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PC Games (Games)

Black And White 2 Preview 72

Posted by Zonk from the more-molyneux-for-your-money dept.
Eurogamer has up a preview of the sequel to Black and White, imaginatively named Black and White 2. In the article Peter Molyneux, the game's designer, admits to some faults with the original title: "'It had really, really really terrible, awful tutorials,' he admits. 'The creature itself was broken, you couldn't really build things and people really wanted to build things, there weren't enough objectives in the game, the story couldn't reflect what you'd like. The list goes on.' As designer, programmer, co-founder of Lionhead Studios and even now OBE, Molyneux can afford this sort of candid admission, especially when there have been several years of retrospection. But that doesn't stop it from being a surprising admission, smiling openly as he talks to us about his newest foray into the god/strategy genre, Black & White 2. And it's clear that for this sequel, he isn't prepared to make the same mistakes twice."
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Black And White 2 Preview More

Black And White 2 Preview

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  • Please Peter Molyneux, No Gestures (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tepp ( 131345 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @03:22PM (#13169434)
    Please, no gestures in B&W 2.

    They make my hands hurt.

    I can't do them fast enough to keep up with the pace of the game, and I can't do them well enough not to make mistakes and send the wrong thing to the wrong place.

    I have carpel tunnel and try to minimize mouse motions, having to do wide screen-sweeping motions hurts my wrists.

    I know some people like doing them, let them continue to do them, but please add in keyboard shortcuts for people like me who get intense throbbing pain in their hands and wrists.

  • Problems with the first game? Heres a few.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MooseMuffin ( 799896 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @03:25PM (#13169457)
    Level 1 and 2 were tutorial, and not really fun until toward the end of level 2. In level 3, in a ridiculous game design decision, your creature is stolen, taking the best part of the game away right as it gets fun. Level 4 is just hell, with fire raining from the sky and everything dying. At this point, the game goes from not fun, to just frustrating, and I stopped playing. Its unfortunate, somewhere between level 2 and 3 you got the hint that there was a really great game here.
    • Interesting. That post mimics exactly my experiences with the game. I played it for about 3 days then stopped.
    • God that game pissed me off when they took the creature away. I stopped playing after that point, and spent all my time in the "playground" playing with the creature again. What the hell were they thinking, adding in one of the most fun game elements in years, and then TAKING IT AWAY?
    • 100% agree. My thoughts on the game are identical to yours.

      I also hated how you needed to pull your population from level to level but there was no ability to move large numbers of people into the vortex at once. I amassed a *huge* population on Level 3. At the end of the level I was expected to eiter drag hundreds of people to the vortex one at a time or start Level 4 with a small population.

      I chose the third option, I uninstalled the game and never looked back.

  • B&W2 looks cool...but this presents me (and a few others out there) with a problem... It's published by EA. How am I supposed to boycott EA and buy B&W2 at the same time :/

    • Re:EA :( (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Arrrg! Just steal it like you do every other game, movie, and song. Duh!
    • BitTorrent yo
    • B&W2 looks cool...but this presents me (and a few others out there) with a problem... It's published by EA. How am I supposed to boycott EA and buy B&W2 at the same time :/

      Westley to Inigo Montoya at the end of The Princess Bride: "Have you ever considered piracy?"
    • It doesn't qualify as a boycott if you don't want what they're selling anyway. Either give up your principles + $$$ to buy the game or don't.
  • will it run on Windows Vista Home? (The first B&W wouldn't run on XP Home.)
  • The list goes on.'

    Exactly -- the list went on and on for the mistakes in B&W, which is exactly why I won't go anywhere near this game. That game was just awful.

    • Re:'The list goes on.' (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Malor ( 3658 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @03:45PM (#13169758) Journal
      Well, Dungeon Keeper 1 was a great idea, but was badly flawed. DK2 fixed a great number of the problems, and was really a much better game.

      Because of that, I suspect B&W2 will probably end up being what 1 should have been.... and should be quite fun. There was the core of a great game in B&W1, but they shipped it too soon.

      It's the NEXT game, the Big New Thing, that will suck. :)
      • It's the NEXT game, the Big New Thing, that will suck. :)

        Will Wright's new game Pee? [penny-arcade.com]
      • > DK2 fixed a great number of the problems, and was really a much better game.

        They still sell DK2 in fact, as part of a multi-game-pack. Despite the fact that the last patch to the game renders it inoperable on XP (even in the best of compatibility modes), and of course all shipping versions of that game have that patch. But EA, having already dismantled Bullfrog, won't fix it, not even by simply rolling it back to the previous patch.

