Black & White

aka: B&W, Black & White: Entdecke dein wahres Ich, Black & White: Find out who you really are, Black & White: Odkryj, kim naprawdÄ™ jesteĹ›, Black & White: Ontdek wie je werkelijk bent, Black & White: Scopri chi sei veramente, Black and White, Hei yu Bai
Moby ID: 3598
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Description official descriptions

Spiritual descendant of the Populous games, Black & White is a 'god' game in which players take the role of a fledgling deity, called upon by people in need.

Entering the 3D world, players can manipulate objects, move people, and cast miracles. To assist the player, there also exists a creature with its own intelligence and personality. Both the players and their associated creature will evolve during the course of the game, becoming benevolent beings, cruel tyrants, or somewhere in between. As the player's characters develop, both their creature and the land itself will change, depending on their alignment.

Although the main purpose of the game is to work through the five lands of Eden and win the faith of as many of the tribes as possible, the game is somewhat open ended in its aspects of wandering, exploring, and developing the sidekick creature.

The creatures in the game feature their own artificial intelligence and will grow like a child, both physically and emotionally. They'll learn by example and put together their own moral codes based on what they witness and learn. Players can pet or scold their creature, nurture it, spoil it, or abuse it. In the end, Black & White is part strategy game, part role-playing game, part child rearing simulator, and part self-examination of the player's personality.

Spellings

  • 黑与白 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

357 People (333 developers, 24 thanks) · View all

Dutch Localization (U-Trax Multi Media Localization B.V.)
Dutch Language Test
Dutch Recording Studio
  • Soundwise
Dutch Voice Actors
Concept and Design Lead
Programming
3D Programming
Artificial Intelligence
Art
[ full credits ]

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Critics

Average score: 89% (based on 52 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 138 ratings with 13 reviews)

Populous The Beginning meets a Virtual Pet (with some bad consequences)

The Good
Training the animal and watching it interact with your populace can be fun.

The attractive graphics and ability to heavily zoom in (until single people fill the screen) and out (where single people are even rendered any more, being smaller than a pixel in size).

The idea of playing good and/or evil.

Some of the sub-quests are quite innovative.

The Bad
The animal is generally very dumb. There are a preset collection of things it can learn to do (well, or badly), but some of the essentials are just beyond its grasp (such as taking food up to the worshippers at your temple so they don't all starve to death).

The control method can be a nightmare with too many things to do and no smooth way of doing them, either using mouse or keyboard.

The camera is very clumsy. You go to a village in a valley and set the camera height a useful distance above ground level. Heading off elsewhere you either have to bother about with the cumbersome zoom out/zoom in functions, or watch as you camera smacks into, and drags itself up the face of a cliff, giving you a nice view of massive blurred pixels. Would setting height above landscape been so hard to implement?

The idea of casting spells through gestures: You draw certain shapes on the landscape to select one of your spells for use - unfortunately, like a badly implemented handwriting-recognition-system, the game very easily ignores you or selects the wrong spell, unless you time your drawing perfectly (and hope your machine doesn't start to chug at that very moment).

Saves later on it the game take way too long, and the actual playing on certain levels once things gets hectic really chews away at your processor and hard drive, making the game chug terribly, even on high end machines.

Lack of professions for the humans: The people in the game need food and wood to survive. There's a forester (that cuts down trees), but no profession that attempts to replace these trees. There's a fisherman and farmer, but no herder for the tons of roaming livestock, leaving you or your creature the task of collecting food within easy site and reach of the 'starving' populace.

Lack of information about opponents: You can be going ahead watering crops for some villagers to eat and the first thing you hear about one of your other villages getting burnt to the ground is some quiet whispering 'deeeeeath...' noises in the background. No major alerts pop up. This can be frustrating seeing as so much time is needed spent doing micromanagement stuff.

MAJOR GRIPE: The Auto-save is a very handy feature, but it does take a while (sometimes up to 30 seconds). Now, this isn't the point I have a problem with, and I really like having it on (mainly due to the frequency of crashes at the moment). However, if you happen to be doing something at the moment the auto-save takes place, once the save finishes the game assumes you have continued doing that one thing for all the time it took to save the game (i.e. 30 seconds' worth of holding down a key/mouse button). Doesn't sound too much of a problem, but I've had several occasions where, early on in a level, whilst innocently scrolling around my little part of the landscape, the game auto-saves, then when it comes back I find myself at the other end of the map with the opponent gods roaring at me for entering their territory, quickly proceeded by all my villages getting lightning storms smashing them to bits before I was even in a state to offer any resistance. Gah! I HATE that.

