one of his big game reviews, for a game that came out a week ago.
An OK game, but c'mon, why did I have to hear my creature taking a crap all the time.
Yuck!
I play games to escape, not to walk around with a monster bag.
Shame that they've still kept the Tamagotchi-like 'Creature'; who wants to train a Cow-Wolf when you can cause Volcanoes?
Also, why does a god have to waste time performing the harvest etc.?
Shame, because the idea had potential.
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Peter Molyneux created a pretty nice game in B&W (the original). Graphics were great for their time, nice playability, etc. The problem was the philosphy behind "NO BUTTONS".
I can't say I remember 100%, but I know you had to draw circles and squares and such in order to use a skill or spell or something. This is total stupidity, especially when it is just easier to click a button.
If game developers decided to start innovating GAMEPLAY which *was* done with B&W, there wouldn't be such an inherent need to fix the things that aren't broken.
I gave up playing the game for that reason.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
The 1.1 patch fixed that, among other problems. Although, if you could save in 1.0, your saved games wont work in 1.1.
What has been the quality of their previous ports of games to Mac OS X? Indeed, when Loki was porting games to Linux the quality was always top-notch. Often the games would perform far better under Linux than under Windows, on exactly the same hardware.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
But not really because it's a poor description, anyway.
Eurogamer did a review of B&W2 recently at
1 124
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=6
Based on this, I'm not sure I'll be picking one up. I think having more feedback from your creature is wonderful -- this was one of two complaints that stopped me from finishing the first one. It just became too frustrating to train my creature.
The other complaint I had does not seem to have been fixed -- the bullshit quests. You're a *god* -- why are you having to find lost sheep or bring wood to a bunch of sailors?
Of course, I'm also pleased to see that Peter Molyneux continues to do interesting, innovative work. I might give him the benefit of the doubt and get a copy of this game anyway.
Zonk didn't bother to take real screenshots for this review. The shots you see are older ones released to press during development. For instance, the evil cow doesn't even look like that anymore. So I hope someone doesn't think that's a really cool-looking cow and get disappointed that the actual game doesn't look like that.
It should be noted that Lionhead intends to release modding tools to allow people to make their own creatures and skins. I miss my evil, scarred Rhino from the first game, and the little chicken from the Creature Isle expansion pack.
The only thing I don't like about the gameplay is that's it's tons easier. You either:
1.) Build and build and build stuff in your city until you win the map.
2.) Take over all the other cities and win that way.
There's not a lot of deep strategy involved in either case. When doing #1, you should avoid duplicate buildings and put decorations to increase impressiveness...and that's about it. For #2, make lots of breeders and homes to house them, and build an armory. Send your creature (with lightning miracle) and the armies, and you're done.
For those who haven't figured it out yet, even the opening logo is "playable". When you see the Lionhead Studio "bucket" appear, click your left mouse button and start waving it around.
critics referred to it as a toy
Last I checked video games were supposed to be toys.
Black & White was one of the most original and creative games ever made. It introduced a whole slew of gameplay elements not seen before, and was truly brilliant.
Unfortunatly, it just didn't PLAY that well. I wanted to love it! I wanted to tell people how great of a game it was. It SHOULD have been one of the greatest games ever because of the creativity, and quality of production. I have no problem saying a game isn't good when it is clearly a low-budget ripoff, or another lame first person shooter. But it is another thing to say a game isn't good when it is clear that the creaters didn't sell out, and truly tried to push the boundries and create something new and great.
Hopefully Black & White 2 corrects these things, but from the reviews it sounds like it still has some problems.
i have to disagree with your opinion. :) just clicking a button a do it its half the fun...
the no-buttons thing was actually quiet good! i loved to play the game without stupid things that only steal screen-space... it was nice to have those beautiful graphics with nothing else on top.
the fact that you had to make gestures with the hand was also a good gameplay thing, because they ARE SPELLS... its magic man!
I suppose this is a bit off topic.
I'll always remember Black and White as being one of the most emotional gaming experiences I've ever had.
At first the game was amazing, simply amazing. We immediately bought copies so that everybody could play. The AI was SOOO impressive. The graphics were great. The animation was clever and funny. The game was unique and bizzare. For days and days we played.