        Turning off the environmental sound (by far one of the best parts of

  • My problem. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by -kertrats- ( 718219 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @03:34PM (#13169572) Journal
    The main problem I had with the game was...it was impossible to win if you were playing 'white'! I couldnt get more than 10 minutes into level 3 as a good guy. Am I just [i]really[/i] bad at this game and just don't know it, or were there some serious balance issues between the two sides.

    • Re:My problem. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by KeeperS ( 728100 )
      If it makes you feel any better, I couldn't get past that damned third level playing as evil either. I seem to recall there being a huge gap between two of the cities, and without my creature I could never expand my influence far enough to do anything in the city I needed to reach. No amount of sacrificing children and throwing fireballs could do anything to help. In fact, they generally hurt since I needed as many worshippers as possible to expand my sphere of influence.

      At that point in the game, the p

      • Re:My problem. (Score:2, Funny)

        by Maserati ( 8679 )
        Try throwing the children and sacrificing the fireballs. Might work.

      • Re:My problem. (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The best way to do it is to place rocks in the center of your town. Some of the people will dance around them and eventually they'll get charged up and start to glow. Then you toss these rocks into the other village. You don't actually have to hit anything, since the villagers are impressed just by seeing them.

        Building wonders helps too.
    • The main problem I had with the game was...it was impossible to win if you were playing 'white'! I couldnt get more than 10 minutes into level 3 as a good guy. Am I just [i]really[/i] bad at this game and just don't know it, or were there some serious balance issues between the two sides.

      I actually always thought the opposite... I have played "white" all along and finished the game as "white". I always figured it would be *harder* to play "black" since you have less population from sacrificing too many, a

    • It's just like real life, every white person wants to be black

  • Peter Molyneux's next game (Score:3, Funny)

    by EddieBurkett ( 614927 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @03:48PM (#13169808)
    You play a game designer where you use your imagination to come up with the most amazing games possible. Then, the games you finally release fall far short of what you had planned. You then spend the rest of the game giving interviews to online media apologizing that your game sucked.
  • My main problem with Peter Molyneux is the fact that he has to relese a sequels to fix the problems he admits to, heres an idea: admit these problems to yourself during production the first time.

    This didnt happen only with black and white but also with fable (it also should be noted that they are releasing another version of fable for PC and x-box that expands on the original, and *surpirse* a sequal) that game had great potential only to be brought on by a re-realse.

    Either he has to get his own affairs i

  • Sounds dishonest (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Linus Torvaalds ( 876626 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @04:01PM (#13170002)

    Sure, he's admitting it was deeply flawed now, with a sequel on the way, but back then, he was telling everybody that it was the dog's danglies. Now he's telling everybody that the sequel is great. What's the betting he's going to be admitting that B&W2 is deeply flawed when he's selling B&W3?

    • It's not dishonesty, it's learning from your mistakes. Good design is a lot like good code: it usually takes several iterations to be really good, and the final product is often still several iterations from perfection but it is "good enough" to ship.

      • Re:Sounds dishonest (Score:3, Insightful)

        by imr ( 106517 )
        It is dishonesty because he knew the flaws and didnt acknowledged them until now that his newt games his out.
        I myself bought the first from that, and I'm learning from my mistakes. I will use a pirate version from this game and if it is good, i will recognize it was a mistake to do so ... in a few years.

      • It's not dishonesty, it's learning from your mistakes. Good design is a lot like good code: it usually takes several iterations to be really good, and the final product is often still several iterations from perfection but it is "good enough" to ship.

        Microsoft are champions of this method. Take 3 versions before something becomes actually usable, and 5 before its useful - after that things actually become pretty good. (e.g. Sharepoint has a long long way to go yet, whilst things like Office and SQL Ser

        • It has been statistically proven somewhere that MS needs 4 iterations to get something just about right.
          Every version after that just adds bloat and useless "features" that end up destroying the initial usefulness.

    • I just had a discussion with my boss about how deeply flawed some code I wrote a while ago is (I was the one complaining, not my boss).

      I think most programmers get this feeling when they've learned new stuff, that their old stuff sucks. That's not true of course, it's just that they can now see the flaws of something that was useful in its day but could have been better. I expect it's the same with game designs.

  • It may have been broken, BUT... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by defkkon ( 712076 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @04:09PM (#13170091)
    Black & White was an awesome game. Despite its flaws - lack of missions, creature AI sometimes unable to control/predict, and lack of options with the villagers - it was an awesome game.

    Peter Molyneux has a reputation for promsing features and concepts that he can't deliver. Personally, I don't mind. He's not doing it because he's a sleezy salesman - he does it because he's a gaming visionary.

    B&W had the same effect that Fable had on me - you almost feel like you're playing something magical. Sounds lame, I know, but its true. Despite all the broken promises of Fable, the game truly sucked you in.