The Bottom Line
Well, it's a fun game for a time. Personally, I'm getting fed up with it due to camera/control problems, plus random crashes, and am glad I got it as a birthday present, and didn't pay out for it. However, if you liked Populous and want to spend some time watching how some people tried to code up a learning animal, either buy one of the Populous games and a copy of Creatures, or wait until this title has dropped a little in price and check it out.

Windows · by Kic'N (4246) · 2001

You may like it with just the black

The Good
This game is a true example of what AI is like. Your animal is smart, noticing every single aspect of what you do. Unfortunately, the people are dim-wits which leads to some disappointments. Let's look at the strategy that should have been more of a strategy game and less baby-sitting those dang villagers!

Obviously, you are a god who has been born through the needs of simple folk. You can help them by harvesting their crops, forcing them to breed :-), and basically telling them how they should run their lives. You know, like most Gods do. Eventually you can learn to cast miracles to help them like Heal and Rain. Others hurt enemies like fireballs and wolves. Some just impress them like flocks of birds and fireworks. However you have a creature to help you in all of this.

The most crucial aspect is this game is the creature, which you get shortly after you begin playing. You raise him from when he is as tall as a cottage to as tall as a mountain. They truly couldn't have created a better AI.

The point of the creature is to learn from what you teach him to do. He can learn miracles by watching you perform them, and once he does, will be able to cast them without you having to tell him to. Stroking him after a certain action encourages him to do that more, while slapping him discourages it. Through this an amazing system is born. Not only does he watch WHAT you do, but HOW you do it, WHERE you do it, and WHAT or WHO you do it too. For example, if he notices you healing the sick, when you teach him the heal miracle, he will heal only sick. But if he watches you heal healthy people, he will heal not only the sick, but the healthy as well when he learns the miracle. Another example of this is water. If he sees you casting the water miracle on farms to make them grow, but not trees, he will only use the miracle on farms. Or if you continually cast lightning on your own people and not your enemies, he will kill off followers by following your example and ignore your enemies.

Through this system comes the most amazing part. It is where the game gets its name: Black and White. The ability to choose alignments comes not from a screen selection but the actions you do. Good is basically good. Tend to ALL of your peoples needs, no human sacrifices, don't attack, only impress.

Being bad is much easier. Killing people is bad, but is truly not all creative. You can do much better. Torture people through starvation, burning alive, and sacrifices (big prayer power). Or better yet, burn the houses, and leave them without shelter. Kill all of the children in the village without much of a reason. Use your creature's poop to poison the village store, then burn the farms so none can be harvested! Teach him to play baseball with humans (it is possible)! Or even worse, sacrifice the dead. The list is endless. Being creative has BIG rewards in this department. In fact, this is probably one of the most fun things in the game next to teaching your pet to do it!

Teaching your pet good and evil is so much fun. Pets will follow EVERYTHING you do as long as they are near it. Tie him to the worship site and sacrifice some humans. Eventually he will learn this is acceptable and do it by himself! Burn some villagers. If it's okay, he will do it. Eventually he will grow horns and have a constant black aura around him. People will learn to fear him and obey him. Or he can be good, people will worship him and praise him, and so he will glow rainbow colors. This leads to the exciting possibility that your creature is praised and is glowing rainbow colors while your temples is growing spikes and the world is in infinite darkness.

Through the parenting system almost anything is possible. Teach him miracles, teach him to be bad, teach him to be good, teach him what to eat and what not to, where to poop and where not to. Its absolutely amazing.

The games sports some nice graphics, but it varies depending on a graphics card. I have a fairly bad one, but my creature, villagers, and structure models are absolutely amazing. However landscapes are a little blurry but are nothing to disappoint greatly. Anyway it goes, the graphics are decent even on low-end cards.

Sounds are decent to the game. The music is mostly soft flutes/violins playing in the background, while you hear children and villagers going about their daily business. Ambient sound effects are done nicely, and actually vary depending on what the villagers do (not just generic).

The Bad
Ugh. The game actually justifies a scientific truth. Most animals are smarter than humans. The creature is a wonderful thing. It respects you, plays with you, learns from you. You get to know it as a personal friend as though it really was your own super-smart companion.

