Black & White Glimpse

The god-game that is colored in a way as if it could pass for a next-gen Nintendo game (with more colors, and I don’t mean it as an insult… it’s just really vibrant. I’d put Warcraft III in the same category), Peter Molyneux’s Black & White, is summed up nicely in a new preview by PCGamerWeb. A fine shaving from the multiple-screenshot accompanied preview:

When the game comes out, players will have the ability to do whatever their imagination can thing up. Want a forest closer to a village in your world? Simply uproot a tree and place it near the town, and soon other trees to spout up around it. Set fire to your town if it pleases you — or better yet – take a large boulder and place it a fire, allow it to heat up, then bowl it through your village. You can help create a town only to tear it back down.

On a hyped tangent:
The hype alone is going to initially sell this game well, however, hype can only get a game so far. Would the Sims be where it is now without the great playability (the Myst example doesn’t count here because that was coming out when CD-Roms were gaining popularity and used often to show off what you could do with a computer more than anything)?

Here are a few paths a game can take when it reaches the market. It can be hyped beyond belief, yet initial impressions can sour its sales almost immediately (as I think was somewhat true of Alice, which was less than people had hoped). It can be moderately hyped, and spread by word of mouth to gain immense popularity (as in the Sims and Rollercoaster Tycoon, though RC Tycoon was almost completely spread by word of mouth). There are many other ways as well.

Black & White shows the kind of colossal hype Diablo II did, only more so due to its playability promised to be aimed at the general population as well as computer game enthusiasts.