I tweeted lionhead on twitter about Black & White 3.

I think there should be a restoration of BW1's charm. Everything had just a bit more character. Silver scroll challenges and the people in them, creatures certainly, and the other gods/opponents too. It was quite fun smashing Khazar's villages and hearing his irritated little comments! That wasn't in BW2 so much and if there was a sequel I'd love to see everything just flow more naturally and be less robotic. The only time you'd hear the enemy speak was starting and winning a land, creating platoons or placing buildings. Yawn!

Also I love the vortex idea but I was not a fan of wonders so much. I liked the BW1 concept of them amplifying your powers but not giving you new ones. I think all the epic miracles should have a special altar at your temple and just take a lot longer to charge. Also the vortex is a great idea but again a plinth for it at the temple would be great!

I think trade with past lands is a great idea, there was always the feeling in both games that if you left a land it was gone forever which for a god is actually pretty unrealistic. Resources and troops should come from past lands, as well as alignment based things like weapons or objects. I hated how in BW2 I couldn't put people and things in the vortex, so BW1 did sort of have an element of take what you achieved in past lands.

Different tribes should come back and you wouldn't be consigned to just one which seems a bit Old Testament to me! I liked the variation of different villages and the different wonders they offered.

Stuff I'd like to see all new in BW3 is a more developed weather system with effects on the people and the creature, like snow making kids go crazy and leave the creche, or summer/winter having an impact on farming. The interface should be greatly simplified. I know in a game which is bound to be more complex than BW1 there has to be some interface but make it less blocky and remove the myriad of useless info tabs and stuff that existed in BW2! I like the idea of a temple being the locus of your power and I think a well modeled temple would look awesome. Miracles need to be varied and more added I reckon. There should be simpler ways to build but still to allow the construction of large cities (city builders would complain if there were less faculties for this) and dampen the military element or make it much better. I loved the idea of creatures being the physical agent of gods and felt they were all too useless in BW2. Gods were governed by their subjects.

Well I've rambled a bit XD
 
Just to touch on one thing you mentioned there - the menus.  Put simply, there shouldn't be any -AT ALL!

B&W1 had the right idea, control the world using items in the world - primarily with flags and your creature.

I'm not adverse to there being keyboard shortcuts for a few things like miracles (as that was quite handy), but in general, I think menus should definitely not be in the game at all.  In fairness to B&W2, I think the reason the menus were so prominent was due to Lionhead running our of money/time to integrate these actions with the world as opposed to a design choice.  But in the end it only served to prove how important it was to keep all game controls within the game and to NOT bring up a game menu.
 
Ah yes.  Now I remember.  Not a patch on the ole B&W1 vortex.

While slightly inconvenient if it sucked up a villager while you still wanted him, I always got a great kick out of hearing a villager screaming when they got sucked up into the air and go down the hole :D .  I definitely would want something like that back in a new B&W game.
 
I was quite saddened when I found out I couldn't put objects in the vortex in BW2. In BW1 I had an array of almighty rocks with which I dominated the world with. I had a specific rock I used to crush people, I had even grown attached to that rock. Other rocks I had were artefacts and came in very handy when converting other village's. I never felt as attached or involved in the world in BW2 as I did in BW1.

I do agree with you point about the menus. Having the menus over a temple, for me, lost some of the immersion I got from BW1. BW2 never quite had that spark that the first game had.
 
One thing I like about B&W 2 was that we didn't need to feed the worshipers, somethings in B&W 1 you would need to feed the worshipers way too often.

I ways liked getting people to dance around rocks to make so your symbol would appear on them.

For B&W 1 you could not win this game without your creature but B&W 2 I could easily win without having a creature.
For a B&W 3 game I'd like to bring back the importants of creatures 
   
 
I agree with your comments about creatures.

I do recall however that some gamers didn't like how reliant you had to be on the creature in B&W1 and that was probably one of the reasons the creature wasn't as important in B&W2.  The argument went along the lines of "In B&W2 you can choose to use your creature or leave him minding all the boring stuff".

But in moving the creature to the side lines, it's like they made him weaker than his B&W1 counterpart.  IN B&W1, you could train your creature to do almost anything you could do in the game.  This was nowhere near as true in the second game.  The creatures looked better, but that's about the only thing with them that improved.