The same cannot be said for humans. They are incompetent in almost every way. They are lazy, especially slow, dependent on your for everything. If you help them they become disillusioned and think you will keep doing it (yes, this is a part of the learning system we have come to love for the creature).

Tasks are normally assigned to them. Placing them over a farm makes them become a dedicated farmer. Over trees for wood, over workshop to gather wood for building, over a building to become builders, and over other people to become disciple breeders (how nice could it be to have God tell you your sole existence is too have sex!). However villagers tend to stray to much from their jobs if you help them too much (again, the learning system).

The worst part about them is how they breed. HUMANS BREED LIKE RABBITS, EAT LIKE LOCUSTS, DRINK LIKE ELEPHANTS, AND SPREAD LIKE WILDFIRE. Making only one male breeder can impregnate every woman in your village. This leads to overpopulation, starvation, and wanton need for more homes until there are no more forests, farms, or space on the map. Even making no breeders, those randy little humans will breed with anything that moves. How dare they mate without your consent!

Even two hours of complying with their needs will result in nothing. It works like a cycle. First they will naturally need food. Once they have this they realize they have room to breed! This is where the cycle can stop! However, as I said, they breed like rabbits and spread like wildfire, so nothing will stop them. More children lead to more nurseries and more houses. More houses need more wood. Once all this is done, the population increase will need more food. More food will cause an increase in breeding. One cycle of this for ONE village can take up to 2 hours! For one village!

Tooooooooo much work. Unlike that great game Populous, where as long as you laid a plan, people were perfectly organized. They did it with rapid speed and precision. They upgraded without even you needing to be there. It pretty much maintained itself. If that were the case with B&W, then it would win game of the year. Unfortunately, it doesn't.

Once you've done so much work with villages, this leaves no time for the creature at ALL. This is a great shame. The creature is practically the best part. Without any attention, he pretty much eats, sleeps, and poops all day, not doing much, and not impressing anybody.

The other part of the game which is disappointing is the fact that you don't build up an army. All converting is done through fear or respect. Pretty much miracles. Plus your creature. So what is the point of villages? Well, there is one point, and that is prayer. They just tend to ask for two much food, and starve. And even then human sacrifice will do just as well, probably even better.

After 3 levels of play, you are annoyed with the progression of play which is pretty much endlessly caring to villagers needs. You will find that once you have good enough spells, you can play skirmish. You can go around with your creature demolishing villages, which is insanely satisfying. Remember all the stuff you could do to torture them? Imagine how much more you can do with your creature. Play catch on a cliff. If he misses, down to the rocks below. If he catches them, offer him a reward: the villager as a treat! Destroying enemy villages is just as fun, except if you destroyed the other friendly villages and your own you will not have much prayer to cast miracles outside of your influence. Just let your creature handle it. He does everything nicely if you taught him right. You and your creature become an unstoppable team. After five hours of giving in to all of their TINIEST of needs, destroying the worshipers is the best stress management. Face it. They don't deserve your mercy.

The Bottom Line
The amazing creature teaching AI simply puts every aspect of parenting into a super-genius, giant pet of yours. Unfortunately, the people just lye around picking their noses wondering why the food store hasn't been growing and where the heck is God to take care of it.

In the end, though being good seems the righteous path, you cannot be good without being excessively annoyed. Plus, the few rewards you get for it (longer days, white temple, rainbow creature is pretty much the best parts) is NOT worth the hours of effort. So in the end, you may find your self giving up about half-way through or giving into the dark side and ruling the world the way YOU and your creature like it. This would make a great game in itself. Only you and the creature. Villages rule themselves. You just get prayer if they believe in you. But with great power comes great responsibility I suppose.

So B&W has its moments. But without the great self-reliant villagers of Populous, the worshipers really, really, bring this game's greatest features down. You may like it just with the Black- not the White

Windows · by Matt Neuteboom (976) · 2005

An exercise in AI but really not enough of a game

The Good
The hype surrounding this beast was HUGE and frankly Lionhead had no way of making it what everyone expected it to be. Which was a pity really because this has so much going for it.

Technically, Black & White is astounding. The complete freedom of movement, viewpoint and personal game-playing style has hardly ever been seen before and certainly not done to this degree. It's perfectly possible to zoom in to the extent that a sheep takes up the whole screen, and it's just as easy to zoom out so the whole island and then some can be seen. With such a difficult trick to pull off, it was always going to be hard to get the control system to work effectively with a fully viewable and rotatable 3D world. And, while not without fault, it does the job pretty much as well as it could have done.

