Anyone Pick up Black & White 2 Yet?

[SupaTroopa]

If/when you do, please post reactions!

It just seems an awful lot like AOM to me, and am not really wanting another RTS game.

But who knows, if it's got enough depth and variety and unique characteristics then it might be worth picking up.

Considering the 1st game was probably the most overrated PC game in history I am just hesitant to spend $50 on it until it gets some reviews. :yes:

I think it's on the shelves today, but might not be until tomorrow so this might be a bit early.

[Rafal Dudek]

didnt know it was out today. I might pick it up on Friday depending on my mood. Just got the rome expansion and that sure still is holding me hehe =]

[SupaTroopa]

Well it got an 8.2 at Gamespot:


Review Link (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/blackwhite2/review.html)

[Rafal Dudek]

Well I got BnW 2 now. So far its pretty enjoyable. They improved on quite a bit of things from the first game like training your pet to do things and building stuff is much easier now. No more messing around with scaffolding (remember those?) Being good or evil now has much bigger difference in terms of how your civilization looks like and the environment.

The patch is out:
http://www.3dgamers.com/news/more/1096483030/

Its pretty big for a patch, little over 100mb. Fixes quite a few things but now I have to start the campaign over again.

[SupaTroopa]

Yeah I'm liking it so far too - thanks for patch link. It's definitely everything the first game should've been. The city building, while fun at first, gets repetitive, but the combat options help vary things.

The system requirements are monstorous - with a Geforce 6800, P4 2.4 and 1GB of DDR400 RAM I have my game set at low-to-medium details - as once you get major cities built and armies going, it can slow down to a crawl at high settings. But the game still looks great at those settings (just make sure you enable FSAA).

[Rafal Dudek]

Yea, its a system hog alright. I'm running high details cept for shadows are disabled, field of depth (dunno what that is) is disabled and no FSAA. I'm getting acceptable performance.

One thing thats wierd is for some reason I'm having hard time doing hand gestures to use spells.

[SupaTroopa]

I finally got it running acceptably after re-installing and patching and starting a new game myself...but the stupid game keeps crashing to the desktop randomnly, and I have to reboot my PC - ugh.

It needs another patch bad. My creature looks absolutely cool though all muscular now and semi-evil looking, hehe. :) (only on Japan island - 3rd one I think, haven't had a lot of time to play) . I heard the game is rather short.

My monkey easily kicked the crap out of the Norse wolf in the 2nd land, sat on top of him and just pumelled him to death, game's not very challenging thus far, sure that will change some, the AI is pretty bland, but acceptable I guess, hardcore RTS'ers will probably hate it unless they recognize the game for what it is upfront I guess. Not much fun being good - just build walls and keep building up your city - takes a lot longer but a balance of good/evil is apparently the way they figured people would play it (capturing towns without destroying them, using creature as a gatherer/builder/entertainer etc..,).

The game is not as deep as it appears at first, but I am having a lot of fun with it and it's a nice change from what I've been playing lately, but like all of Molyneaux's games lately it's ultimately too ambitious for it's own good.

[hinsonnn]

i have the game but couldnt get it install.~ omg.

just as it gets to the end of insatallation, an error message saying that "Your system has nott been modified,. re run installer and try again... error : filename, directory name or volume label syntax is incorrect."

i hope i can fix this problem soon. `

[SupaTroopa]

I could really like this game if it weren't such a buggy, technical mess.

Everyone is having problems with it crashing on Nvidia cards, as well as stuttering and slow performance it seems - regardless of system specs.

I would absolutely recommend waiting until they patch it up more because it is not a finished product.

When/if they do smooth things out somehow, it's a very good game for those who liked the first game but wanted more. I really enjoy it (outside of the repetitive city building) but I can't imagine summoning volcanoes and hurricanes or building huge armies at this point without the thing running so poorly that it cripples my machine and becomes too frustrating to play because of lag.

It's a so addictive though that it's hard not to play it regardless. :)

[moonlightcheese]

Everyone is having problems with it crashing on Nvidia cards, as well as stuttering and slow performance it seems - regardless of system specs.