But then after a few days we quickly realized that they forgot to make the GAME part of the equation fun. In fact, it was less than fun, it was downright irritating, frustrating, annoying, rage inspiring.
I have never played a game where I actually grew to HATE every aspect of it. I hated my creature and my only release was to torture him repeatedly. I'm not a hateful person, mind you, but I hated that zebra bastard who I had once found cute and entertaining. So yeah, he of course would rampage and burninate all my peasants, but I didn't care because I HATED my peasants. Needy good for nothing worthless sacks of shit that couldn't do anything efficiently but die. It wasn't long before I just destroyed everything. Everything. I even realized that I hated the whole game concept and I didn't really care about the outcome. Oh no you captured my creature? You can have the bastard, I'd rather play without him. Multiplayer was an terrible excercise in who cares. I played Dungeon Keeper 2 for quite a while so I was familiar with the concept of playing a game where the only thing in your direct control is micro-managing resources, but at least DK2 was fun. B&W missed the boat.
After a week, maybe a little longer, we sold all our copies on eBay and I remember feeling GOOD as I was mailing them out. Not good because I got a fraction of my money back, but good because I'd never have to see that zebra's sour face or hear those whiney ass peons bitching and moaning ever again.
I've played many games that turned out to be pretty bad, but this was the only one to actually inspire inner rage. Playing Black and White was about as much fun as dragging a cart load of cranky kids through a crowded Walmart.
I played B&W2. I am *not* a super-gamer. I finished it from start to finish in maybe 9 hours of game play, a large quantity of it being repetitive and somewhat boring.
The game is *very* pretty. If you have the graphics card and a nice sound system, you'll have some wow factor. But game play? Come on. The AI is downright stupid. The enemy creatures get 'stuck' looking at trees because they lose their pathing when you close off your gates to your city. Their armys will stand there waiting for you to open the gates, but if the gates close, they stop. I got past peekaboo early on in life and just playing it with an army until it gets close enough for archers to take out doesn't do much for me.
What's worse is I completed every single quest (barring a couple that would have switched my alignment) and I finished this game in less than a half day's worth of playing.
I'm sorry, but 50 bucks for something like this? Just for pretty graphics? I want my money back. (on the other hand, I didn't get any save crashes).
The entire point was that it meant miracles couldn't just be tossed out without thinking. They were akin to special moves or combos in a fighting game, they required a certain amount of skill and precision to cast and were something to be practised to allow you to become more adept at them.
Stuart
It's all fun and games until a 200' robot dinosaur shows up and trashes Neo-Tokyo... Again
I loved my old creature! I had an Ape. I did have some trouble with him at the beginning, but once I taught him that he could eat grain, it wasn't so bad. He did get hungry a lot, though... So I'd come over, give him some grain, rub his belly 'till he ate it, make him happy. We'd play with the beachballs (he did have a tendency to eat them, though), I'd leash him to a friendly village so he could help out (and raid their stores) - it was a good life.
It took me about a month before I realized that I'd trained him to be fat, lazy, and complain a lot (you're complaining? Here, have some food, and I'll rub your belly). At least he was affectionate - he'd pay attention to my hand when it was around. No doubt waiting for the next handout! I never gave him anything heavy to carry so he wasn't that impressive in combat, either... I was so pleased when I realized that I'd done! (Not pleased with the result, mind you - pleased that it could be done at all!) I'd spoiled a creature!!
Just wait 'till I have a kid!
--LWM
I loved everything about the first Black & White game, except the frickin' pet. If I wanted one of those Tamagotchi (egg pal) electronic pets, I'd buy it on a keychain. I want to be a 'god' to my 'creation,' not an obedience school to some baby mothra knockoff. I want my 'worshippers' to follow MY vengeance with fear and tribute, not cringe at the Second Coming of the Great Big Teddy Bear. Too bad this is Black & White & Pet II, not a real god game.
[
Sorry, but your comment makes as much sense as saying that Gran Turismo should get rid of "that boring driving stuff". If you don't like the genre, fine, but...
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Alright everyone, admit it, you're trying to waste time reading other game reviews trying to pass the 24 hours for Civilization IV is released...
