Build by day and defend by night. That’s the latest — and last — god game, Masters of Albion, coming from game developer Peter Molyneux of 22cans.
22cans dropped the official launch trailer last week and the game will be available in early access on April 22 on Steam for $25, and there’s 10% off via Steam for early adopters.
Masters of Albion blends city-building, simulation, and real-time combat into a single player-driven experience defined by freedom, creativity, and consequence. In the words of its creator, Peter Molyneux, Masters of Albion is the culmination of a lifetime’s work in the games industry, bringing together mechanics from previous much-loved titles like Black & White, the Fable series and Dungeon Keeper.
You can watch the trailer here.
With systems-driven gameplay at the heart of the game, Masters of Albion reimagines and reinvigorates the God Game genre, placing complete control in the hands of players, and ensuring that every decision made carries weight.
22cans sees Masters of Albion as both a homage to the foundations of the genre and a step forward in how those systems are realized.
By day, players can navigate through the story, explore the world and design, build, and
manage fully customisable towns with a freedom not found in many city builders.
By night, however, players find themselves in a very different world, one in which they must defend their towns against increasingly volatile threats from the creatures of the night in real-time combat, using every power they have available to them to keep their towns from destruction.
This contrast between creation and survival sits at the heart of the experience, allowing players to enjoy the juxtaposition of a cosy day of god work helping your people live and work, and the terrors of a night where every second is marked with danger.
Masters of Albion is built around experimentation, bringing together ideas that defined earlier god games with new mechanics that expand how players interact with a modern game world.
Developed by a team that includes Molyneux, Mark Healey, Russell Shaw, Kareem Ettouney and Iain Wright, Masters of Albion combines decades of experience in game development across all disciplines. It is a team that is packed with the people behind genre-defining titles such as Fable, Black & White, and Dungeon Keeper, bringing those influences together into a modern interpretation of the God Game.
“As this is my last game, for me it’s the most important. My dearest wish is that it brings joy to all who play it,” said Molyneux, in a statement.
In a statement, Healey said, “The last games I worked on before Masters of Albion had much bigger teams with AAA budgets (Dreams, LittleBigPlanet), this time the team is much smaller as is the budget, but the passion and enjoyment in the dev process of Masters of Albion wins supreme for me.”
“What makes Masters of Albion unique is that we are trying to bring together the essence of so many previous titles we’ve made in the past. I really feel like we are going to appeal to fans of those past games with a mixture of nostalgia and recognition as well as new players who’ve never played games I’ve worked on before,” said Shaw, in a statement.
And Wright said in a statement, “I’m looking forward to seeing what people do with it. When you give players that freedom to build and shape something themselves, it tends to go in directions you wouldn’t expect and that’s the most rewarding part.”
“After absorbing the game design direction from Peter and the team, I was able to go away and have full unrestrained creative freedom, away from the day-to-day development hustle and bustle. Diving deep into the artwork researching, drawing, painting, allowing the artwork itself to have a voice… arriving at the final work at my own pace, process and methods, and then integrating it into the game. I loved this level of creative freedom, which is something very unique to working on Masters of Albion, and a very rare thing to experience in the industry,” said Ettouney, in a statement.