Am I the only one who never really gelled with the creature in either versions? It's not that I couldn't train it, I always managed to get them to look after themselves, not get fat and maintain all villages in my possession and everything, and they are all pretty good at impressing other villages if I say so myself, and I studied Project Creed in depth and with much interest.
But in spite of all that, I nevertheless found the creature to be a bit of an appendage and was always wanting to get stuck into the game without it there. edit: spoiler!
If it weren't for the silly save-times I'd relish the second land of the original BW after Lethys has stolen the creature and I have the land to myself,
yet I always pined for opposing gods. BW was at least in part about choice supposedly, and I'm not trying to be some anti-creature evangelist, yet I saw no option for choosing not to have a creature, in either versions. In the second I tried changing the map.txt to start on a level after the creature selection, yet it always inserted the default lion creature :no
Anyways, as for BW3, I'd be happy to tell the truth if they simply released an add-on for the first game that updated the graphics and fixed the bugs, and added some new content, like a random map generator [I've put the following in a spoiler, as it might give away the ending of the original BW, and also because the spoiler button is a cool radioactive sign :laugh2]
so that you could chase Nemesis for all eternity. No matter how long I waited after the bad conscience declared towards the climax "this could go on forever!" nothing seemed to happen, Nemesis just sat there doing nothing, waiting for me to wipe him out. After all, what if the player chose not to sacrifice their creature to finish off Nemesis?
I think Yahtzee is right in his cynicism about 'choice' in computer games. Problem is in a game like BW there are simply too many possible user decisions to fully account for I think for choice ever to be really complete.
Having said that, it might be nice to have creatures that have opted no longer to listen to the voices of gods, and instead roam freely, expressing various personalities much like in Creature Isle?
Having said that, it might be nice to have creatures that have opted no longer to listen to the voices of gods, and instead roam freely, expressing various personalities much like in Creature Isle?
I do like that idea. Some might even help you take on another god, but you wouldn't have much control over them. You might ask them to do something, e.g. help your villager from being attacked and depending on his pre-set personality, he might wipe out an opposing village to distract the god or just try and repair your village while you take on the enemy god.
creatures in BW2 are too much like robots. they have a "free will" bar at the bottom but that is meaningless. they have no free will - i mean, you click on a spot and they go there, no argument and no shouting. no real creature would do that! :suspect
and the creatures are too violent. even if your creature is good, they will still kill any creature they see. they dont even get to know each other before they start to fight.
they should have kept the same creature engine from BW1 and used it in BW2. it was much better than the creature in BW2, but i suppose BW2 was made to appeal to a wider audience. shame.
To be fair, there were runmblings from Lionhead that the new Creature AI suffered as they effectively had to rush the end development of B&W2 as they were running out of money.
They had planned to build a much better interface between player and creature but had just run out of time (and money) .
I'll wager that the power of the B&W1 creature AI was much weaker than the B&W2 AI, but that AI is useless unless the interaction with it is right. That's where B&W1 did much better than B&W2. Neither were perfect but B&W1 was much closer.
I would wager that had they enough time to get it right, the B&W2 creature AI could've been something very good. What we got was something just short of a simple wizard to set how we want our creature to behave. Guess we'll never know now what could've been.
Anyways, as for BW3, I'd be happy to tell the truth if they simply released an add-on for the first game that updated the graphics and fixed the bugs, and added some new content, like a random map generator
creatures in BW2 are too much like robots. they have a "free will" bar at the bottom but that is meaningless. they have no free will - i mean, you click on a spot and they go there, no argument and no shouting. no real creature would do that! :suspect
and the creatures are too violent. even if your creature is good, they will still kill any creature they see. they dont even get to know each other before they start to fight.
they should have kept the same creature engine from BW1 and used it in BW2. it was much better than the creature in BW2, but i suppose BW2 was made to appeal to a wider audience. shame.
Nice for some. I'm working throught the summer and be taking my holidays in winter to go on a snow holiday.
Be sure to enjoy the sights. Shame you're still underage though. That's going to stop you from seeing the long list of bars/clubs there. It really is a college city which makes it quite fun. enjoy!
Enough of my going OT.
The creature stomach thing is a good example of what I'm on about with the B&W2 AI. They probably built a very powerful AI engine, but without the right stuctures in place to use it properly, it never reached it's full potential.
