Decade Article

[Alkatraz2212]

None of you know this yet, but I'm letting you know now, I'm technically a published games journalist at this point. I have only one article, found here: http://blog.pikimal.com/geek/2011/03/07/five-reasons-you-will-always-treat-your-sims-better-than-yourself/ If you liked that one article of mine, you should look around the rest of the site, it's some pretty good stuff.

Anyway, as my second article, I thought that Black and White is approaching its ten-year anniversary, and I wanted to write an article about what made it so special, and how it affected the gaming industry as a whole. I wanted to gather up some research first though, and where better to turn than to the last living community based around the game?

So, give me a list and a little description of what made this game so great, and what you think has changed in the industry because of this game. I'll be sure to give this site a shout-out when I get the article up there.

 

[GallopRider]

Lol, your article on The Sims is great.  I definitely got some laughs.

What made BW so great?  All the little stuff, of course!  I loved the freedom to interact with just about anything and to do whatever I wanted with my little peoples.  I could raze the village using anything from my creature, to one of the nifty miracles, or even something as stupidly creative as a flaming piece of creature poop.  :laugh2 And of course, I could just restart the skirmish map and do it all over again!  I could assign the villagers jobs or do everything myself.  And of course there's the creature.  You love 'em and hate 'em at the same time.  Some people ignored them while others doted as much training on them as possible.  Nevertheless, there's a certain satisfaction one gets when they watch their creature perfectly convert a village or tend to the villagers.

As far as changing the industry, I'd say BW showed the world that you don't have to have a lot of action to have a great game and that sandboxes are not necessarily boring.  You control the world.  You mess with everything and toy with it all.  You reset and try it differently.  Love it or hate it, BW is something special.

Well, that my two cents.  Hope I was of some use. 

 

[fenton_pat]

Read that Sims article too.  Good stuff.

As for B&W, it's a tricky one to sum up briefly.  But let's gather my thoughts and see what comes out.

I think the brilliant thing about Black & White was that it could be so many different things to so many people.

It could be a traditional god game to some, while a slightly bizarre pet game to others to name but two of the main draws.  Think like training your Nintendog and then having him face off Godzilla in some mysterious land you own. And all the while you could throw your own magic into the mix.

If you haven't guessed yet, for me the creature training was what kept bringing me back.  Watching all the cool, random and sometimes frustrating things he did seemed oddly similar to training a real life pet whether that be by Lionhead's design or by accident (some of the creatures AI actions were downright nuts).

But to be fair, character was to be found everywhere in the game, from the villagers you mind/torment to the charming almost Monty Python type humour in some of the quests.  This game was quite different from anything else out there at the time and granted you so much freedom.

In the end, that freedom endeared/frustrated many people in different ways.  As has already been said - Love it or hate it, Black & White was and still is something special.

 

[Okapidragon]

Haven't read the Sims article, thinking too fast and on a connection that's too slow to go clicking on links left and right. Will read after I post.


BW had, as far as I know, one of the very best AI's devoted to entertainment and dedicated to commercial retail at the time (keep in mind, this was 2001, and I mean the bloody creature, not the idiotic enemy AI that was, after all, your standard AI with certain scripts for certain situations hard-coded). I think a lot of people forget this, but I've taught creatures in the past to always, when they see a new town, cast fireball, then storm, then water, then heal, then food, take food from the store, eat, pick up a tree, toss it into the store and then begin casting birds and the such. I recall a story from one of the beta testers in the early days of the game in which he stated that he taught his creature to kick a villager, then, every time he did, go eat a tree and throw it up.

Then, of course, there's the intentionally-easy script engine that is almost entirely self-explanatory and can be decrypted by nothing more than trial and error, in .txt format, which was pretty much from the start screaming, "MOD ME! MOD ME!" I mean, that was nothing new, but it was still uncommon for the developers to make it intentionally easy for fans to make their own content. There had been before that, for example, Daggerfall and I think Morrowind (I don't remember the year Morrowind came out), and I recall Doom being easy to mod, but not many mainstream games really were, otherwise. Black & White, a game with a very Indie feel and an almost-Indie story of its conception, hit the market to an already-massive following that only grew for the first three years or so, and then it continued to milk off of Fable and BW2 for a couple of years. Who knows what kind of game we'd have gotten, had LH not run short of time and money? Something amazing, I'm sure.

And then, there's that epic feel. I can never seem to capture it in skirmish landscapes, no matter how hard I try, but the LH lands, with their scenery and scripts, had two important and contradictory factours always at play--
1: They were these immense, natural-feeling islands, a marvel of aesthetic design if nothing else, and the beginning of an era of making games (outside of doujoshin (I'd say "spelling?", but Latinizations are up for interpretation anyway)) that were focused on pretty things or beautiful scenery, natural graphics instead of blocky or angular, textured instead of bold, an era that Lionhead really grabbed by the horns, and
2: The feeling that, as massive and omnipotent as you were, in spite of being able to rise in the air until the whole island was a quarter of your screen, this place never felt small, or distant; It never felt as though you were just looking at a map, in Google Earth, for example, and being viscerally connected by a sandbox interactivity (this is where I fail); Everything was always this incredible fractal of detail, you would be roped into your villagers' lives, and exploring the land, even though you could technically simply rise above the island and see the whole thing, was a meticulous and intriguing affair of working your way along the whole island, manipulating and interacting with everything, chuckling when the people cried out, "WE NEED MORE OFFSPRING!"

Oh, and don't forget the multiplayer. I never got a chance to try it, but apparently that was a big deal while it lasted.

 

[FotD]

I'll look forward to reading Five Reasons You Will Always Treat Your Villagers Worse Than Yourself. 

Everyone in this thread has captured it perfectly, so for my suggestions, I shall just say "ditto."

 

[Alkatraz2212]

Thanks for the help guys. I've submitted the article, it's waiting to be edited and posted.

I wish I could just put a giant quote from each one of you here, but I just had to give it all a quick summary, and I have to say, I didn't quite do it justice. I'll be sure to post up the link when it's published, and then you guys can all contribute your comments.