    Same thing happened with B&W. The entire time I played it, you almost feel like you're intruding on a whole other universe. It had a mystical feeling to it. As you you explored your island, you always had the feeling that anything could happen.

    I'm looking forward to Black and White 2, but I would still like to give props to the original.

    • I would turn that completely around. There was no game in there. It was pure promise. The magic that was there when I first attempted to play it (as I held my nose past the stinkeroo of a premise that the islanders worshipped me by worshipping a creature) was clearly missing when I attempted to repeat the experience.

      In other words, all hype and no game. If you played Populous in any of its incarnations, you have played a better game with a better implementation of the premise than B&W. Populous ha
    • Fable sucked me in...for the 9 or 10 hours it took me to beat it. On the plus side of things, it taught me never to buy a Molyneaux game at full price.
  • He forgot to mention that the game was confused. Was the goal a traditional RTS, or were you supposed to use your monster all the time? I think about level 2 I couldn't progress any further as the glowy edge of my area was butting against others, and I could not figure out how to do more forward progress. Put it back on the shelf, cursed that I also had bought the expansion pack, and moved on with life.

    By the way, I also got the giant sheep, so I'm not completely dense about the game.
    • "Traditional RTS" - Just words.

      Molyneux is not the kind of genius to get wrapped up in conceptualisations. Hes a free thinker
  • And it's clear that for this sequel, he isn't prepared to make the same mistakes twice.

    Sure, if you can say anything about Peter Molyneux it is that with every game he releases he makes completely NEW mistakes.

    Which is probably a good thing...

  • "MUST BUILD HOMES"

    and yes, it does need to be capitalized in order to show the emotion involved.

    now multiply that by 640 times, then you have a crappy game.

    it was a thinly veiled rts game in a genre-busting package.

    i also never managed to get past land 3. taking away your creature made it very difficult to expand your territories. it was also too limiting most of the time.

    peter should stick with what he knows best... old dos games. stop making modern ones until you know what the heck it takes to make a
  • From the article:

    Your choices in the game reflect the side you eventually control; either a benevolent God who creates prosperous societies and improves the quality of life for its people, or a vengeful deity who forms armies and smites anyone who gets in the way of conquest - be it of land or civilisation.

    The stylings of this game (and others, like KOTOR and Fable) are based on a false dichotomy. Just look at a popular god, like "Yahweh" in the Bible, and compare him against the above description: Yahw

    • This was sorta possible in the first game. You could play a really evil god, but have a good creature. You could train your creature to perform good miracles and generally take care of your town while you were busy hurling fireballs, boulders, and generally smiting the enemy towns.

      The game still became pretty dull and repetative though.
  • I loved Populous. Great game. Took forever to get through anything, and man did I enjoy calling Armageddon.

    Heard about B&W from some friends who had been playing it about 5 hours and were frothing at the mouth about how cool it was, and how pretty it was. So, I bought it. 20 hours later, I quit. In addition to the stuff mentioned above, what really got me was the voices. Those had to be the most over the top Brits working in game voicing EVER. It didn't help much hearing the old guy giving helpful advi

  • Oh yeah, he missed the game flaw where the game FUCKING CRASHED ALL THE TIME. I didn't even get past the stupid first level, what with all of Black and White's stability problems. And don't give me crap about video drivers or Windows or whatever. That same system played other games like UT2003 or AAO just fine, thank you very much.

  • sing along boys and girls:

    Oooooh, we've got this notion
    That we'd quite like to sail the ocean
    So we're building a big boat to leave here for good
    We're not keen on sinkin
    So we're all sittin here a-thinkin
    that we're going nowhere till we get some wood

    Eiii-del-eii-del-eeeee
    Eiii-del-eii-del-eeeee
    We simply can't leave til we get some more wood ...

    "Sheep .... sheep have many uses"

    This was a great game with great flaws. Not like Feeble .. er, Fable, a game that would itself be described as a flaw were it not too i
  • Say what you want about Black and White, but I got freaked the hell out when the game starting SAYING MY NAME if I played too late at night. Not my character's name, either. My real name.

    "beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeennnnnnnnnnnnnn "

    B&W looks up your name via an Outlook API call.

  • Now that Peter has officially declared that Black & White was a really shitty game (that I never played), I'm interested in just one thing : how can he be sure that he's not foisting another steaming pile on us all ? Is he going to ask forgiveness for all the hype he made around his buggy code ?
    I agree with the posts above on Populous. THAT was a revolutionary game, visionary and innovative. But it's also the best game he made. Too bad that was back in 1989.

    Also reminds me of a Murphy's Law : each perso

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