Going off on a tanget from the current frame here so forgive me - I was contemplating the miracle system in BW. One thing that always would drive me spare was having to constantly cast new wood miracles over large wonders (before the first Norse one was finished at least :yes), and I thought it would be nice for the miracle not to have some arbitrary limit, but rather keep casting more wood as the prayer power sustained it. The rate at which the wood was created would be dependant upon the amount of mana available to you and the rate at which it was created at that time obviously.
Perhaps further still, you could link your miracles up to a certain point on the map and have all extra mana diverted to them. For example, you could block off strangle-points with a tornado miracle that is constantly whirring around there unsupervised, the power of which would depend on the rate at which your villagers produce mana, so if it was too low then your opponent is able simply to march on through it without being swept away, or probably it would dissappear completely. Heck, you could even make a lighthouse with a fireball and warn people off a bad area of sea, or choose instead to misdirect them to crash on the rocks so your villagers can go looting. OK it's getting crazy now...
Or perhaps if you're a git-god you could sustain a volcano in your opponents village, until such a time as you deem to take it away again (the action of which would be somewhere near as impressive as putting it there in the first place), or you take your opponents volcano out of your own village, or even capture their prayer power somehow by diverting it to your worship site (which incidentally should never have been uncoupled from the temple like in BW2 :shocked) with the only way to break that chain being to either halt all worshipping at their site, or a well-placed rock in the middle of yours; shields anyone? :: . Also, I thought of some kind of aura you could sustain, that spreads your alignment in it's radius, so for instance, supposing you're good, the landscape morphs more dramatically bright and lush, and the people are happy, while if you are the aforementioned git-god then the people are aggressive much like your git-self. The ideas for this are endless so I shan't bore you with all the ones I had - what do you think?
I wonder if this system could live happily in the scripting language of BW2... :suspect
Alecunlimited, you're ideas are very interesting. I do wish the miracle system was improved, I barely used any of them in BW2. As for the first idea, I've had a similar idea, of evolution in your creature. You choose you're creature (any animal walking on all fours) and train him to be bi-pedal, talk, and fight. Since he is under the influence of a God he grows to a massive size, constantly learning and evolving as you teach him.
Though the chances for BW3 are slim, I do want to see what they do with it. Will they simply drop the game completely? Who knows.
I would like to point out that, whereas I never played very far into BW2 to find out, in BW1 the area under your influence does change based on alignment. If you are good, then the landscape takes brighter tones, and sort of faint obnoxious rainbow auras surround everything, and the sky over your temple is bright and opalescent with a rainbow, and if you're evil then everything around your influence and especially your temple looks like Land 4.
Just thought I'd point that out, you can test it next time you play B&W.
I would like to point out that, whereas I never played very far into BW2 to find out, in BW1 the area under your influence does change based on alignment.
Indeed it does Also, in BW2 the landscape morphs to match you alignment, but the alignment-based lighting they used was much more subtle than in BW.
Just to mention a BW2 issue which I think played a major part: according to the credits the co-designer (There was Molyneux and Ron Millar as lead designers) is a guy who worked in the past on 'true' RTS games, and I think the conflict between the two designers shows. Since Millar was not part of the original BW creation, he likely wouldn't have had a very good feel for what the game was actually about, and was probably told:
"Right! We need some of your RTS experience to make an RTS part of the game"
which I think was probably the wrong angle to take. The right one in my overly opinionated view should have been:
"Ok, the ants have become aggressive, now what advantage would a God confer if he/she was to take sides, given for example the same powers as BW?" Rather than crow-barring in an RTS element. For a start while there is a pretty good line of sight for a God, I question whether a platoon of 10 would blithely swagger up to 50 elite Aztec swordsmen and spill their pints like they do in the game if you order them to... I just don't think that 'classic' RTS elements really fit well in BW.
As it was, there was Molyneux's God-sim, and Millar's RTS, and the two never quite gel'd, you can almost tell the bits put forwards by each designer. So I think the key to BW3 will be in either a return to a small development team in the first, more conceptual stages, and then some big business to back it up which is now at Lionheads disposal, or a completely new team who knew both games intimately well and made something out of sheer love of the game. I nominate Daxter :yes
Am I the only one who never really gelled with the creature in either versions? It's not that I couldn't train it, I always managed to get them to look after themselves, not get fat and maintain all villages in my possession and everything, and they are all pretty good at impressing other villages if I say so myself, and I studied Project Creed in depth and with much interest.