The Gesture Recognition Technology is a neat addition (of course, that is ALL it is...) and works well for the most part. It's nice to be able to train yourself to swing the mouse around effortlessly to pull off the funkiest spells. To this day, I still haven't managed one of them though.

The AI is the game's biggest asset. The incredible intelligence of your creature; which can be trained, learns from experience, learns from watching you, learns from watching anything else, picks up habits, forms a personality, forms a physique, and pretty much becomes the physical shape of your style of playing; is almost too beautiful for words. Memories get formed so easily: I remember a time when I was spending hours teaching my pet monkey to play football. By the end it was having so much fun I was worried it was going to starve, so I stuck it in it's pen and went off to do other things. I was wandering around the land aimlessly after a few days had past in the game. My monkey couldn't sleep so, to my disbelief, he got up, looked around the village, felt worried, spotted the ball, clapped with enjoyment, rushed over to get it, took it to his pen and started kicking it against the wall for fun.

Wow.

That wasn't scripted. It wasn't "told" to do that by the game. It just did it. That's just...staggering. Oh and the graphics are good too.

The Bad
But OH NO! It all goes horribly wrong! After so many right ingredients, Lionhead suddenly undercook the whole thing. There is no game in Black & White!

Well OK there is. But not much of one. The fact is, the total freedom that you are presented actually becomes boring as hell after a while because there simply isn't enough to do. There is always something to be doing, but just not enough. Your jobs are always mundane and monotonous as hell. Sometimes you have to reach just far enough outside your influence to grab a tree and take it to your village store. Except you have to repeat this mind-numbing task about 50 times to get enough wood. Then you have to build a house with that wood so that you may expand your influence by a centimetre before doing the whole thing again. All so you can take over another village by impressing/helping them. For example...say...by giving them wood. It's enough to make you nail your face to the wall.

The spells are dire for the most part. Don't think on the levels of Populous-style carnage. There are no earthquakes and volcanoes here. In terms of attack: fire and lightning are pretty much your only options. The others are just boring.

Also, if you were a God, would you spend all your time fishing or chopping down trees for people? The extraordinary AI of your creature is almost negated by the abysmal AI of your followers. They don't do ANYTHING for themselves. This means killing them is one of the only satisfying options. This in turn unbalances the moral slant on the game because it is ten times easier to complete it being evil than being good.

I know I touched on this too but the levels are just boring. The worst of which is level 3. Not only do you have to spend something like 20 hours trying to overtake some cities with an absurdly high belief in another God and are miles outside of your influence; but they take away your creature! Are they stupid?! That's the whole reason anyone is playing this game!

The Bottom Line
It could have been the RPG to end all others. It wasn't, and this is a crying shame. It had so many things in the right place but Lionhead forgot to add a game with them. So we have a completely open-ended production with nice graphics, AI without peer, some clever tricks but...what are you supposed to DO half the time again? Er....

Windows · by Shazbut (163) · 2002

[ View all 13 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Obscene Hermit And Wan Mar 18, 2009
HOW-TO: weather system And Wan Mar 3, 2009
Naming your Villagers from your email program And Wan Mar 2, 2009
Black & White Multiplayer Hints, Tips & Advice And Wan Mar 1, 2009
Creature Changer Crashing And Wan Mar 1, 2009

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Black & White appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Scrapped versions and plans

A version for Sony PlayStation was in development at one point by Bethesda, as well as for Sega Dreamcast probably by other developer - there were also plans to release this title for Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance. Ports were eventually cancelled and plans never reached a development status.

April 1st

During the game on April 1st, Your monster will leave smiley face foot prints in the ground instead of their regular foot prints. To do this, change your computer's date to April 1st.

Avatars

Originally the game was to include humanoid 'avatars', but the team eventually concluded that stroking and smacking around humans was a bit disturbing, hence the bipedal animal forms.

Death

If you ever wondered about that creepy female voice saying "Death" every once in a while, it means that someone in your village just died. There's a patch that let's you eliminate that voice if it's too spooky for your taste.

Gestures

One of the features in this game is "gesture recognition", allowing players to cast spells by drawing shapes on the landscape with the mouse and precluding the need for any icons on the screen. According to Molyneux, this is a direct reaction to the massive amount of icons present in his last game for Bullfrog, Dungeon Keeper. The icon interface for DK takes up a good third of the screen while playing.

