He’s not saying that it will be his final game, but as Peter Molyneux talks about Masters of Albion, there’s certainly a sense of ‘one last job’ – a swansong and a homecoming that combines all the greatest works of his career into a culminating statement. The interface, a supple and intuitive hand that you can use to pick up villagers and assemble buildings, comes right from Black and White. The world and its name owe their inspirations to Fable, and the third-person combat (more on that later) whispers of Dungeon Keeper. Of course, just like Populous, Molyneux’s breakout hit from 1989, this is also a strategy and god game. Absent is the top-hatted financial manager from Theme Park, and Theme Hospital’s nasally receptionist, but the band is otherwise back together. As well as his best-known games, Masters of Albion reunites some of Molyneux’s closest creative collaborators.
“I approached Mark Healy who worked on Dungeon Keeper and Black and White,” Molyneux tells PCGamesN, “and Russel Shaw who did the audio for a lot of Lionhead’s games. There’s also Iain Wright and Kareem Ettouney, who I worked with on these games in the past – the office I’m in even overlooks the old Black and White offices. It was a crazy thing to do, to bring this team back, but it had to happen.”
So what is Masters of Albion? Revealed as part of Opening Night Live at Gamescom 2024, strictly speaking, it’s a god and strategy game where you play the benevolent (or otherwise, depending on your choices) deific ruler of a small town in idealized Olde England. By day, you can make, and encourage your people to make, virtually anything imaginable. Everything is within your power. You decide what food your subjects eat, craft their weapons, build their houses, and manage and micromanage all aspects of their lives.
Stone is better, but if you’ve had an especially good harvest, you can make everybody’s houses out of bread. Production and factories are important, but you need to balance mass manufacturing with environmental concerns – or not, depending on what you want. The god game, Molyneux says, is all about “feeling powerful.” Masters of Albion is built with that in mind.
But then the day ends, nighttime arrives, and the gameplay flips around. Every town under your auspices has a resident ‘hero,’ a noble warrior whose job is to protect everybody else during the small hours. Monsters, ghouls, and myriad threats will descend between dusk and dawn, and if you’re not prepared, or your hero isn’t tough enough, you’re likely to land in trouble.
From what we’ve seen so far, your opinions here are twofold. You can either protect, buff, and help your hero from above, using your god hand to cast spells and miracles, or you can take control of them directly – you can play as the hero yourself, and wade into combat from a third-person view.
So, you’ve got a world inspired by Fable, the god mechanics from Black and White, and the combat dynamics of Dungeon Keeper. In one sense, Masters of Albion is familiar, but the secret is in the blend. Before it’s worldwide reveal at ONL, Molyneux spoke to us directly and shared his vision and the story of the game’s development so far.
“I went back and looked at a lot of the games I’d made before,” Molyneux says. “I looked at Dungeon Keeper and in my mind cherry picked the features that I felt were different and deserved to be explored more. Then I looked at Black and White, especially the hand interface and the incredibly pure and clean HUD.
“I loved the open-world feel, too, and that went down on my list. And then I went to Fable. I absolutely adored the world of Albion in Fable and the irreverent humor and the notion of heroes. So that created a really long list of features, and I started to ask myself whether we could mix those together.
“This is the kind of statement I could get in trouble for, but what Masters of Albion feels like to me is a reinvention of what a god game is. What a god game should be about, I’ve realized, is making you feel powerful, not just the power to destroy things but to create things.”
In 2012, Molyneux co-founded 22cans. The studio’s first game, an experimental mobile puzzle called Curiosity: What’s Inside The Cube? dovetailed directly into its sophomore effort, Godus – the winner of Curiosity, the person who successfully revealed the final part of its gigantic polygonal enigma, would become the game master of Godus, and hold sway over the strategy and building game’s development, as well as receive 1% of the game’s revenue.
But despite a successful Kickstarter campaign, and an initial launch in 2014, Godus struggled. 22cans began developing another game, The Trail, and during a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone, Molyneux said that Godus had not made any money, meaning that Curiosity’s winner, a player called Bryan Henderson, would not get paid. In 2023, Godus – or rather the rebranded version, Godus Wars – was removed from sale on Steam. The game is still available on mobile devices, but given its storied history, Masters of Albion feels like something of a comeback, both for Molyneux himself and 22cans.
“I’ve got to be a realist,” he explains. “I’m 65 now. With my lifestyle, my life expectancy can probably be measured in seconds rather than years, and so this could be my last game. I will be designing and coding and inventing games until the moment I die, but this could be my last game. It would be a fantastic end to my career. It started with a god game. It could end with a god game.
“For me, this is life. I can’t imagine anything better to do with my life than to work on this. It feels like you’re making a delicious soup. This analogy might not bear close examination, but my hobby is ‘cooking’ and with simple ingredients you can blend them together in a way that makes this delicious soup, and over the years you’re ‘tasting’ the game and thinking ‘yeah, this is going to work.’ And the real joy comes from the team, seeing people being proud of what they’re making, especially when it’s with my old friends.”
Especially since Populous and Black and White, but even since Godus, gaming and the strategy and god genres have changed significantly. Molyneux started the first prototype for Masters of Albion three years ago. Though his personal development process remains largely the same, he’s mindful of the modern market and how players’ expectations continue shifting.
“The way I make games is just silly,” Molyneux says. “It’s just trying stuff out. The way I work is ‘let’s try this!’ and if it works we keep it. I have to experience how the game is evolving before adding a new feature. This is the way I love to develop, and [it] has gotten me into trouble in the past. I love to experiment, fail, experiment, fail. In the early days we played around with a lot of mechanics that just didn’t stick – in the past, maybe I would have shown Masters of Albion a year ago. But now, all the systems we’ve got are bedded down and we can say this is a playable game.
“We have to get rid of some of the problems of god games that I’ve done in the past. In today’s modern world, uniqueness can’t be an excuse for lack of polish. There’s a very high quality bar that you have to reach visually, audibly, and in gameplay, and blending those things together is tough.”
We’re yet to find out the release date for Masters of Albion, but following its global reveal at Gamescom 2024, it now has a Steam page, and you can wishlist it right here. As for Peter Molyneux, after experimenting with mobile and free-to-play games, he says he’s learned a lesson: “I should always make games for gamers.”
Check out some of the other best building games, or maybe the best grand strategy games available right now on PC.