I liked the philosophy behind no buttons, it made the game unique. People grumble too much about it, when they should realize that in the end it probably did not impact their experience as much as they thought it did.
At first, I thought mouse gestures in a game were stupid, now they're everywhere, even available in Mozilla.
The only way I found to win a game during Black and White 1 was to toss my creature's poop at the opposing side's food supply. As soon as you landed one in there, game over!
No, a closer analogy would be like if you drove around with a puppy in the car in Gran Turismo, and you had to pull over to the curb occasionally so it could pop out for a crap.
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Err, the point about using the gestures was that you had to learn and practice to be good with them; particularly in combat when rushing the spells sometimes go wrong. I personally thought this was a bloody clever aspect to the game-play. Much more involving that simply clicking an 'annihilate enemies' button.
I totally have to agree, but I can see that it did serve a purpose. It slowed the game down, and made you think about what you wanted. Sometimes, it was difficult to draw the shapes in the heat of the moment, and my feeling that the AI god cheats compounded that issue for me. I swear he got tons of free resources--and the AI moves WAY too fast for a human to compete--not that it's necessarily very smart, though.
If it weren't for the carpal tunnel inducing nature of the glyph drawing, and the scrolling, zooming, I'd be all for it. But seriously, if I played for any amount of time, my wrist would be killing me. That plus the game play killing micro-management, I never finished the game. It's supposed to be fun, not work, people.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
I have had nothing but trouble trying to get this game to run properly on any of my different PC's.
First off, it requires Pixel shader 1.1 support on your video card chipset, which many Nvidia cards do not support(I know many of them do, just not some of mine)
List if Un-supported Nvidia cards
Secondly, you are going to need a newer generation video card with 256 Mb minimum.
My first PC has 128mb geforce MX, 512Mb ram,2.6Ghz intel , and the game will not start due to the pixel shader 1.1 issue.
My other pc is 128mb quadro Fx,1Gb ram, 3.0 ghz intel, and the framerate makes it unplayable even at the lowest quality settings.
These are both PC's that have done fine with Doom3, HL2, and many other games. I now own a $50 game I won't be able to play without dropping another $200-$300 dollars for a top-notch video card.
Black & White was awesome -- I was sadden that they added an interface with point and click buttons. casting miracles was part of the fun of the game...if you sucked at doing it, you were going to get owned by he who could cast fastest. plus, there was shortcuts like the R key for 'repeat miracle' ...so that helped
B&W 2 seems fun, except for the fact that there is ak nown bug on NVIDIA cards that it runs like crap by default due to the pixel shaders. I had to edit my graphics.config and change my 6600 line to minspec 3 (lowest pixel shader)
Theres no fur or grass, and the water isnt all reflective, but it runs smooth. Lionhead said they'll fix this in a patch.
B&W2 seems fun though. I'm on the second land.
One thing I would say is that whilst the game is technically and graphically very good, the amount of micro-management required even with just two or three townships under your control on a map is too onerous.
The enemy AI, not unlike games like Command & Conquer, becomes fixated on constantly attacking you very early on in the game to the point where you barely have any other time free to do much else. This coupled with the fact that you have to manually create armies to defend your bases just adds to the frustration. You can assign your armies to defend certain structures, but any force that does not pass directly through this defensive circle is just left unchecked to wreak havoc. If an army manages to get past a group of archers, well.. they just sit back and watch them maraud through the town.
The collection of resource is another annoyance. You can have several storehouses (structures that store wood, grain and ore - required to feed your people/armies and build other structures) but invariably one will sit there near empty whilst the others are completely full up, even if they are placed adjacent to eachother. Again, managing this requires you to take time out and move resources around manually - something the AI is plainly incapable of doing.
It is also not always immediately obvious what the mouse is positioned over, and it can be frustratingly difficult to isolate something quite small when there are other objects that can be picked up in close proximity. Picking up individuals, for example, when your population is quite high can be annoying at times.