In a beta version, signing Peter Molyneux's name as a "gesture" immediately gives you the most powerful spell in the game. Molyneux included this feature to give him an advantage in multiplayer. It is not known whether this made it into the final version.

References

  • When Peter Molyneux presented Black & White in the German TV-Show GIGA GAMES (NBC Europe), he activated the "show names"-function of the villagers. Then he scrolled over the land, gave his creature some advices and finally picked up a villager called "Jörg Langer", threw him onto a huge mountain, Jörg fell down and landed in a forest nearby. Peter Molyneux just said: "So you have to chop wood for the rest of your life!". At the time, Jörg Langer was the Chief Editor of the German gaming magazine GameStar which wrote an unenthusiastic review of the game ("just" 84%).
  • When you start the “boat-quest” to construct an ark (behind the wooden gates), you’ll hear some really annoying singing. Kill the middle on of the three singers and the others will go “Oh my God! You killed Kenneth!”, which is an obvious Southpark reference. After constructing the ark, you’ll see two people reenact the famous Titanic scene as well.

Sailor Song

The famous Sailor Song was, in the english version, sung by the Lionhead-people.

Sales

In 2001, Black & White won both the Gold- and Platinum-Awards from the German VUD (Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland - Entertainment Software Association Germany) for selling more then 100,000 units (Gold) and more then 200,000 units (Platinum) in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. As the Gold-Award is not counted into the Platinum-Award, both awards total in between 300,000 and 700,000 units sold.

Saving

Saved games for Black and White are a little unusual. When you save a game it records the status of the island, but not the status of you or your creature. Instead, the status of you and your creature are part of your profile which can't be restored once it changes. So if you save your game at level 1 with a good god and a small creature, proceed to level 5 with your creature becoming huge and your god becoming evil along the way, and restore the save file you'll end up with an evil god and a huge creature on level 1.

Soccer pitch

Lionhead released a patch allowing you to create your own soccer pitch for your people to play in. When you have installed the patch, you can build the pitch with eight scaffolds from your workshop. And when your people have nothing to do, they come to the pitch and play for a while.

Weather

There was an interesting feature included with the game. If you had registered your game at www.bwgame.com, the weather in-game would match the weather in your area.

Awards

  • Gamespy
    • 2001 – Strategy Game of the Year (Readers' Choice)
    • 2001 – Best Articial Intelligence of the Year
    • 2003 - Most Overrated Game of all Time* PC Gamer
    • June 2001 - Game of the Month
    • October 2001 - #18 in the "Top 50 Best Games of All Time" list
  • PC Powerplay (Germany)
    • Issue 03/2005 - #2 Biggest Disappointment
    • Issue 02/2006 - #2 Hype Disappointment
  • Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland
    • 2001 - Platinum Award
    • 2001 - Gold Award

Information also contributed by Alan Chan, Andrew Hartnett, Felix Knoke, Indra was here, Kartanym, Lumpi, PCGamer77, Sciere, Scott Monster, Ummagumma, Xoleras and Zack Greene

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Related Sites +

  • Black & White
    Official website
  • Official Game Site
    The Official Site for Black & White, which includes links to other fan web sites and the ability to register to play online.
  • Official Webpage (Mac)
    The official product page for the Mac version of Black & White on the publisher's website, which provides a profile of the game, a rundown of its features, an overview of the game's creatures, and purchasing information, among other such things.
  • Official WinAmp Plug-In
    A little before the release of the game, Lionhead made a visualization plug-in for WinAmp. It uses the game's graphic engine to show the bear dancing along with your music. The day passes to night and disco lights will also appear in the display.
  • Planet Black & White
    A fan page that is updated at least daily with new stuff, including 'bonus' creatures and other downloads.
  • The Final Hours of Black & White
    GameSpot covered the wrap-up production of Black & White in this lengthy article in their "Behind the Games" series.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 3598
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Contribute

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Ray Soderlund.

Macintosh added by Kabushi.

Additional contributors: nullnullnull, Adam Baratz, Unicorn Lynx, JPaterson, Corn Popper, formercontrib, Zeppin, Patrick Bregger, yenruoj_tsegnol_eht (!!ihsoy), FatherJack, Danfer, R3dn3ck3r.

Game added April 3, 2001. Last modified March 6, 2024.