But in spite of all that, I nevertheless found the creature to be a bit of an appendage and was always wanting to get stuck into the game without it there.
I always felt that the creature was as close to being a mortal as your god gets in BW1. It's your avatar in the real world, and you teach it make happen what you want to make happen. It has the same name as your character AFAIK, and although you can direct mortals to expand in a desired direction, the creature is the one physically living in your land and carrying out your black or white desires.
If it weren't for that then I'd see the creature as an overgrown disciple.
fenton_pat said:
The creature stomach thing is a good example of what I'm on about with the B&W2 AI. They probably built a very powerful AI engine, but without the right stuctures in place to use it properly, it never reached it's full potential.
I have been playing BW2 for a week now (beat it and the expansion), and I'm not even sure I'd call BW2's current creature mind an AI. To this day I'm discovering something new about the old creatures (read a post by Kays on how is Ape/Chimp was telling a story to impress villagers and he realized the creature was referring to another critter from a previous land. Easter eggs wrapped in Easter eggs).
I read somewhere that the BW1 creature had something like 38 variables it understood when being rewarded or punished, which includes how hungry it was, the time of day, how tired, all not counting the object it was 'looking for'. I might not have seen the full extent of the BW2 creature, but the gaps between how the old and new behave are tremendous.
I think the entire creature concept would have been better received if people knew just how good an AI they were dealing with, and how fragile it was. Stuff like making your creature cast the Forest miracle, water the trees and transplant the permanent saplings to further water is arcane knowledge, when it should have been an obvious example of the great potential it had.
I have been playing BW2 for a week now (beat it and the expansion), and I'm not even sure I'd call BW2's current creature mind an AI. To this day I'm discovering something new about the old creatures (read a post by Kays on how is Ape/Chimp was telling a story to impress villagers and he realized the creature was referring to another critter from a previous land. Easter eggs wrapped in Easter eggs).
I read somewhere that the BW1 creature had something like 38 variables it understood when being rewarded or punished, which includes how hungry it was, the time of day, how tired, all not counting the object it was 'looking for'. I might not have seen the full extent of the BW2 creature, but the gaps between how the old and new behave are tremendous.
I think the entire creature concept would have been better received if people knew just how good an AI they were dealing with, and how fragile it was. Stuff like making your creature cast the Forest miracle, water the trees and transplant the permanent saplings to further water is arcane knowledge, when it should have been an obvious example of the great potential it had.
Ah, now here is where we get down to the subtle nature of the creatures. When I say that the AI in B&W2 was probably more powerful than in B&W1, I mean purely the nuts and bolts engine, i.e. the kind of information it could receive and then make judements on.
Most of the stuff you are talking about are the before and after parts, i.e. HOW you give him that information and the actions your creature's body can do with that information.
It may well be that the AI was capable of so much more in B&W2 (for all we know, it may have had 100s of variables compared to B&W1's 38), but because the interface with the creature was so poor, you could only teach him certain things and that was that. Also, the AI is constrained by the actions that it's body can do. It may have wanted make friends with the other creature for example, but as the body had no animations for that, then that option was out.
I particularly enjoyed such unique items in the original's fine-tuned AI as getting the creature to poo on fallen enemies and eat enemy villagers followed by pooing the remains in the village store. Neither was very practical, ut entertaining, and I was impressed that you could do it.
It would be neat to see if anyone with coding expertise (besides me, because my computer is crap until I find some MOAR RAM) could perhaps look into changing the interaction system in BW2, so as to test the variables against BW1. I'm not sure how hardwired the particular piece of code would be in the rest, though; In my experience, commercial producers like to make reprogramming tricky, but, though my experience, as previously mentioned, is slim when it comes to BW2 (for those of you that remember Skeith, I play it occasionally at his house, under his file, but generally spend a lot more time with Crysis and Bioshock), BW1 and Creature Isle had (has) all sorts of mods, including the recent and much-sought-after colour swapper, so it might be worth a shot.
As said, BW2 is foreign to me, so if there are any specific or well-known reasons this is impossible, remember that technology leaves off at about 2002 for me, so I missed BW2 by that much. :rolleyes
