Few developers can – even after all this time – get you quite so swept up in their enthusiasm as Peter Molyneux. It’s an enthusiasm that has, famously, got him into trouble in the past, when passion and promise have failed to meet reality by quite some margin – with players often caught in fallout. So it’s hard not to be sceptical when it comes to 22 Cans and Molyneux’s latest project, Masters of Albion. But – as someone who grew up on the games of Bullfrog, the games of Lionhead – listening to Molyneux excitably play his way through 45 minutes of Masters of Albion, it’s even harder not to be just a little bit hopeful it might all come together this time, when this weird Molyneux greatest hits mash-up promises so many things I love.
Molyneux himself (or his marketing team at least) hasn’t shied away from comparisons with his past glories when talking about Masters of Albion, tipping a hat to the likes of Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, and Fable. And there are unquestionably echoes of those beloved games here; Masters of Albion is a lot of things jostling for attention, a lot of familiar things as it slams together god sims and management games and action adventures.
You might have a big all-powerful god hand in Masters of Albion, capable of zapping enemies with mana magic and hoisting people into the air, but even omnipotent deities won’t get much done without cold hard cash – here, used to buy goods, build stuff, hire workers, unlock tech trees, and so on. Which is where the game’s city building and business management core comes in. And perhaps surprisingly, the closest Molyneux touchpoint here appears to be 22 Cans’ previous game, Legacy, repurposing some of its more intriguing flourishes (intriguing, at least, until the project’s eventual tumble into blockchain hell) with the production chains driving your wealth acquisition being built around a similar sense of customisation-focused modularity.
Your buildings – your farms, your mines, your smelters, your factories, and so on – are constructed by snapping blocks together, Lego style. You’ll usually need an entrance, a roof, and a delivery/collection point, but there are further choices to make from there; some cosmetic, some functional. You might decide to house your citizens in their place of work, for instance, even combine different building types (a smelter and a factory, say) to cut down on transportation times – albeit with the trade-off seemingly being the more complex the builds, the more mismatched the pieces, the less efficient the whole.
That modularity, also like Legacy, extends to goods manufacturing. If you’re going to set your factories to work on pie-making, for instance, you’ll need to prototype that pie first, drag-and-dropping from a stack of ingredients before sending them into full production. Same with weapons, which you’ll assemble from blades, cross guards, hilts, and the like. Cost and profit is seemingly determined by a market simulation, while complexity impacts build time. And because you’re a deity, you can (in one of those slightly frivolous but characterful touches that are perhaps at the heart of Molyneux’s most fondly remembered games) speed up manufacturing by waggling your magic finger over buildings, or you can use your powers to manually shift materials to their delivery destination in order to reduce production time – although this’ll occupy precious minutes you might prefer to spend elsewhere.
Away from the macro focus of pie construction, the influence of Molyneux’s earlier games becomes more obvious. From your birds-eye view of the world, the vibe is decidedly Black & White as you manipulate things with your big ol’ hand. Your influence is total within an activated region of the world, but you’ve no control over an area until its beacon is up and running, which is where your heroes come in. Possess one and Masters of Albion suddenly looks a lot like Fable as you directly control them from a classic third-person action-adventure perspective – say, to cut a path through enemies and reach a beacon in an area you’re not yet able to exert your godly influence.
During the demo, that meant battling across rugged mountain paths (supposedly, you can also possess animals and other humans to explore the world, but they won’t be able to attack). And once a beacon is activated, you’ll gain just enough influence that you’re able to restore it, jigsaw-like, from bits strewn across the land. All that’s left to do, then, is charge it up with mana power and full omnipotent control of the region (alongside additional rewards such as new heroes or building pieces) will be yours. And from there, it’s time to start up a fresh set of regional production chains.
There’s one other key detail to note: all the above happens during daytime when the mood is intentionally relaxed, giving you space to complete objectives or slip into your hero skin and explore the world. But nighttime is designed to bring a more chaotic vibe, as monsters prepare to attack your settlements and the genre shifts again, this time looking more like tower defense. That means the final hours of each day (in normal mode, the clock progresses automatically, but in casual mode, you determine when your day is over and night comes) should be spent making preparations for attack; shoring up your settlement’s weak points with heroes or building expensive modular turrets you’ll top with a trebuchet or ballista in order to survive until dawn. And, yes, there’s a permadeath mode if you choose.
So that’s Masters of Albion, or at least more or less everything squeezed into Molyneux’s 45 minutes of uninterrupted gameplay. There are still some grey areas – the rhythms of third-person exploration have yet to be fully explained, for instance – and my cautious skepticism isn’t likely to dissipate until I’ve played the thing myself. But as a presentation of ideas, the flow and interplay of Masters of Albion’s drastically different parts is certainly intriguing, and I can’t pretend the Bullfrog fan in me, the Lionhead fan in me isn’t, naively perhaps, at least curious – even hopeful – about its future.
And I would, genuinely, love to see this work. Partly for entirely selfish reasons, of course, because I miss these kinds of games, this kind of wildly ambitious whimsy. But if this truly is Molyneux’s last game, as he suggested to Eurogamer not too long ago, it’d be nice (speaking as someone who’s received a huge amount of enjoyment from the games he’s shepherded in the past) to see him go out on a high. But this isn’t just a Molyneux game, of course; there’s the team at 22cans, which this time around includes the likes of former Media Molecule boss Mark Healey in the role of art director, Fable and Dungeon Keeper composer Russel Shaw on music duties, with Ian Wright, whose design credits include Fable 2, Black & White 2, and Alien: Isolation onboard too. Whether their combined might can create magic and deliver something special remains to be seen, but we’ll have at least some idea of Master of Albion’s future when it enters early access on 22nd April.
