Black & White Updated Preview--Part Two
Black & White--Day Three: Hands-On, Part Two
As you read this, Lionhead's ambitious role-playing game and real-time strategy game hybrid Black & White is only days away from officially going gold. For Peter Molyneux and the entire team of designers, programmers, modelers, and artists at Lionhead Studios, the development cycle has been somewhat of a roller-coaster ride. Faced with a number of delays and uncertainty about the game's mass appeal, the team persevered and in the end produced a game that's both familiar and completely unique. Recently, we had the chance to visit the Electronic Arts offices in Redwood City and extensively play a nearly complete version of the game. In the
Visually, Black & White sets itself apart from similar 3D games by using a number of different rendering technologies. The first thing you'll notice when looking at the terrain is that the textures never repeat themselves--there are no texture seams, no tiling, and no repetition. When skinning the game's geography, Black & White dynamically generates all the textures on the fly, which means that there's almost an infinite number of terrain types. The snowcapped peaks of the game's second land, for example, seamlessly blend together with the green slopes of the mountains' base. The textures can even be morphed along the edges of other objects, giving trees, houses, and other structures the appearance of being part of the terrain and not just randomly placed on top of the ground. This dynamic nature of the terrain textures is carried over to the creatures as well. The creatures that you find in Black & White age at a rate of about one year for every one hour of gameplay, but their maturity isn't just depicted by their physical size; their skin will also show signs of age. At about 40 years of age, creatures will start to show some signs of gray, and their skin becomes a little looser. Likewise, when your creatures get injured, their skin will show signs of abuse like swollen eyes, cuts, and bruises. Most of these blemishes will heal, but some of the more devastating injuries to your creatures will leave a permanent, if subtle, scar. According to the designers at Lionhead, this approach was taken not only to give Black & White an organic look but to ensure that every player has a unique world and, subsequently, a unique experience.
Even more interesting is the game's skeletal-animation system, which automatically adjusts to the size and frame of your creature as it grows. That means that your creature's limbs won't clip through the ground and other objects when it gets bigger. This effect is put to use best during the combat sequences that take place when two creatures fight. In these titanic clashes, each punch and hit has to connect with the 3D model of the other creature to register a hit, and when they do, that creature reacts accordingly. Without a high-level skeletal-animation system, these fights would otherwise have to be canned. The number of polygons that Black & White pushes is equally impressive. Each creature is composed of around 2000 polygons, and each villager is made up of around 300 polygons. When you consider that there can be up to 100 villagers onscreen at once, you can begin to appreciate the amount of detail that Black & White's engine can push.
Where's the Interface?
Black & White's impressive visuals are accentuated by the game's interface, or lack thereof. Peter Molyneux describes the layout of Dungeon Keeper, his previous game, as being "disastrous." Dungeon Keeper was littered with icons, and its tab-based interface was clunky and hard to navigate. With Black & White, Molyneux sought to remove the interface altogether. In fact, before he and his team started coding the game, he made a promise to himself that he wouldn't add a single icon to the game, no matter how tempting it might seem to do so down the line. "There were times when adding one small icon in the corner of the screen would have saved us all so much time," laments Molyneux. "But in the end, we stuck with it, and I'm very happy with the result." But if you pay special attention to the screen, you'll find that the crafty designers at Lionhead did cheat just a little. Your mouse pointer is in fact a dynamic icon. As we mentioned in the first part of our preview, your pointer is how you'll carry out the majority of controls in Black & White. Modeled to resemble the hand of God, the pointer will change shape depending on what part of the screen you move it to or what object you roll it across.
Another small "cheat," a series of symbols, is located in the lower right-hand side of the screen. Each of these arcane signs resembles a hieroglyph, and they all correlate to a specific action or spell. When you trace a sign's shape using your mouse, you'll activate that sign's respective action. For example, early on in the game you'll have access to the leash sign. When you draw this sign using your mouse, it will be replaced by three new symbols. These symbols represent the three types of leashes you can equip in the game: leash of learning, leash of compassion, and leash of aggression. When you trace any one of these new signs, your mouse pointer will automatically hold a leash that's tied around your creature's neck. The leash is the learning tool you'll use to train your creature. Tie the other end of the leash around a villager, and the creature will interact with that person. If you equip the leash of aggression, the creature will automatically adjust its AI to be hostile toward anything you force it to interact with, while the leash of compassion will cause your creature to be more careful with its surroundings. To unequip any of these leashes, you simply have to shake your mouse back and forth a few times--another testament to Black & White's "interfaceless" interface.
Of course, managing a game as robust as Black & White without an interface whatsoever is almost impossible. How do you keep track of the spells you've acquired? What about something as simple as saving your game? Or an options menu? That's where the game's citadel, or temple, comes into play. The citadel was originally designed as the place of worship for your villagers, but Lionhead added deeper functionality to this structure in time for last year's E3 build. If you double-click on the citadel's door, you'll be taken inside to a circular room. The floor of the room is a miniature map of the island you're currently occupying, and surrounding it are seven rooms as well as a number of scrolls that adorn the walls. Each of these rooms leads to a different part of the citadel where you'll be able to view various statistics and toggle numerous options. One such room, for example, leads to the creature cave. Here, you can examine your creature's vital statistics and view what miracles it's been able to learn. Other rooms in the citadel include the save-game room, the library, and the challenge room.