There are also a number of faults in how the A.I reacts to events. For example, you could position an armada of archers on your walls and towers, and if positioned correctly the enemy A.I will continue to send armies along a fixed path straight in the firing line. I counted at least 10 times where this occured (the A.I never seems to learn that its last brigade got massacred before even launching an attack themselves), before the A.I - I'm sure by chance - got blocked by an obstacle and was forced to take a different route.
Another key failing (although you could view this as intentional) is that it is difficult to earn "tribute" (essentially credits with which you can buy better structures) unless you follow the "good" path. Very early on in the game you are tasked with removing a boulder from someones garden, a task which - if you simply remove the rock - you are awarded a valuable amount of tribute. If you choose to disregard the persons cry for help, and instead throw them in the sea before depositing the rock on their house, you get nothing.
All in all, a disappointing game unless you are a fan of extreme micro-management and practically zero autonomy.
B&W was a great psychology experiment. Let me explain why.
The most common complaint I hear about the first B&W was that the creature was too hard to train. So now it pops up bubbles explaining to you what it is thinking. The second biggest complaint was constant micromanagement of villages.
I thought it was easy to train a creature: less is more. By the end of the first level I had trained my creature to heal hurt peasants, give them food if they need it, and water trees and fields in the spare time. It didn't take much effort and it was quite intuitive. And the creature did all the micromanagement for me. Brilliant!
But on to my point about patience: I watched my 9 year old brother play the game. He spent 99% of the game doing stuff with his creature. Punishing him, rewarding him, giving him stuff to eat, etc. Whereas I spent 10 minutes out of each hour doing that. His creatures never acted on their own, they followed him around, they ate everything, they pooped on everything.
I get the impression that most people doing game reviews have the attention span of 9 year olds. It wasn't the game's fault: these reviewers need to go back to playing Quake 3 because they fingers were twitching too much.
I have to disagree. This game has filled me with rage. I actually very much enjoyed the first one. The people that seemed to hate it are the ones that didn't understand how to manage their population and pets. That's what was great about it, if you did it wrong, things went badly. But if you did it well, it was a tremendous feeling of accomplishment.
#2 is dumbed down in every way. Knowing exactly what your pet is thinking and exactly how to train him makes the pet less of a pet, and more of a robot. He has no personality at all. The RTS elements are like an afterthought: simple and entirely lacking in depth. The city building has a great interface, but also seems to have no point in the end. In the end, the best aspect of the game was the road-drawing.
Bleh.
oh man, did you ever hit the nail on the head.
almost felt bad when i started slapping my monkey around.
After a week, I started enjoying it. A LOT!
Am I the only one that just tied my creature to a tree and threw the opposing villagers off the tops of mountains? That never got old. This looks like a better sandbox than the first, and adding RTS elements might add a much-needed depth that was woefully missing from the first, especially if creature management is better. In the first game I can think of many times when the creature was breakdancing and petting people one minute, yet pooping on and collapsing roofs and throwing people into the ocean the next.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
I'm not an uber-gamer anymore, but b/c I enjoyed B&W1, I bought this game.
.5h worth of work. When you only play 2 to 3 hours a week, that's a pretty significant portion of wasted time.
While my machine is on the lower end of the specs for the game, I believe I'm well within tolerance. So far, I have had crashes involving the start of the game, clicking on scrolls within the game, and army battles.
It's quite frustrating, really. And since I promised myself I wouldn't spend $300 upgrading my machine just to play a game, I guess I'm out of luck.
As someone who grew up playing PC games (starting with Dungeons of Daggorath on the TRS80), I have to say I'm pretty disappointed with the stability.
As far as the gameplay, I do enjoy it. Given that I don't have a lot of time to play, though, I just can't tolerate losing 15m to
Whatever. Nevermind.
http://www.biggercheese.com/
Seems to sum it up quite nicely.
Get the game here here: Black and White 2. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!
I recomend everyone that are thinking about this game to take a look at lion heads forum - what do you DON'T like about B&W2 (http://allboards.lionhead.com/showthread.php?t=97 765). There are rants there and peopel flameing Lion Head in ways i can only dream of doing. BTW the Like thread is about 1/4 of the don't like and if you remove all the OMG the grafiks are UBER the do not like thread dwarfs the like thread.
And yet the un-skippable intro...
