Black & White 2 preview

The video game business has its fair share of eccentrics and one of the people who have fitted into that category for the longest period is Peter Molyneux, former industry magnate at the late Bullfrog, now boss at Lionhead Studios in the UK. This is a company with a lot of interesting projects underway, some in-house, others at satellite companies.

Molyneux has produced some truly innovative titles over the years and even though the first Black & White had its share of faults, it remained a beautiful and original title. It did not fulfil Lionhead’s ambitions, though and the company have learned from their mistakes and put their knowledge into the upcoming sequel. It’s going to be spectacular.

Lego of the gods

In order to visualise great, complex ideas one needs the proper building blocks and a lot of work has gone into designing a consistent world, capable of framing all of Molyneux’s ideas. The landscape in the game has been imbued with a number of new characteristics, because when you’re playing as God, it’s not enough to be able to part the waters and create some grain once in a while. Real gods are in charge of chaos and order, alpha and omega, and the landscape must be able to react accordingly. Therefore, it can now be warped, morphed and destroyed as the game progresses.

In the original Black & White, you didn’t so much wield ultimate divine power yourself, but served more as the right-hand man of the gods. This has been changed. You now have a range of so-called epic miracles at your disposal, which can alter the landscape significantly. Earthquakes can create wide chasms in the earth, splitting entire cities in two, cutting off resources or simply teaching the pagan dogs to rezpect your authoritah, instead of believing in other deities. Volcanoes can be elevated to create destruction in the right places and the lava can be led into populated areas or into ravines, ready to be released on unsuspecting crowds at your leisure.

Advanced physics

The laws of an advanced physics system govern everything in the game. Arrows, pebbles, walls, lava, mountains – everything. Molyneux illustrated it by drawing up a circular wall, which he filled with rocks. If you punch a hole in the wall, the rocks will roll out. It can also be filled with water, in which you could drown enemy troops. On the other hand, you can also use the physics for defensive purposes, for instance moats with lava or water. Hollow walls can be used in the same way, either by filling them with water to douse fiery artillery or with lava to fry attackers.

Molyneux demonstrated how you could throw boulders at walls to break off pieces. Then you could throw the pieces at it, to destroy even more. Another defensive possibility was to carve out a round boulder and make it roll back and forth between two mountain slopes. During the beta test, this had proved an effective means of flattening attacking troops. The possibilities seem endless.

As Molyneux described it himself,”When I play RTS games, that is the kind of power I want to have!”

And Black & White 2 is indeed much more of a real-time strategy game than its predecessor. The game no longer focuses as much on gaining believers, and according to Molyneux, your citizens are not as innocent as they used to be. They’ve gained a lot more feelings and personality and are to a much higher degree unsatisfied with what you’re doing than they were in the first game. This time around, they’re also more of an actual resource for you to use, seeing that they are the soldiers of your army and populate the buildings of your city. You can even make armies comprised of thousands of little minions – there is no upper limit other than how many polygons your system can push.

Peter the Zealot

The artificial intelligence in the game also gives bragging rights. Your creature can be ordered to defend or attack and when you do something, your soldiers try to interpret what you want them to do. For instance, you can gather entire formations of soldiers with swordsmen in the first line, archers in the second and catapults in the third and equip the latter with a stone, which can be used to smash through enemy walls. The soldiers will then run through the hole and attack whatever greets them at the other side. As you can see in the screenshot, your creature can also spread your soldiers over a larger area using the cool physics engine. It will also learn how to use the world around it as it grows up, of course. The game physics even influence the way your creature looks. You’ll be able to style the fur of it as you see fit (shaving off hair in funny places, anyone?), but the fur also gets soggy in the rain, and it’s flammable too, among other things.

It’s plain to see that Molyneux lives and breathes for getting his games out into the world. He’s incredibly enthusiastic. Seeing him explain about Black & White 2 is like seeing a father talking about his newborn child in a maternity ward. Sadly, we didn’t have time to go over anything other than the technology itself during our little chat, but that part alone is very impressive. We had to save the AI, gameplay and other things for some other time, because Molyneux only wanted to discuss physics. But then that just means we have even more to look forward to.


Source: Boomtown DK
English version by: Jonatan A. Allin (neonwolf)