Haven't read the Sims article, thinking too fast and on a connection that's too slow to go clicking on links left and right. Will read after I post.
BW had, as far as I know, one of the very best AI's devoted to entertainment and dedicated to commercial retail at the time (keep in mind, this was 2001, and I mean the bloody creature, not the idiotic enemy AI that was, after all, your standard AI with certain scripts for certain situations hard-coded). I think a lot of people forget this, but I've taught creatures in the past to always, when they see a new town, cast fireball, then storm, then water, then heal, then food, take food from the store, eat, pick up a tree, toss it into the store and then begin casting birds and the such. I recall a story from one of the beta testers in the early days of the game in which he stated that he taught his creature to kick a villager, then, every time he did, go eat a tree and throw it up.
Then, of course, there's the intentionally-easy script engine that is almost entirely self-explanatory and can be decrypted by nothing more than trial and error, in .txt format, which was pretty much from the start screaming, "MOD ME! MOD ME!" I mean, that was nothing new, but it was still uncommon for the developers to make it intentionally easy for fans to make their own content. There had been before that, for example, Daggerfall and I think Morrowind (I don't remember the year Morrowind came out), and I recall Doom being easy to mod, but not many mainstream games really were, otherwise. Black & White, a game with a very Indie feel and an almost-Indie story of its conception, hit the market to an already-massive following that only grew for the first three years or so, and then it continued to milk off of Fable and BW2 for a couple of years. Who knows what kind of game we'd have gotten, had LH not run short of time and money? Something amazing, I'm sure.
And then, there's that epic feel. I can never seem to capture it in skirmish landscapes, no matter how hard I try, but the LH lands, with their scenery and scripts, had two important and contradictory factours always at play--
1: They were these immense, natural-feeling islands, a marvel of aesthetic design if nothing else, and the beginning of an era of making games (outside of doujoshin (I'd say "spelling?", but Latinizations are up for interpretation anyway)) that were focused on pretty things or beautiful scenery, natural graphics instead of blocky or angular, textured instead of bold, an era that Lionhead really grabbed by the horns, and
2: The feeling that, as massive and omnipotent as you were, in spite of being able to rise in the air until the whole island was a quarter of your screen, this place never felt small, or distant; It never felt as though you were just looking at a map, in Google Earth, for example, and being viscerally connected by a sandbox interactivity (this is where I fail); Everything was always this incredible fractal of detail, you would be roped into your villagers' lives, and exploring the land, even though you could technically simply rise above the island and see the whole thing, was a meticulous and intriguing affair of working your way along the whole island, manipulating and interacting with everything, chuckling when the people cried out, "WE NEED MORE
OFFSPRING!"
Oh, and don't forget the multiplayer. I never got a chance to try it, but apparently that was a big deal while it lasted.
