Black & White Postmortem

They made tons of promises and didn't deliver on half of them. 5 levels???? Give me a fucking break. I expect more then five levels with over 3 years programming. Add to which you only really get your creature on Land 2 and Land 4. Land 1 is just a giant tutorial and is basically over after you get your creature. Land 3 they take your creature away. Land 5 they curse it and make it unable to do jack shit. I remember hearing promises of over 400 quests... Hah right. Maybe if you enjoy stupid tree puzzles or find the hidden rocks or follow the little man/wolf/ insert object here.

Another stupid thing about this game is that your creature constantly forgets basic things you teach it. Spend an hour beating the shit out of it for eating a villager and it keeps on doing it. Teach it how to use the village store, raise the totem, fish, drink when it's thirsty, and it will forget all of these next time you load the game.

Then there is the actual gameplay itself. Nevermind the constand repetitive tasks of pulling out trees, performing food and wood spells, and laying scaffolds for the idiot non self sufficient villagers. This alone takes up 90% of the game. They should have called the game "Micromanagement" because that's all you do!

Taking over towns is a simple matter. Throw rock through town, cast food a few times, cast wood a few times, throw fireball, heal town a few times, cast winged creatures, Ta DA! Town is yours. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Lionhead simply did not spend enough on actual gameplay. Too much time on stupid insignificant details such as adviser lip syncing, creature dancing, zoom levels, email support, weather ect... ect... ect...

/rant

..what's that burning smell?

oh, it's this entire thread!

The most off putting thing about my copy of Black and white is, apart from the level 5 bug, you only get a real choice in creatures on level 5 so am i supposed to stay on level 5 for the rest of my life? How can I choose a creature after I've completed the game? Half the stuff that I really like about the game isn't available for most of the game and when it is you're too busy working on the mundane stuff.

I returned my game and got my money back. The damn thing was crashing my system once and again, and trust me, i'm a hardcore gamer and no other game hangs in my system. Couldnt do nothing and EA support was shitte. So there.

I hate how people hide behind the "Its the difference between good and evil" when people critize the programming behind the game.

Face it, its a bad game. They convinced themselves that they could make a revolutionary game and couldnt come through. And the real shame is that they cant even see they failed.

Okay, my opinion on why B+W failed in most ways as an enjoyable game...

They just wanted to do too many cool things that have never been done before in games. The problem is there's a reason a lot of this shit was never done before... It's either no fun or cannot be successfully integrated into a game. It boils down to the fact that the game is 85% innovation and 15% fun.

Okay so you may be thinking I hated this game... Actually I enjoyed it quite a bit for about a week and then the gee-whiz factor went away and I was left with a piece of software loosely resembling a game. A buggy piece of software at that. Now I'm waiting for an official patch to try it out again.

If this game is about being a god, then gods are a bunch of pussies. Beign a god means it is easy to do amazing things. I've fell like I could have gone out and built a village with my bare hands faster than my pice of shit villegers did.

And, Pete, your 'no icons is good' resoning sucks ass. Why the fuck do I have to travel half way across the fucking map to see that ONE of my villages needs food. Give me some Sim City bars at the bottom left hand screen.

This could go on for pages....If you are going to make a god game...let the players be god.

Oh yeah...the angle and devil dudes are really helpful...not.

Fuck...I want my money back.

POSTMORTEM ??? WHY ?? -> http://www.geocities.com/lionhead_blackwhite/

Funny they didn't mention "we shipped a broken game and it took months to fix it while we worked on a demo for the xbox" in the "what went wrong" section. *sigh*

I liked the game, I really did but the game became cripple towards the end and was unplayable. I got to that point in 4 days.

How can they have a postmortem article when THE GAME ISN'T FINISHED YET? :-)

I've waited three months for it to be playable without serious bugs like savegame corruption and forgetful creatures. Now there's a patch which means the game won't even LOAD on my machine and many others.

(No, it's not Daemon Tools. I've never had it installed.)

For contrast's sake, I think B&W is one hell of a lot of fun. No problems here.

Another thing is im not really sure what people were expecting tbh, if you go look at any of peter's past games then its just like them. Brilliant concept with a few nagging factors in the execution. On top of that, his games are always "sandpit" games where your pretty much left to play within the game context however you want to. That doesnt sit well with a lot of people.

We need foooooooooood.......we need wooooooood......we neeeed offfspring.

I'll tell you what you whiny insignificant bitches need.... Whiny Villager meet sacrifice altar...altar meet whiny villager...POOOF! Instant miracle power.

The villager angered me so much I burned every fucking one of them at the altar...starting with the kids in the creche....left my creature (mandril) all alone on an island for two straight days (my days not game days) hoping that he would go insane out of boredom.

The game aggravated me just a bit.

"Your creature will do that more often"

C'mon guys-- it's the first game to have poo in it. How can you not like it?

I had a blast with Black and White. <Shrugs> I wasnt expecting an RTS. I was expecting a Sims type game, only cool. I wasnt disappointed.

I had about collectively 2hrs of fun with this (and that is being kind), I really thought molyneux would make something good but its a tech demo, with gameplay that is a re-hash of all his previous games, very disappointed in lionhead. And im sorry but that AI was total ass in my opinion, scripted and randomized. OH OH YOU CAN "TEACH YOUR CREATURE HOW TO DANCE ANY WAY YOU LIKE, HE'S THAT SMART!!]b when in fact you could spend the day with your creature tied up on some remote part of the island and at some point the *magical ai*script to make your creature do his scripted dance will kick in at a random interval. Yes i have tried this and it did work. Not impressed. dont care no patch will fix the entire gameplay. Reasonably nice engine and physics thats it.

I have a nagging fear that Sigma will turn out exactly the same way.

hehe postmortem, cause its friggin DEAD !!!

The sad thing about this, is that the guy thinks that they made a great game.

This means that I must never buy any of their products again, since they're all going to be Molyneux masturbation fantasies.

Black and White is like The Matrix.

It's fun for 2 hours, and it pushes the threshhold of technology forward.

What went wrong?

Say, where is that patch, anyway?

I can tell you what went wrong, they forgot they were making a game and not a technology demo.

dooooo dooooo