E3 2002: Black & White 2 first look

Lionhead's Peter Molyneux likes ambitious game designs and is willing to talk about them even during the early stages of development. At a pre-E3 meeting, Lionhead had a lot more to show of Black & White 2 than when we visited the UK studio last fall. Nonetheless, although Lionhead has the game up and running internally, only screenshots were available for the presentation.

Black & White 2 picks up some time after the first game, after the world has "moved on" and the primitive villagers you once knew have developed much more advanced technology. As in the first game, you assume the role of a god, but now all the world's tribes know your legacy. The problem is that the tribes have all interpreted your earlier directives in vastly different ways, and war has broken out as a result. Whereas the villagers were simplistic followers in the first game, they've evolved into more independent, more sophisticated, and potentially warlike beings.

Tribal villages are no longer defenseless settlements being contested by different gods. Villages can grow into towns, which can grow into cities. Settlements can come under attack by creatures and aggressive tribes, which will amass armies, so defenses such as walls and towers are now essential. You can lend support to specific villages using a city-building gameplay element. The gesture-based interface has been expanded with this in mind, so now you paint walls on the ground and draw spirals to create towers. Much like the original game's spell system, the size and durability of these defenses depends on how well you draw the proper symbols on the screen with the mouse. It's not enough to have tall, flimsy walls, because heavy storms or creature attacks can knock walls down. And during the course of the game, it'll be important to build walls taller, as tall, powerful enemy creatures may simply step over small early defenses.

Black & White's central concept of allowing players to choose to play in shades of good and evil is present even more graphically than before. But alignment decisions translate differently in this conflicted world, so "good" means the path to peace (or at least self-defense), whereas "evil" lines up with malicious warmongering. More than ever, there are real consequences to choosing one path or the other. Villagers won't just let an evil creature eat and trample them. If they're fed up and have developed decent weapons like bows and arrows, a massive group of villagers will team up and attack a creature, as can be seen in one of the attached screenshots. Also, as was planned for the first game, the world of Black & White 2 will reflect whether you're a good or evil god. For example, green grass will grow in the footsteps of a very good creature, while a very evil creature will leave a smoldering trail in its wake.

Strategic combat plays a much bigger role in Black & White 2. As the game progresses, villagers will gain better types of weapons and armor, and leaders who can gather villagers around them to launch military campaigns outside of settlements will develop. Naturally, creatures will still play a key role in combat, and one of the first screenshots shows two opposing creatures, each flanked by a large armed body of villagers. The more developed combat system will flesh out the game's strategic dimension, and it also means the single-player game won't focus as much on linear quests--although there will be some quests, such as the very first one, that you'll have to complete to win over a village.

Making a full-fledged sequel has afforded Lionhead plenty of opportunity to significantly enhance the game's graphics and even its AI. Black & White 2 is still a ways off, so it's not surprising that the game's 16-fold increase in world detail will require relatively powerful PCs by today's standards. Close-up shots of the creatures show that there's already support for some advanced effects, like fur, and some creatures may be able to wear clothing or even armor. From the short movie clips we saw, we can confirm that the villagers look much more lifelike and are more like detailed characters than cartoonish abstractions. Other details include leaves that will change color and fall with the seasons and visible blades of grass. Because of the game's scalable engine, such incredible levels of detail are tuned to display only when you're zoomed close enough in to appreciate them, so PCs won't be bogged down too much.

This upcoming PC game is one of two Black & White games in development at Lionhead's core studio. The other, Black & White: Next Generation , is an adaptation of the original PC game's concept to a distinctly console gameplay style. But besides these, Lionhead has a basic framework outlined out to "Black & White 5," and Molyneux has a separate, even more ambitious game concept that he's previously referred to as 2811191Dmitri . Even though Molyneux talks openly about games in early development, he's learned his lesson about discussing release dates. The general indication was that what we saw was for "maybe next year, maybe the year after."