The grind and immersion-breakers gradually got me, though: 

All those little people who have presumably been in self-sustaining populations for centuries before the birth of the gods? Yup, they appear to be hapless ingrates who slowly die off without constant coddling; but quickly get bored with divine intervention. I didn’t become a deity to remind a bunch of monkeys that they need to breed faster than they die and maybe plant some crops now and then…

The creature? Cool concept, never got the hang of training the damn thing, to the point where the behavior never seemed to rise above ‘arbitrary’.

The quest objectives that you mysteriously couldn’t use your divine powers to solve, despite being able to do equivalent things all the time? Oh, sure, you can pick up people from villages that don’t believe in you however much you want. But you can’t pick up the Atheist, because he’s an atheist! How wacky, instead you get to pet and/or slap your creature into picking him up and not eating him, what fun! Obviously, a god game needs to limit your divine power somehow; but it can’t feel arbitrary and capricious about it.

It was doubly frustrating because Molyneux was behind Bullfrog, which created Dungeon Keeper and Dungeon Keeper II, which were both delightful god games(and of course the Populous series), overflowing with both challenge and the guilty pleasures of abusing your power.

Black & White was incredibly technologically superior; but just didn’t have the solidity as a game. It made being a god mundane and frustrating. Also, maybe I just sucked; but I found that the ‘receive less faith for repeated miracles/miracles that don’t address current demands’ mechanic made it really hard to actually make the “Black and White” moral choices: If you coddled your worshipers all the time, they’d survive as a population but succumb to apathy. If you beat them up, you’d run out of believers soon enough. Instead, you always resorted to the classic-abusive-relationship “use a destructive miracle to inspire fear and create a demand for a healing/constructive miracle, repeat, come out with confused creature and neutral karma” arrangement. (You’d think that it wouldn’t be possible to make setting a town on fire by throwing the burning bodies of its children at it feel like a chore; but you’d be wrong. Also, it’s totally fucked up that the inhabitants would fall down and worship you, among the bones of their slain children, if you deigned to rain the fires out… Serious Book of Job stuff there…)

http://web.archive.org/web/20110606122527/http://www.gamerankings.com/pc/914356-black-and-white/index.html

Having themselves been exposed for their general credulity and journalistic haplessness, perhaps, is why reviewers were so harsh on Fable (and on Molyneux’s “Project Ego” grandiosity) even though it was a very good action RPG.

A particularly interesting story is Demis Hassibilis, a brilliant Molyneux protegé who did likewise with “Republic”, a similarly overhyped game that turned out to be a kind of weird little toy (but unlike B&W and Fable, no emotional hook)

Fable, by contrast, received the lethal indictment of being merely blah. Probably a more competent game than Black and White; but not-terribly-interesting RPGs are about the world’s most crowded genre.

For a designer who takes innovation and ‘concept’ seriously, Black and White, while it fell flatter as a game, was arguably much more of a triumph than a workmanlike but fundamentally uninteresting action RPG…