I distinctly remember asking for a better rendered flying red pig instead of a real evil avatar as well.
I played BW for a while, but when I had a difficult run with my cow, having to punish him repeatedly for eating people, I made the mistake of checking his state of mind. After slapping this bovine back and forth a lot, his state of mind was "My diety has a black heart."
I closed it down. Haven't played since. Actually felt BAD about slapping a giant, graphic, cow.
Somehow, slaughtering strangers in UT2K4 is actually fun...
Oh, the worst AI cheat was a bug that happened when your creatuere died and was returned to your temple while the enemy was casting a lightning at it, he'd continue with it next to your temple until the spell was used up, constantly damaging your temple (or more exactly, your towns because the temple absorbs buildings when damaged).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I learnt that it's very important to keep in mind that a man's visions with a game doesn't make him a good game designer. That's why they often have different designers and visionaries at modern game companies. I'd look at both B&W 1 and 2 for examples of this. And conversely, people with not too many new visions can be excellent designers. I could look at Diablo II for an example of this, in large based on the ancient Roguelikes, and also admitted to be so by the designers at the division formerly known as Blizzard North. Yet it became among the most successful games in modern PC history.
;-) (seriously -- don't go think this is a Populous or Powermonger!)
My only recommendation to people not yet having experienced B&W is to try to always keep in mind that this is about a computer game, with the regular limited AI, and regular limited game play through a quest system and limited content, andof course that you don't control a world, but an animal.
This is the kind of game where your fantasy combined with others hype is your worst enemy...
I think B&W is a game that would be earth shattering if ideas and visions ruled game design, but I believe that unfortunately for Peter Molyneux, it's the other way around. Great ideas can lift a game a lot, but it still needs to have the foundation of being fun. If it doesn't, it risk feeling to me like a game made by a "mad designer" where you... well, spend time slapping monkeys to destroy villages. Sure the idea is fun, but without other concepts such as exploits of human's collective minds (Diablo II) or competitive nature (FPS games), strategic and analysing thinking (RTS games), etc, how long is it fun, really? For me, about 2 days or so, and I really wanted it to be good.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
human's collective minds (Diablo II)
:-)
Sorry, I meant "collecting" here. Was talking about the huge item focus of Diablo II. Most I've heard that like the game still plays it for that, and for many it's addicting as hell. So I wasn't suddenly mixing in the Borg into this discussion.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I got the game, but then couldn't play it because it requires a graphics card that has Pixel Shaders 1.1 (which my decent, but not insane graphics card can't do). I don't really need to spend $50 on a game that doesn't mention any such ridiculous requirements on the packaging and then find out I need to spend another $150 to get a hefty new graphics card to play it. (Note: I have a GeForce 4 MX - which is decent but slightly dated). What's really funny is that they seem to know this is a problem and encourage you to go visit their "partners" at ATI on their website (ATI sells several cards that do support this).
In fact, most of the "mid-to-low end" machines (ie $800) that I see being sold right now on name brand computer websites come with a graphics card that won't play this game (and the ones that do are new models that are just starting to be sold)... This probably isn't that big of a deal for most people here - as I'm sure that most people here buy the newest gaming hardware every year... but for mom and dad and your kid sister (who are most likely the people targeted by this game - and by lower end machines), it's probably a big deal. Caveat emptor.
A games console might validly be said to be a toy. You can play many games with it.
Only a modded game console is a toy. You see, with a ball, you can think up new games to play. With a game console, you have to mod it in order to run games that the console maker didn't approve.
The people need to be micromanaged between worship and play.
I've been told that if you micromanage the people, they'll get comfortable with being micromanaged. So if you don't like to micromanage them, then don't micromanage them so much in the early rounds; let them keep their free will.
Biggest problem in the original game was that it was somewhat awkward to use anything but a mouse. I had difficulty using my trusty wrist-saving Logitech Trackman FX Marble to cast spells, throw things, and compete in some of the contests (e.g., bowling). There was talk from the developers about how the new version would get rid of some of the mouse-ballet-dancing annoyances in the original.