While lots of people gave out about creature training in B&W1, I think it was made too simple in B&W2.  A compromise between the two systems is probably what's needed in any new game.
 
The idea of B&W 3, should be "the best of both with something else good in between". :yourock:
I remember in the third land of B&W 2 (the training land where your creature wakes up) I thought that you could put stuff in the vortex (because you could put people in it in the Greek land), so I tried some grain and villagers, and was like whaaaat??  :laugh2
I did like the simpleness of B&W 2 creatures, give them food, click on them, they eat. 
You don't have to scratch their darn belly.
One small thing that showed some personalty in a B&W 2 creatures was that no matter how much you slapped them, they still loved to kick enemy walls!
Being a stick out here, but, I kinda liked the tool bar. :upside
A lot of its' stuff should belong in a temple, but, it allowed for you to know whether a town was under attack, or grab a miracle you did not know the gesture for, or plant a building.
There were way to many leashes, though.  I think four should only be necessary: aggression - a bloody rusty leash, learning - a basic comfortable rope, free will - a basic comfortable rope, and compassion - a fluffy multi-colored leash that is barely there. 
 
I have to agree on the whole "getting creature to eat" thing,  As endearing as it was to rub their belly (which should still be an option in there just for funsies), that particular part was better managed in B&W2.

I pretty much agree on the leashes, but I'm undecided on whether we really need separate leashes for learning and free will.

As for the menus, perhaps this falls under the "something else" requirement?  I genuinely believe that if Lionhead had not run out of time/money, they would've cooked up something better than what they went with.

I greatly admired the menu-less setup of B&W1, but I can also see it's short comings (which a menu seems the most easy solution to). That said, the less you need to bring up a menu for in a game, the better as it just takes you out of the game world.  Also, in B&W2, the menu was almost too easy to use while trying to do the same stuff in the game was too awkward.

While not the easier path, I think that any new B&W game should focus on doing everything in the game environment, e.g.
  • Context actions pop up around the hand depending on what's nearby.
  • Use flags on trade buildings to control your stance toward other towns.
  • More in-game mechanics for changing the creature's attitude towards something as opposed to moving a slider.

Don't get me wrong.  I loved the sliders.  But they were too simple and only served to remind you that your creature was an intelligent "thing" to be configured as opposed to a character to interact and play with.
 
You know in B&W 1 you can teach your creature to eat the food when you give it you him. ;)
In a new B&W game there should be A LOT of creature to choose form not just 6 like B&W 2
 
While having a lot of creatures would be awesome, there's two things working against this being any easy thing to do.

The wide variety of creatures in B&W1 was a bit of a cheat in that many of the creatures were variations of another with slightly different settings, e.g. Ape/Chimp/Gorilla, Horse/Zebra, Bear/Polar Bear and Lion/Tiger/Chetah.

They couldn't try the same trick twice which leads us to the second problem with having many different creatures - detail.  For all their flaws, the B&W2 creatures were quite different from one another both graphically, physically and behaviourally. For the smaller number of creatures in B&W2, they probably took a lot more effort that all the B&W1 creatures combined :shocked .
 
Zebra/Horse...Chicken!
Yep, way too much similarity's between B&W 1 creatures...  :yes
So for No. 3, break out the soft drinks!!!  :muffin: :cheers :coffee
Cuz I will demand... yawn... quality! yawn...  :laugh2
 
fenton_pat said:
While having a lot of creatures would be awesome, there's two things working against this being any easy thing to do.

The wide variety of creatures in B&W1 was a bit of a cheat in that many of the creatures were variations of another with slightly different settings, e.g. Ape/Chimp/Gorilla, Horse/Zebra, Bear/Polar Bear and Lion/Tiger/Chetah.

They couldn't try the same trick twice which leads us to the second problem with having many different creatures - detail.  For all their flaws, the B&W2 creatures were quite different from one another both graphically, physically and behaviourally. For the smaller number of creatures in B&W2, they probably took a lot more effort that all the B&W1 creatures combined :shocked .
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Then they should make more exotic creatures ( snakes lizards  insects or even spiders). Or create your own creature. Like combining other creatures into a more interesting creature.
 