RPG or RTS?
We ended up playing Black & White for the better part of a day, but we're still unable to properly pigeonhole it. The game seems pretty evenly split between being a role-playing game and being a real-time strategy game with empire-management influences. Black & White clearly exhibits the delicate balance required when dealing with resource management in more orthodox RTS games as well. While there aren't any tangible resources per se in Black & White, you will have to "harvest" two specific provisions: power and belief. The line that separates these two "resources" is fuzzy, but for the most part, belief is gained by performing miracles or other godly acts in front of the villagers. For example, if you pick up a boulder and send it rolling through the middle of a village, you'll hear the townspeople ooh and aah, and a number will float above their heads indicating the amount of belief points you were just granted. When entering a new town, you'll need to attain a certain number of belief points before you're able to perform any tasks, even those as simple as picking up a piece of wood. Once that point requirement is met, you'll be able to pull off your standard suite of moves. And as belief in you increases, so does your area of influence, which is denoted by a pale red ring around your village.
Belief also begins to wear out after a while. So even though the simple act of picking up a tree in the middle of a village yields a lot of belief points initially, the villagers will eventually get used to seeing you do that, and the amount of points they'll grant will steadily decrease with each successive act of God. This means that you'll constantly have to search for new towns for fresh, uninfluenced minds, or you'll have to perform more impressive feats on a consistent basis to keep your original villagers in awe.
The second "resource" is power, which is gained when villagers pray to you at the citadel. Located in the middle of every village is the town center, which is built around a tall totem that you can raise or lower at will. This totem calls the villagers to prayer, and the higher the totem is, the more villagers you will have heading on a short pilgrimage to your citadel to pray. However, villagers who are praying to you are villagers who aren't doing any work, like breeding, farming, raising cattle, or fishing. This creates a dilemma: The more the villagers pray, the more your power increases. But the more they pray, the less they work. So why should villagers pray to you in the first place? Because as you increase in strength, new spells and miracles will become available to you at the citadel, so it's up to you to find a proper balance between your villagers' efficiency and the rate at which you increase your own strength. Black & White is filled with similar volitions, the most controversial of which is the act of sacrificing. If you choose to, you can sacrifice one of your villagers at the citadel altar for an instant boost in power. However, a sacrifice is the most evil action you can perform in Black & White, and even if you're the most righteous of players, your world and creature will instantly take on a more insidious appearance.
Influenced by Street Fighter?
In addition to its strategy and role-playing game influences, Black & White seems to take design hints from a less obvious genre: fighting games. One of the most publicized aspects of the game is your ability to take your creature online and pit it against other players' creatures. When two creatures prepare for combat, a small arena appears at their feet. Once they enter this circle, their health bars pop up in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, and both creatures take on a fighting stance. Clicking on the other creature's body will prompt your own creature to attack. The body part that you clicked will be highlighted with a small glowing star, and you can have a number of these indicators active at once. Your creature will take about one to two seconds between each attack, and he'll execute a number of moves including punches, straight kicks, and even scissors kicks. If you click on the ground while in the arena, your creature will shift its stance and move toward that direction. If you click on your own creature, it will briefly go into a defensive posture to protect the area that you indicated. So if you click its torso, your creature will block high; if you click its leg, it will block low, and so on. Your creature won't block incoming attacks automatically, and since it takes about a second for it to react to your block request, it'll be up to you to anticipate how and when the other player's creature is going to attack.
Your creature will take all the experience and spells it mastered in your single-player campaign into the online multiplayer arena. Conversely, any experience (and scars) it gains in the multiplayer battles will then be carried back into your single-player game. This is also true of Black & White's skirmish mode, which throws various challenges at you. These challenges have goals with varying degrees of difficulty that can include converting an entire village within a given time period or defeating an enemy god. One of the skirmish games we played involved a conflict between you and two other gods. You can successfully complete this skirmish by either destroying the gods outright or influencing their villagers until you've gained enough belief points. The latter approach is the easier of the two, but you have to keep a watchful eye on your own village, as the other two gods will be vying for your villagers' belief points as well.
Despite the availability of multiplayer and skirmish modes, Black & White's single-player campaign will undoubtedly prove to be its most appealing aspect. With hundreds of hours of gameplay (you'll be faced with a difficult decision at the end, after which you can continue to play the game forever), 400 quests, and 60,000 words of spoken dialogue, it's safe to say that the game is incredibly involved. Black & White even has quirky little options like mimicking the weather patterns outside your home, naming villagers after your Outlook contacts, and letting you know when you receive e-mail. Your creature can even dance to the beat of any MP3 file you play in the background, and it'll also create and upload its own Web site with, among other things, a diary about how you're treating it.
Having had only one day with this game, we were only able to scratch the surface of Black & White. Peter Molyneux's signature influence is clearly evident in the game, and yet it's also like nothing he's ever done. The game will be available in a matter of weeks, but we'll be continuing our ongoing coverage of Black & White tomorrow with a look at the creatures' behaviors.
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