Black and White 2 v.1.2 Performance Update

Black and White 2

Black and White 2 is the sequel to Lionhead's original Black and White, a game which caused a stir in the gaming world when it was first released in 2001 because of the innovative creature AI and world physics. The sequel carries on the "God-on-a-budget" style of game play of the first, with much less of the sometimes frustrating micro-management seen in the original.

The basic game mechanics in Black and White 2 haven't changed much: you gather resources, build walls and structures for your followers, and interact with the people and land. All this is done from a God's perspective via a floating, disembodied hand. While the mechanics haven't changed much, the goals are a bit more straightforward this time.

In the original, there were tasks to achieve on each of the five lands, but at it's heart the game felt more focused on letting you play with your creature. In this follow-up, the goal is to convert all the people of the different settlements on the map into your followers by either impressing them with your towns and miracles (Good), or by simple hostile takeover (Evil). As you play, the game decides whether each of your actions is "good" or "evil" and aligns you accordingly with different visual results.



While there is debate at how much of an improvement the game play is over the original game, there is no doubt among anyone that the graphics of Black and White 2 are superior to the first. Black and White 2 is in fact one of the most graphically advanced games out presently, using some of the newer SM3.0 aspects to striking effect, particularly with certain features like water. An added bonus is that nearly everything in the game is able to be interacted with, either in subtle ways (i.e. a field of wheat bends and the water ripples realistically as you zoom in close and brush your hand over it), or not so subtle ways (i.e. watch as the buildings and walls tend to collapse and splinter realistically when you throw a massive boulder into them in your divine wrath).



Black and White 2's excellent graphics make it a good benchmark, and we've used it many times for past performance tests. Unfortunately, one of the problems with this game has been that it tends to favor NVIDIA graphics cards over ATI cards, despite the ATI splash screen at the game's startup. This had us scratching our heads, but we suspected it might be fixed in a later game patch. We aren't exactly sure why they didn't get this right earlier, and it's rather misleading for ATI/Lionhead to promote hardware that doesn't perform as well with this game for so long. However, it looks like they've finally got it right with the version 1.2 patch as our performance tests will show.