Man, it's been a while since I posted on these forums.

I've read many a thread such as this and felt like chiming in with my two cents.

My gut feeling is that B&W3 will only get made if one of two things happen:

1. Peter Molyneux (or whoever is more directly running Lionhead now that Peter is head of MS gaming or something) gets an itch to revisit B&W - quite a long shot in my mind.
2. Another Gaming studio buys the rights to B&W and makes it their own - about as likely as the first if not even more far fetched.  Although with so much time gone by now, it might be the better option so long as the right crowd come along.
   

I really enjoyed B&W1 and CI.

I liked B&W2, but for many of the reasons said in this thread already, it didn't feel like a proper sequel to the orignal.  BOTG ammended that thought slightly, but I still thought a better game was out there that was some sort of marriage between B&W1 and B&W2.

With that said, it would still have to go somewhere new without just re-doing the stuff in B&W with better graphics.  B&W2 tried to do that but just got it wrong.

Like MRFLIBBLE said (BTW - long time, no see), the RTS direction was a non-starter.  It just didn't work that well in the context of a God game with a great big honking creature at your disposal!

I liked the City building, but tying that into impressing other towns was way too easy.  It just felt like "Sim City Lite" with Gozilla cuddling his teddy in the background.

We can't just ask for more of the same from B&W1 because as sure as a bear craps in the woods, there'll be plenty of people out there complaining that there wasn't anything new in the game.  The rose-tinted glasses need to come off some time.




So with that rant done with (it really went on longer than I wanted) and given the odds of B&W3 being made, let me ask this - had B&W2 and BOTG never been made, where would you have liked series to have gone.  I'm talking more about gameplay rather than just saying that you wanted to play it online.

In addition (as sacreligious as it is to say it), if Lionhead were to hand over the B&W reigns to someone else, does anyone know who else might do a job?

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Hey old timer!

I'll go at these backwards.

It's really hard to say about handing over the reigns to someone else, but I can't really think of anyone else who could have the same feel. Bungie might be able to do something fun, and I'm sure Blizzard would test and balance the thing to the end of time, or until it was fun to play, but I can't think of anyone that could really imbue a game with the same spirit.

Had 2 never been made, I would have liked to see the game get bigger, not smaller and prettier. Right, second one wasn't ever made so I'll stop making comparisons.

First off the same basic gameplay should carry over. Feeding and keeping your town expanded and happy. Ore isn't really necessary other than having a finite resource to limit the production of certain / structures. Having more races that are differentiated by more than structural design, and having spells available based on their history and what their shaman / holy men would have knowledge of would be cool. These should tie into your knowledge base and prayer power from each race should go into a single pool that powers all of the spells you have knowledge of, so you won't have to make your norse town pray to cast your norse spells. Having altars, or even the town center itself be the altar, would prevent you from having your people running back and forth. (But really, that was too fun to see them book it to your temple with you raised the totem.)

Deformation of terrain, even if only limited to after the enemy god(s) on a land were defeated. Being able to physically shape the land how you want it to be after having complete belief of the people there seems like a given for a deity. Having a system similar to the land maker but overly simplified would be awesome.

In the game and when editing, stick with the minimalist ideals that spawned the first game. Gestures should be integrated into more systems than just spells, and information contained in the world should be limited. Tied in to this is to bring back the temple, and the scrolls contained therein. Not only representing how the people view you on the outside, the entire inside of the temple could morph based on your alignment. It could be really beautiful and truly a testament to you as a god. The rooms inside could be used for anything and everything, maybe even having one that would be a graphical lobby of sorts for online games. Being able to type, or even voice chat with other people while setting up games would be neat, or even letting your creatures meet and get to know one another if you so desire.

Creature fighting is a must. The learning creature AI applied to the fighting could be awesome. At first you would have to click to make them dodge, sidestep, block and attack but after enough fighting they would learn from you and be great fighters without your influence. Maybe there could even be online stats tracked and creature fighting tournaments held and sanctioned by Lionhead from time to time.