I would absolutely recommend waiting until they patch it up more because it is not a finished product.
it has nothing to do with the game. the game is fine but nVidia's released a patch for their drivers that you can download to fix this problem. google search for "black and white 2 nvidia" and you will come up with plenty of links for the driver... like this one...
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downloads_rel70betadriver.html

note that this is a beta driver and may not fix your issue. if you still have the issue, document it and send to nvidia and i'm sure they'll have all the issues worked out soon. (damn ATi for having the optimizations for this game GRRRR).

oh... by the way... this is my first post here at 3dgamers.com... hope it helped! ^_^

EDIT: and i've also seen that the game has problems with "smart doctor" for those of you using this. if you have an ASUS mobo disable smart doctor and ASUS diagnostic utility.

[SupaTroopa]

Thanks Moonlight, I did download those drivers a few days ago and they didn't really help much though at all.

What DOES seem to help Nvidia users is to download the tweaker tool from 3dguru and force the shaders (both vertex and pixel) to 1.1. THIS removes the stuttering - but of course the game doesn't look quite as good.

Believe me, the game has major issues - it crashes on me constantly, so much so that I can't get past land 3 and am a bit tired of reloading it once an hour or starting over constantly if I don't save.

Enemies go right through my walls and get stuck in structures etc..., also...which is just stupid, but typical of Lionhead's over-ambitious sloppiness.

I generally like the game despite some of it's major issues that will hopefully be ironed out sooner or later.

I have a love/hate relationship with it right now. I also wish creatures grew to be taller in size than they are - but I have not yet seen a fully grown creature, so who knows, but it seems like they're awfully small in-game unless you zoom in.

[moonlightcheese]

that's really odd, because i don't have those problems at all. i'm running the game just fine on medium/low settings using an old Radeon 8500 that i have (until my upgrade coming this weekend). it would seem that the problem is with collision detection and physics, which is still a driver issue with nVidia. i hear that their drivers are very poor but if the drivers are so poor that they create the conditions you are talking about then i think i'll take an ATi card.

oh well... too late. i already ordered a waterblock for the 7800 series so i guess i'm stuck until my next upgrade next year. i hope i have better luck than other nvidia users are having with this card x.x

which mobo are you using Supa? in fact, what are your full system specs? any overclocking software for the GPU?

[SupaTroopa]

Funny I ditched a 9800 Pro recently for a 6800 because of driver/compatibility problems with my ATI. :)

I don't really have any problems with other games though since I got the 6800. I did notice B&W2 is an "ATI" game officially though.

My specs;

P4 2.4ghz
Nvidia 6800 128MB AGP
1GB DDR 400 RAM
Soundblaster Live 5.1 PCI (quite old now)
Titan Gygabyte Mobo (4x/8x AGP capable of handling 3.0 P4's when I upgrade that)

Nvidia definitely need to iron out whatever issues they're having with newer games it seems. The only other prob I can think of is that Serious Sam II will crash during cut scene movies - therefore I just hit a key and skip them before it can and the game runs fine otherwise. I've seen someone else with a Nvidia card talk about this on their forums.

[moonlightcheese]

well Supa, it looks like i'm in the same boat as you are now... just picked up my 7800GT OC (the BFG card). the game won't even run. i've used the beta forceware and the release. may try an older version of drivers later. this is BS man. you'd expect a company like lionhead to release a solid product that you can use on both brands of GFX cards...

everytime i run it i get errors no matter what settings i use. it's ridiculous... will try harder tomorrow to get this going. these graphics cards are becoming so different in design that optimizing for one means writing off the other entirely. sometimes i miss the good ol' days of shader model 1.0...

[SupaTroopa]

that's too bad, I haven't played it in a few days due to the crashing, and while the shader 1.1 fix seems to eliminate the stuttering and slow downs, the game doesn't look as good as it should.

I'm getting randomn crashes in all 3 of these new games, which is disappointing, and hope Nvidia gets off their rears and updates the drivers.

I did find the simple fix to allow your creatures to grow double in size (or as big as you want)- as they are, they are too small I think. So that's nice.

A Moderator at the Lionhead forums acknolwedged they are working on issues with Nvidia currently, at least, so I'm just being patient for now until they get their act together.