Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Black & White ...
I bought this game the day it was released, all the previews and my complete trust of Peter Molyneux made hesitation unnecessary. Got a great T-shirt with it as well. Home and install, then play, play ...
... and play? Actually I didn't get quite as excited or engrossed as I had wanted to. Sure, I did play a lot at first but after a while some annoyances started to creep up. Different people seem to place different weight on those things, I myself tried to ignore them since I really wanted the game to be above that, but I can't do it completely. More on that later ...
In short, Black & White is about a god.
A god and his creature.
The god is you. The creature is, well, your creature. You gain your creature early in the game and from then on you can raise it to be your servant in the world, something it will be to the best of its knowledge and according to how you raise it. Train it to help villagers, and it will. Teach it to eat villagers and it will. Teach it to help your villages and eat the opponent's and it will. Creatures are pretty smart once you figure out how to teach them properly (by reward and punishment), but before that it can be a bit annoying when your creature poops on the villagers and spends all his time going around watering the trees. Raising your creature is a big part of the game, and doing it well has its rewards in that you can make the creature do a lot of things for you without your supervision later on. I'm no expert as this yet :-) ...
And by raising, I do mean a certain amount of vertical raising as well :-) ... Your creature grows and changes appearance completely according to how you keep it. Be nice to your monkey, keep it away from hard work and feed it regularly and you will end up with a big, fat, lazy and friendly ape. Creatures also change appearance depending on if you raise them to be good or evil, so you can have anything from a rainbowsparkling ape to a dark, smelly one with sharp teeth and fang-like hands. Pretty cool.
Actually, the graphical coolness only starts there. The landscapes in Black & White are just gorgous, and they change just like your creature depending on if you're good or evil. I've been nothing but kindness and happiness so far, so my lands have always been lush and green and sunny with beautiful sunsets and full moon nights. I've heard that evil looks just as nice in its own way though. The detail levels adjust on the fly as well, so you can effortlessly zoom from very far out in orbit indeed to quite a bit closer than you ever thought you wanted to be to a sheep. Both zooms, and everything inbetween, look just as great.
Then there are the villagers and their villages. People who believe in you provide you with your power by praying, so it's in your interest to make them believe in you as much as possible. How you do it is again all up to you. Throw them around, raze their homes, lob fireballs across their heads or provide them with food and shelter. Everything you, and your creature, do in front of villagers builds their belief, just make sure you don't repeat yourself too much or the miracle will start to get mundane. The amount of belief affects your area of influence, and a god without belief is defeated. So, the basic goal on a map is to convert all your opponent's villagers so he's defeated by impressing or scaring the hell out of them. All sounds very intriguing, doesn't it?
And it is, most of the time anyway. The two main problems are village expansion and conversion. The first thing requires wood and food. Lots of them, especially the wood. The problem is that wood on the island regrows much slower than you and your villagers use it up. You'll often find yourself completely out of wood in your area of influence and constantly casting wood spells on the village stores to get more. Assigning villagers to chop trees is effective as long as there are any trees around, but them running out is of course the whole problem. You can train your creature to do this for you, but not enough to meet demand. It gets tideous, in short.
Belief is just as bad, at least later in the game. You need to impress enemy villages to eventually convert them, but you have to wary your tricks to remain effective. And if you've chosen to be a nice benevolent god it gets hard to impress after a while, when you consider all the evil tricks to be unacceptable. And every time an enemy god does something in his villages, he wins back some faith. This, as you might guess, makes for some really long and eventless periods in the games. And oh, villagers can't fight or anything either, it's all up to you and your crature (and the occasional missionary) to convert others.
Ah, you've got spells as well, some of them really cool. However, you need belief to use them, belief provided by villagers praying at your temple. Villagers praying need rest every now and then as well as plenty of food to keep them going, Forget them for a while and they'll start to get unhappy, or even dead, on you. Not nice either. The last times I played I ended up doing as little spellcasting as possible to preserve power, teaching my creature to cast spells and then trying to make it do the business for me. Feeling limited in your spellcasting isn't exactly good for the fun factor either, especially not when enemy gods always has plenty of mana to counter the impression effect of your own spells.
Finally, to try and end on a positive note, a word on the controls. Lionhead aimed to create a completely iconless and intuitive interface, one that didn't need any buttons and could be controlled completely with the mouse, and I think they've come as close to perfect as humanly possible, much much closer than anyone else for a game of this complexity. Everything can really be controlled using the mouse and it works very well. I don't usually play using just the mouse, learning a few almost equally intuitive keyboard shortcuts makes everything much easier, especially when it comes to moving about. Great interface work!
So in all, I can't really feel disappointed with Black & White. It really does everything it set out to do, and that includes a ton of cool stuff that nobody else has ever done. There are so many details to like inside, so much to do and see. And yet there are some basic gameplay features/issues that drags down the gameplay side of things in some levels. It was in development for a long time, but still the single player side of the game could have used more time. The beginnings are great, but the later parts could have used more fun and polish.
Or maybe I can find a better balancing in my gameplay if I start playing again, a balance that lets me preserve wood better (and teach my creature to be even more helpful)? Interesting thought ...
I still have a large game to finish, and then an expansion I haven't even looked at. I should get at it again, suddenly I feel it's time. Fresh start with new creature and all. Hum hum ...