Creatures need to be massive. They need to be so massive that when fully grown the only way they are able to maneuver through dense cities is by tip-toeing their way on the streets and over houses.

Vortexes should exist between the lands and should be able to pass objects through to the next. Tied with this, you should be able to revisit previous lands and check on how the people there are doing. This would prevent too many people being taken from one land to the next, as leaving too few people on a previous land might tempt other gods to come and spread their influence in your absence.

There's more I can think of, but for now I'll have to stop there to avoid the bleeding of readers' eyes and also because my wife just got home from work.

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We can't cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live our lives in happiness.

MRFLIBBLE:

Hey old timer!

I'll go at these backwards.

It's really hard to say about handing over the reigns to someone else, but I can't really think of anyone else who could have the same feel. Bungie might be able to do something fun, and I'm sure Blizzard would test and balance the thing to the end of time, or until it was fun to play, but I can't think of anyone that could really imbue a game with the same spirit.

When it comes to putting the spirit into the game, I agree 100%.  No other game studio puts the same kind of spirit and kookie-ness (if that's a proper word) into their games like lionhead (thinks of the sailing missionaries).  The only exception would be some of those Asian developers that put some nice humorous touches into their RPGs, but by comparison, it's really only a drop in the ocean compared to the same kind of content in B&W.

MRFLIBBLE:

Had 2 never been made, I would have liked to see the game get bigger, not smaller and prettier. Right, second one wasn't ever made so I'll stop making comparisons. First off the same basic gameplay should carry over. Feeding and keeping your town expanded and happy. Ore isn't really necessary other than having a finite resource to limit the production of certain / structures. Having more races that are differentiated by more than structural design, and having spells available based on their history and what their shaman / holy men would have knowledge of would be cool. These should tie into your knowledge base and prayer power from each race should go into a single pool that powers all of the spells you have knowledge of, so you won't have to make your norse town pray to cast your norse spells. Having altars, or even the town center itself be the altar, would prevent you from having your people running back and forth. (But really, that was too fun to see them book it to your temple with you raised the totem.)

Agree totally.  The game needed to be longer for a start.  Basically, I thought B&W1 was just getting into it's stride by Land 4 only to wind up on the final land moments later.  Not sure about having a common pool of prayer power though.  I admit it was annoying to not have enough prayer power for the later miracles you get in a land due to the smaller villages, but that could be offset by transferring power from one worship site to another via powering up a sommon miracle between sites and dumping that power into the lesser charged of the two.  If a better mechanic of transferring prayer power from one site to another could be created, I think that would be better.

MRFLIBBLE:

Deformation of terrain, even if only limited to after the enemy god(s) on a land were defeated. Being able to physically shape the land how you want it to be after having complete belief of the people there seems like a given for a deity. Having a system similar to the land maker but overly simplified would be awesome.

I agree, it would be cool to say that once you are the only ruler of the land, you are entitled to change it as you see fit. 

MRFLIBBLE:

In the game and when editing, stick with the minimalist ideals that spawned the first game. Gestures should be integrated into more systems than just spells, and information contained in the world should be limited.

Not sure on this one.  I always found the gestures to be a bit hit-and-miss.  In particular when they ran out of simple shapes to draw for the later miracles.  Lionhead tried to compensate for this by having you do a pre-coursor gesture first before drawing the gesture for the one you wanted, but then that defeated the purpose of the gestures which was to act as a new system for shortkeys.  They were a nice idea, but I can't picture them being expanded to other aspects of the game without becoming overly convoluted.

MRFLIBBLE:

Tied in to this is to bring back the temple, and the scrolls contained therein. Not only representing how the people view you on the outside, the entire inside of the temple could morph based on your alignment. It could be really beautiful and truly a testament to you as a god. The rooms inside could be used for anything and everything, maybe even having one that would be a graphical lobby of sorts for online games. Being able to type, or even voice chat with other people while setting up games would be neat, or even letting your creatures meet and get to know one another if you so desire.

