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Games Entertainment

Black and White 2 - How To Construct A Giant 26

Posted by Zonk from the build-a-monkey-kit dept.
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. "
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Black and White 2 - How To Construct A Giant More

Black and White 2 - How To Construct A Giant

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  • Someday, Lionhead will realize menus are good ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by loopback_127001 ( 695885 ) on Friday September 09, 2005 @01:54PM (#13520514)
    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 displa

      • Re:Someday, Lionhead will realize menus are good . (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Mondoz ( 672060 ) on Friday September 09, 2005 @02:54PM (#13521091)
        "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 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.
    • 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 sam
    • 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 so

  • Arcade vs. Complex (Score:4, Insightful)

    by skrowl ( 100307 ) on Friday September 09, 2005 @02:14PM (#13520710) Homepage
    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:Arcade vs. Complex (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I mostly agree with this, and am not exactly arguing but maybe just adding something.

      All the examples you've given include a lot of menus, but they are built-in to the GUI and HUD of the game itself. You don't have to pause the game to access them, or leave the game world to access them.

      Menus are bad when they take you away from the game. If Lionhead feels like thats what menus were doing to their game, I say take them bitches away!

      RE4, a nearly perfect game, had some flawed menus that were its only probl
  • For a second there I thought that might mean that either GDCE or B&W2 had been cancelled.
    • Yes... I believe that postmortum is bad spell checker-ese for postCARD. I was kind of worried about this to. As far as the content of the article goes, I like the direction Lionhead is moving. However moving away from menus and making the game more complex as well may not be such a good idea. I think that thier next offering will benefit greatly from any design flaws in B&W2 as much as B&W2 will probably benefit from the innovations of the original B&W.
    • Pattern recognition is a hallmark of intelligence.

      My thoughts on this new trend. [slashdot.org]

  • I wonder how much of this actually made it in. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Pluvius ( 734915 ) <pluvius3&gmail,com> on Friday September 09, 2005 @03:41PM (#13521454) Journal
    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
    • So true, amazingly he still manages to sucker people in every time. B&W2 will no doubt get awesome reviews on the first day...but will be about 40 hours short gameplay wise, and will have no one playing it after the second week. B&W 1 had that bug where you couldn't even beat the game for pete's sake??? And it only had 5 levels? All those years of development for a game that takes 10 hours to beat? Don't even get me started on fable.

      • Yes, there was a lot of disappointment about the short story-mode, but that didn't last long.

        Most of the community ended up playing online or skirmishes, anyway. There were even sites that collected creatureminds. And we [planetblackandwhite.com] know.

        B&W2 will have more islands, but as with any game; you can play it as fast or as slow as you want. Most of the people who complained that Fable was too short didn't even do any of the side quests. Same goes for B&W2.

        Either way, take it or leave it. The previews so far are

    • As one keynote speaker at Free Play 2005 mentioned, the thing about Molyneux is that he just doesn't shut up. The press then take what he say as promises, many of which end up falling short. I guess by now everyone should have learnt to take his word with a grain of salt... the speaker was Kieron Gillen, I think.
      -ReK
    • Fable is just about the only game Peter has made that didnt deliver. (and it was still a damn good play despite that fact.) Even black and white did everything he said it would. It wasnt as fun as it should have of been but it delivered (The average review hit 90% (www.metacritic.com)) and was quite a feat none the less.

      How quickly people have turned on one of the greatest games designers. There is now a small army of forum visitors and IRC junkies complaining about how he never delivers.

      The Theme park seri

  • 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 g

  • 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 wh

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