Ladies and gentlemen, I give you From Dust, a game from the God-Game genre. You control an unnamed diety, and you're able to manipulate the environment around you. In this case, your enemy isn't another civilization or a group of invaders, it is the environment itself.
You have to defend your villagers from tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and I'm sure more than that. You do this by guiding shamans to shrines so they may defend themselves; their village will be spared, but the surrounding environment will be greatly changed.
Basically you can move the earth, block and create new pathways for water to (dynamically) flow and erode the landscape. Rock, obviously, erodes slower than just soil. You can also splash some vegetation and it will grow to cover that area of the island. You can also, say, take some lava and use it to make a sturdier dam by placing it in front of a river.
By guiding the villagers to these shrines and protecting them, you aid them in migrating to new lands and gain new powers. In the Gamescon demo, the power gained for protecting against the impending tsunami was the ability to temporarily freeze water, where it will later return to a liquid state - used for setting up traps or something, I suppose. Just seems like it'll be fun messing around with the environment, I suppose.
Check it out.
Oh, and it's coming out for the PC, PS3, and 360 - which is weird I guess, because typically god-games don't come out on consoles.

That water looks gorgeous.
Methinks this will be a beautified rethink of Black and White.

Oh my ♥♥♥♥! THIS is what Black & White 2 shood have been! I'll so follow this closely.

Thank you for the tip.

How is it weird that it's coming to consoles too?
It's a large percentage of the gaming audience there.

Maybe a large percentage of the general audience, but not nearly as much of the strategy segment, which is made mostly of PC users. You can count on your fingers the number of major RTS games released on consoles.


Also, I'm eagerly looking forward to this game. Actually, I'm as excited as a frantic eight-year-old who just got a N64. No, really.

Ohooohohoo Ubisoft just OWNED Lionhead Studios!

Now let's watch them roll back the release date over and over again!

Anyways, this game looks like top-notch ♥♥♥♥. I just need to get a nicer graphics card and CPU now...

I'd wager that:

- Your village will not grow at all. I bet it will be a boring, static bit of arbitrarily important scenery.

- Rocks will never crumble and the entire map will only be able to operate on one plane.

- Caves will be impossible

etc.

I don't know.. the way this is looking like is it will be the ♥♥♥♥ when this comes out. Anything mandatory that an island would have I'm sure will be put in. But if it's like you say and will turn out like a peice of crap then that will be pretty god damn dissapointing.

Well it is supposed to be a realistic nature simulation, and before the 'From Dust' title it was named 'Project Dust'.
The fact that it was a project to create a virtual ecosystem suggests formations you can see in real life, will be achievable in this game.

Caves would be pretty cool, but not very practically viewable from an overhead sort of view. Perhaps they could do some trickery where you can make Warcraft 3/Starcraft type caves, where the sky darkens but it's still open to the air in actuality.

In any case, looks interesting but likely I won't have enough computer power to play it until three years after release.

Looks sexay.

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Sweet. I just hope it lives up to my expectations.

B&W2 wasn't that bad... :\

What B&W2 did you play? I played the one with a campaign and a campaign ONLY. No sandbox, no Multiplayer... But I forgive your thoughtless words because I like you sprites.

EDIT: I do understand that this game (From dust) haven't those things either right now, but I hope it will!

Don't remember... :\

lulz ok.