The temple should definitely come back like you say and should be expanded on.  It should never have been dropped.  The multiplayer room could be expanded on also.  You could see other gods online floating around.  Perhaps the scrolls in that room could offer a window into playbacks of recent or ongoing games?  I also like the idea of the interior of the temple morphing along with the outside too.  We should definitely keep villagers worshipping at the temple too.  I agree it makes the temple a juicy target, but that was part of the fun of B&W.  There was strategy in that, i.e. do you bring all your villagers to the temple to power up miracles or do you keep some in reserve?

MRFLIBBLE:

Creature fighting is a must. The learning creature AI applied to the fighting could be awesome. At first you would have to click to make them dodge, sidestep, block and attack but after enough fighting they would learn from you and be great fighters without your influence. Maybe there could even be online stats tracked and creature fighting tournaments held and sanctioned by Lionhead from time to time. Creatures need to be massive. They need to be so massive that when fully grown the only way they are able to maneuver through dense cities is by tip-toeing their way on the streets and over houses.

I was never too much into Creature fighting, so I can't say too much on this.  However, I don't agree that the creatures should be bigger than B&W1 staandards.  When they reach full size, they need to be impressive and they already looked ridiculous when they couldn't navigate around two houses built closely together.  Having them tip-toe would only look worse.  What may look better is if they could actually climb over large structures, i.e. the buildings are structurally sound enough to take his weight.  Although it'd also be cool if a damaged building collapsed accidentally under his wieght once in a while. It'd encourage you to keep maintenance.  So long as they didn't look silly navigating a crowded city, then I wouldn't be too bothered with them being bigger I guess.

MRFLIBBLE:

Vortexes should exist between the lands and should be able to pass objects through to the next. Tied with this, you should be able to revisit previous lands and check on how the people there are doing. This would prevent too many people being taken from one land to the next, as leaving too few people on a previous land might tempt other gods to come and spread their influence in your absence. There's more I can think of, but for now I'll have to stop there to avoid the bleeding of readers' eyes and also because my wife just got home from work.

I agree Vortexes should remain open, but perhaps they should be tied into the temple somewhat, i.e. when you come to a new land, your temple is built on that vortex so that to visit previous lands, you use the temple to use the Vortex.  Following on from that, you have access to your whole network of vortexes/temples to do with as you please.  There could be potential for additional gameplay or strategies out of that e.g. setting up a supply chan from previous lands (I believe a similar idea had be mentioned but then muted for B&W2).

Ok, I made a long post longer,so I'll leave it at that.

Catch ya later.

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I think the chances are very slim, considering the fact that lionhead is already making fable 3 as we speak.

When I heard F3 was announced, I got kind of, well, you know, PO'd, because lionhead seemed to have abandoned the BW series for the Fable series. I mean, Black and White has been around longer than fable, and Lionhead would've made a BW3 by now anyway, if they already started F3.

I do understand that companies will do anything for sales, but seriously, Black and White was a great game! It could've been more promoted like Fable maybe, but still.

I could be mistaken, but Fable is based (kind of) on the concept behind Black & White (being either or ). Whenever I hear of someone playing fable 2 on xbox live, I always mention Black & White.

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-Lordoftheringwraiths

With LHS having sold out to Microsh-- microsoft (pardon), the BW franchise is a thing of the past. I mean, look at BW2. It was already an overly glorified Age of Empires, and that was before microsoft was officially owner. the joint adventure with EA for BW2 didnt help either (I -HATE- EA. They're the worst videogame developer ever).


BW2 was a massive disappointment on every aspect except being able to build more, having to unlock certain buildings, and the graphics. But it failed on every other level.


IF lionhead decides to go for 3, they'll have to get back the original developers. They will have to review every-last-damn-idiocy in BW2 (which is a lot). Then they will have to review what made BW1 so (also a lot of work). and THEN they have to combine the best of both worlds into BW3. But after BW2, I doubt they're up for the task. Lionhead studio's failed it's fans. I hope they won't mind having sold their souls to microsoft.

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So then I dropped my pants right, and- oh...