Unfortunately, B&W II seems worse for trackballers overall. Spells are more point-and-click, but elementary movements (zoom in and zoom out) that worked fine with a trackball in the original don't work at all in B&W II. And throwing things is still a godawful (no pun intended) pain.
Any help for trackballers from anyone out there? Can I change the preferences to use a game controller or joystick? Or must I buy a mouse to play this one game?
Not exactly. GT is a driving game: the dog would be an annoying extra. But the Creature is an important part of B&W: without it, it would be little more than a simple RTS.
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I wonder how much difference a graphics tablet would have made?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Taka!
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
one thing bad about the game, is that the creatures arn't as big as advertised. sure in screenshots you see the HUGE creature basing armies and walls, but thats when you zoom in COMPLETELY. the creature looks so small when you are actualy playing the game. and why would i make army when my creature can kill 10 platoons with the help of a few maricles?
but if you didn't manage them then they wouldn't bother worshipping you
Then is it possible to macro-manage your units? Analogy to the Bible: Though there were a number of recorded miracles between the flood and the end of the book of Nehemiah, those miracles were spaced out across two millennia.
No one mentioned Dogz.
I did, the point being that replacing "Nintendogs" with "Dogz" would preserve the spirit of Zonk's assertion. So is the B&W series a marriage of Dogz and an AOE game?
In a single deific moment you can raise a volcano beneath your enemies, shake their cities to rubble with earthquakes,
Heya! They reinvented Populus!
Nah, just kidding. There ain't any new game ideas coming out of any major dev studio anyways, so I'm happy if they do some old stuff in a good way. It looks interesting, but it definitely has lost the "wow, this is a cool, new and unique idea" bonus.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
So. Frustrated critics referred to this game.. as a toy.. I FAIL TO SEE THE PROBLEM HERE!!!!
"I'm not religious, but at the same time I don't get why science always has to have something to prove."
Yeah, I've wondered the same. Previously, the high prices for a decently sized one have always scared me off, though I have no doubt it's worth it. I'll have to get one, I'm guessing it could also be good for CAD stuffs. It's worth a try anyhow, right?!
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
B&W no doubt fuelled a lot of the interest in gesture control. Infact I use mouse gestures in absolutely everything I do on my PC (with firefox handling internal mouse gestures and other software handling OS navigation with gestures) 200% efficiency
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
I agree. The concept is simple enough, using mystic gestures to do magic. But while the idea was good, it was just too clumsy in practice - getting the gestures right was just too hard for the game to be enjoyable, and I gave up on it once they started becoming necessary for gameplay.
There is a distinct need for more of them, and the pet is not necessary. Molyneux really needs to go back and make a big-budget Populous 4.
First off, black and white 2 is fun. The combat is simplistic like previous bullfrog games, but that didn't stop them.
Now, I have a fairly beefy computer. Not brand new, but beefy. Dual athlon 1600s, 512mb DDR, GeForce 6800 GT, SBLive... This barely hits the minimum specs for the game. And those specifications are low. Exceptionally low. By the time you exit the tutorial, any mediocre city bumps the ram consumption near 480meg. Fine fine, I'll bump the details to nothing, turn all of the shiny things [and there's many, the game is beautiful] off. By land #5 any sizable city sends my machine into heavy thrashing.
Maybe I'm just old and crotchety, but a game shouldn't require 1.5-2 gigs of ram in minspec mode.
Additionally, Zonk describes being a "good" god as completely boring and the AI as predictably dumb in war.
The point of being good is to stamp out evil. The problem with evil is that it keeps cropping up everywhere when you're not paying attention.
Bring back the D&D elements, where your alignment had something to do with who you attacked.
Bring in World War II elements. Good soldiers had bullets and chocolate. Good soldiers were nice to enemy prisoner soldiers. Good soldiers fought better than evil soldiers in the long run, but easily loose moralle.
The point of being evil is to stamp out good. The problem with good is that it keeps cropping up everywhere...
COME ON!! It isn't that hard to make up challenging good versus evil conflicts!!
I had problems where the 1.1 patch still froze and left the Giant Creature on the mountain unable to interact, while I was still on the first island. Right before the evil god sets him on fire!
Which was annoying, in that there is then no way to get to the next level without that animation sequence.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --