It's coming! Possibly one of the most awesome games of all time, Black & White 2 is scheduled to come out in early October. If you've never played the original game, Black & White, I can confidently tell you that it is one of the most unique games I've ever seen or played. You're basically a diety who tries to compete with other gods to gain control of a land. You get believers by winning them over, using Miracles (which are powered by the worship of your followers) like magically procuring resources like wood or grain (food), growing trees, or by terrorizing them into submission, like raining fireballs on their towns, destroying parts of their villages, etc. You have a "creature", which is a magical being that is basically a giant animal of sorts, which you train and care for and teach it to perform Miracles as well. You can choose to be either a good, benevolent diety or an evil, destructive horror, to get what you want, and your actions reflect what your Temple (your source of power) looks like, as well as what your creature looks like.
In Black & White 2, it's that and more. Now you can train and control massive armies of worshippers to do battle against one another, fortify towns, and fight for control or defend your territory using armies. The graphics are absolutely jaw-dropping. Your creature is now the center of your power, and its alignment (good or evil or somewhere in between) affects nearly everything around it now, even the terrain. The game, like its predecessor, is fully 3d, you control everything using a "hand" and after a few minutes you'll become one with controlling the environment around you. Resources are more important than ever now because you can't perform Miracles that magically generate them like you could in the original game. The more I read about the progress of this game as it nears completio, the more it seems that this game is going to be VERY big, maybe even as big, if not bigger, than The Sims.
Check it out at
Lionhead Studios, makers of the Black & White series. If you preorder the game on
EB Games you will get a code to unlock another creature as well.
That's all I'll say for the moment, I could go on and on about how great the original was (although it was quite buggy in XP), but if you wanna learn more about it just go to the site and read up on it.
I'm not sure what the online playability will be yet. In the original, you got a list from the LionHead servers about what games were open and then you went there, but I don't think there were dedicated servers. You would all play in a free for all with your own creature that you trained in single player mode so it had the same skills and was the same size and age, and if you did team play then you all shared your territory and controlled the team captain's creature, taking over villages across the land and working your way to capturing all of them so you could wipe out your opponents Temple and destroy him/her. The new multiplayer will probably be much more advanced, supporting dedicated servers I bet, and since you can mass armies now, not all the power rests in your ability to create Miracles. What I liked so much about Black & White was how "realistic" the village structure seemed. People procreate by breeding, people grow and die, and you can assign them to jobs. Everybody needs food, so they go to the Village Store (if you're good, you'll build one) and get the grain they need, and they sleep in houses (again, if you're good, you build them. Otherwise you just let them sleep on the ground and don't waste your time gaining the precious resources to build homes), etc. To power your Miracles, you would have worshippers come to your Temple to worship you and increase your energy pool, allowing you to use more powerful Miracles. With the new abilities of villagers and the whole new dimension of training soldiers, it's going to get really cool.
Anyways, check it out. If it gets as popular as I hope it will and it supports dedicated servers...maybe
TG could eventually host one. =D
