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.'"

Interesting, but...

[Dachannien]

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.