For a game about exploring where your moral compass will take you, Black & White is too simplistic in its ethical views.
Like Populous before it, Black & White casts you in the role of a newborn god capable of wielding incredible power so long as your worshippers believe in you enough. The more people you have and the more impressed they are by your displays of divine ability, the further you’ll be able to project your miracles to bring other villages under your influence. The wrinkle is in how you choose to demonstrate your existence: miracles can include gentle showers of wondrous rain for growing crops, or fireballs which can immolate people alive and burn their homes into ash. Both are effective ways to inspire mortals to devote themselves to your worship, so much of the game is supposed to hinge on the moral decisions you make about how to treat your people, how to resolve the game’s many quests, and how to save yourself from the aggressions of a dark god intent on snuffing out every other deity in Creation.
The problem is that these moral choices almost never have a compelling affect on the game play, and when they do, the outcomes are so obviously one-sided that the decision feels more like “Do I want to do something foolish here?” An excellent example is one early quest which tasks you with deciding whether or not to save a group of villagers who are drowning in the ocean. Rescuing them requires little effort and rewards you with a useful new miracle dispenser, while leaving them to die subjects you to several minutes of agonized spluttering and no benefit whatsoever. You can also choose throughout the game to violently mistreat people within your influence, but considering that the source of your power is directly linked to your population levels, you’re actually just depleting your own resources for absolutely no reason. For a game that’s supposed to be all about exploring where your moral compass will take you, the creators of Black & White seem to believe that “Good” results from basic wisdom while “Evil” consists of cruelty performed purely for the sake of short-sighted malice. A real ethical dilemma exists when a person is forced to weigh the natural inclination to act in their own self-interest against the costs of taking advantage of others in the process. This compelling struggle was well represented in previous games like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale where noble or selfish behavior frequently came with their own unique rewards and consequences, but Black & White players will quickly realize there always seems to be one correct choice.
Having missed the mark so dramatically on the opportunity to offer interesting game play opportunities to explore the facets of power and accountability, succeeding in Black & White mostly comes down to your willingness to keep your people supplied with room and board while breeding them as rapidly as possible. Imagine a version of SimCity where the only two meaningful building options were large or small houses and you’ve got a pretty good idea of how village management works here. Technically people can be assigned specific tasks, such as working the fields or carrying wood from the storehouse to the workshop, but these workers are so single-minded that they tend to work themselves into an early grave while accomplishing only a small fraction of what your food or wood miracles could do in an instant. The result, which has you toiling away night and day to provide for your people’s seemingly insatiable desire for mountains upon mountains of food, leaves you feeling more like a divinely fueled servant than a god. The fact that the little ingrates will still decide you’re evil if you fail to adequately protect them from harm triggered by a scripted game event causes this aspect of the game to wear thin very quickly.
For all the things there are to criticize in Black & White, the feature which has justifiably earned most of its praise is the Creature: a large anthropomorphic animal governed by his own desires, preferences, and personality in one of the most astonishingly well implemented artificial intelligences ever seen in a retail product. The game starts with access to three different Creatures and each is unique. The cow is docile and tends to be naturally good with the villagers, while the ape is intelligent enough to learn many miracles very quickly and will curiously experiment with things to see what they can do. Finally, the tiger can be easily frustrated or angered when things don’t go his way and is a natural carnivore, but is also speedier and stronger fighter than many of his peers. This initial choice turns out to be a temporary one as playing the game can unlock over a dozen other types of Creatures, each with his own individual strengths and weaknesses.
Your Creature grows up as you play, seamlessly transforming from a small baby into a skyscraper-sized goliath over the course of dozens of hours. Wounds from combat leave scars on his body he can carry for a lifetime, while his likes and dislikes will slowly change to reflect the lessons you’ve taught him and even the behavior he’s witnessed from you all on his own. Creatures are emotional too, becoming discouraged when they have trouble performing a new miracle, wandering out to explore the landscape when they’re bored, or seeking your notice when they’re lonely. And, just like a child, they may even act out by doing something they know they’re not supposed to if you’re not attentive enough. Just a few hours of play will be enough to begin molding his height, weight, strength, and temperament into a Creature noticeably distinct from one raised by most anyone else.