Raptor said:
Or even you could choose a secondary creature for navy battles.
That would be epic.Cutting out the resource supplies of the enemy with a giant shark/crab/octupus thingy or  clearing the way for your own trade or millitary ships. OR Impressing/destroying unreachable cities with your sea creature.
Poseidon would be jaelous.
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Interesting ideas about doing more stuff on the ocean.  I dare say that would be a new and logical step to take the series in.

As for having a secondary creature for ocean stuff, I'm not so sure.  It would start a slippery slop of diluting the special-ness of the creature, i.e. if you can have two, then why not three, etc.?

For ocean combat, I'd prefer the more Godzilla approach with the creature.  He simply walks into the ocean and plays with the toy boats in whatever sadistic way you taught him :D ! 

In the interests of fairness, we should probably rule out any naturally aquatic creatures then, e.g. Shark, Crab or Octopus as that's just too different.  Alternatively, you could allow those creature types, but then they would suck on land.  I definitely believe that you should only have one creature though.

But the more I think about sending my creature walking into the ocean, the more I like it -particularly when he gets really big.  Imagine the cool tidal wave action/destruction :laugh2 ?!?!
 
fenton_pat said:
Interesting ideas about doing more stuff on the ocean.  I dare say that would be a new and logical step to take the series in.

As for having a secondary creature for ocean stuff, I'm not so sure.  It would start a slippery slop of diluting the special-ness of the creature, i.e. if you can have two, then why not three, etc.?

For ocean combat, I'd prefer the more Godzilla approach with the creature.  He simply walks into the ocean and plays with the toy boats in whatever sadistic way you taught him :D !  

In the interests of fairness, we should probably rule out any naturally aquatic creatures then, e.g. Shark, Crab or Octopus as that's just too different.  Alternatively, you could allow those creature types, but then they would suck on land.  I definitely believe that you should only have one creature though.

But the more I think about sending my creature walking into the ocean, the more I like it -particularly when he gets really big.  Imagine the cool tidal wave action/destruction :laugh2 ?!?!
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I would die to see some ocean/sea specific miracles like fog to see the ships wrecking into eachother.Or cunamis to destroy the buildings of your enemies.And when you mentined the Godzilla I've just got an idea for a good old creature mission.Saving the giant monster's friend MoobyD the White Cet from 10 medium classed Fishing ships and 1 commander ship if you fail you can restart the mission whenever you want.When you destroyed the ships then Godzilla will give you one of her eggs for saving her friend.Then you have to bring the egg to a hot spring to accumlate  it for 5 days. When the egg hatched you can change your creature to this beast. He can swim faster has medium elemental resistance and he can conjure water miracles faster and he can herd or summon fishfarms.
 
Interesting mission idea, but perhaps a little too specific.

There is also one other gotcha if we start talking about ocean combat.  As I recall early on in B&W2, they were talking about getting from land to land via ships as well as importing supplies from earlier lands when you started on.  If you're going to have ocean combat, one of the logical questions people would have is why can't we move from land to land using ships?

As we all know, this idea never too hold in B&W2.  For what exact reason (putting aside the obvious financial reasons in developing such a new mechanism), we'll never know, but if I had to guess, they could never explain away how you'd fit your creature onto a boat (although I have a few half-baked ideas around this).

Personally, I liked the idea of using vortexes though.  It just feels more godly and we discussed earlier in this topic about how this could be improved upon, e.g. merge the functionality with the temple.
 
fenton_pat said:
Interesting mission idea, but perhaps a little too specific.

There is also one other gotcha if we start talking about ocean combat.  As I recall early on in B&W2, they were talking about getting from land to land via ships as well as importing supplies from earlier lands when you started on.  If you're going to have ocean combat, one of the logical questions people would have is why can't we move from land to land using ships?

As we all know, this idea never too hold in B&W2.  For what exact reason (putting aside the obvious financial reasons in developing such a new mechanism), we'll never know, but if I had to guess, they could never explain away how you'd fit your creature onto a boat (although I have a few half-baked ideas around this).

Personally, I liked the idea of using vortexes though.  It just feels more godly and we discussed earlier in this topic about how this could be improved upon, e.g. merge the functionality with the temple.
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The temple was the symbol of your godly power and overwhelming evil/good.And they took it away  :(.
 
Yup.  Have a read from earlier on in this topic to see what we came up with about that.
 
fenton_pat said:
Yup.  Have a read from earlier on in this topic to see what we came up with about that.
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I like the idea about the rooms and the home universe.
 
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