Of all the game’s different quests, only a handful near the beginning of the game allow his participation and even then only to help you grow accustomed to interacting with him. Creatures cannot be controlled directly, but they can be focused using three different leashes which encourage aggressive, gentle, or curious behavior. This simple system allows you to help your Creature learn a new miracle by performing it while he’s attached to the Learning Leash, or ask him to hurl a stone by right-clicking on a target while he’s on the Spiked Leash. A big part of his training will involve rewarding him for appropriate behavior by gently petting him up and down with your mouse when he does something you like, or giving him a swat (or punch!) on the nose if he does something naughty. Eventually, all of this training will be useful when it comes time to send your Creature into a village outside your current influence and allow him to implement what he’s learned as he tries to impress the people into worshipping you. He can even battle the Creatures of enemy gods in a simplistic, but quite entertaining spoof of many Street Fighter-esque fighting games. Black & White may be a god game, but the Creature here is such a star that he’ll have many players happily overlooking the title’s other deficiencies for many, many hours.
The game’s interface is also very well executed. One of the real innovations here is Black & White’s gesture recognition system which allows players to perform miracles simply by moving their mouse to draw a certain pattern and trigger the affect. Easy and intuitive, this gesture recognition can be bypassed through the use of standard keyboard shortcuts or by just grabbing the appropriate miracle icon off the temple, but few players will want to pass on the experience of literally carving their miracles out of thin air with their hand. Otherwise the game uses a unified system where the left mouse button is always used to move around the world while the right mouse button interacts with things, allowing the player to pick up, drop, toss, tap, spin, and break things with ease. One has to wonder, though, if the design team’s determination to create a game with as basic an interface as possible didn’t wind up limiting the variety of in-game quests, strategies, or construction projects there are in the game.
Black & White’s graphics are excellent for their time, capable of rendering vast landscapes of stony mountains and welcoming green fields spotted with forests of trees swaying gently in the breeze. The color palette is heavily influenced by your ethical alignment, meaning that dawn for a painstakingly kind and generous god will be heralded by a glorious violet sunrise which breaks into a bright, warm, and cheerful day. An evil god, on the other hand, would be witness to a grey and dismal daybreak of under a sky tinged with an ominous crimson hue. Special recognition goes to the Creatures which undergo gradual, but dramatic evolutions to reflect their shifts in height, fitness, and alignment: from hunched over, mottled, twisted beasts to bright, playful, and noble animals that literally glow in the dark, every one will be as unique as the player raising him. The humans in the game don’t fare quite as well since zooming down to ground level will reveal that they consist of so few polygons and textured, they look more like two genders of identical human-shaped burlap sacks. Thankfully, unless you’re watching one of the quest-related cut scenes, you’re unlikely to spend much time observing them up close, and their simplistic models allows for literally hundreds of them to be wandering about the villages at a time. They never speak amongst themselves which makes congregations sound a lot less boisterous than you’d expect, but the game otherwise has a strong assortment of different audio effects for everything from drowning to fires to the drum beat of a tribal ritual dance.
It seems odd to suggest that a game which was delayed years beyond its originally projected release date could have used even more time in development, but the fact is that Black & White was released in an unfinished state that multiple patches have failed to rectify. The game is rife with stability problems, particularly in the second world where saving the game can inexplicably take upwards of two or three minutes and crash out to the Windows desktop partway through the process. Another continuing source of irritation is the way your villagers will constantly complain that they need more food, even if their village store contains enough supplies to keep them fat and happy for generations to come. Fortunately, several other bizarre bugs, including one which would drag your Creatures alignment towards Evil if he ate any fish, and another which left him irreparably damaged in the fifth world have been fixed by the game’s post-release patches.
In the realm of artificially intelligent characters, Black & White is a success of unparalleled proportions. The Creatures are the stars of this game, clearly establishing the cutting edge of adaptable, trainable AI companions and making them fascinating and fun to interact with throughout the game. How unfortunate, then, that they aren’t starring in a better title. As a strategy game, only a few hours of play will rapidly reveal that the only path to victory is to treat your own people incredibly well so you can spread your influence as far and as fast as possible. It fails as an exploration of morality for the same reasons: unlike other games which understand that altruistic selflessness and petty, malicious greed can each be treated as distinct paths to personal gain, the very nature of Black & White’s economic and quest systems make evil behavior self-defeating. Where is the satisfaction in devoting yourself to goodness when there’s absolutely no temptation to take a darker approach? These are the sorts of questions Black & White’s designers forgot to ask, and in so doing, lost sight of the game’s focus and left it to become a fascinating idea which goes almost completely unrealized. The Creatures alone could make this title worth checking out for some people, but anyone seeking a competent strategy game is advised to look elsewhere.