Peter Molyneux's Masters of Albion feels like the long-overdue rebirth of god games

I have very fond memories of Black and White. I don’t think I was even ten years old when I first got hold of it, but I remember owning the white cover instead of the black one: an intentional choice because I was, of course, a good kid. But then, I became a god. Initially, I chose to be the Cow, a generally benevolent creature that’s somewhat of an all-rounder. But I got tired of being the good guy: tired of my Cow consistently eating everything when I wasn’t looking. No, I wanted to be something mighty: something with bite. I transitioned into my #TigerEra, embracing the chaos and trading out my brains for pure brawn. Did I have a clue what I was doing? Absolutely not. But God (or Cow) knows I was having fun.

God games, however, have died a death post-Black and White. Despite the pure freedom and strategic depth that they offer, the market feels largely underserved. That’s why Peter Molyneux’s latest project, Masters of Albion, is so exciting: it’s a hybrid of modern RPGs and god games, from the creator of the genre’s seminal titles. It feels like a blast from the past, brought into the modern day. It taps into my nostalgia, and I can’t help but be intrigued.

But Molyneux has come under fire before for overpromising – ahead of the latest gameplay trailer, he tells me that there’s been “a few sleepless nights” following his return to the spotlight. The ideas in Masters of Albion are great, but there’s skepticism around the game itself: in some ways it does sound too good to be true. “I just want to be really honest and forthright with what we’re doing and make sure that I don’t overpromise anything,” he stresses. “That seems to be the golden rule.”

Masters of Albion is undeniably ambitious, however, seemingly uniting several disparate parts and design philosophies into a singular game. There’s the Fable-esque RPG elements, Dungeon Keeper’s possession mechanics, and, of course, the god game strategy of Black and White and Populous. In many ways it’s the perfect swansong: all of Molyneux’s games in one place. And if it works, it’ll be quite the spectacle.

I ask Molyneux how the team has managed to create cohesion between all of these ideas, and if any of the game’s features were inspired by things that simply got missed in his older titles. “Masters of Albion is, at its heart, a god game,” he says. “A god game is all about the freedom to approach the game in whatever way you want. That freedom should be not only the freedom to make moral decisions, but the freedom to play the game how you want to play the game.

“When we went back and looked at some of our old titles – Dungeon Keeper, Black and White, and Fable – we cherry-picked pieces from those games and mixed them together in a new recipe. My analogy is: when you’re cooking, you can take the same ingredients and make a very different dish depending on how you mix those ingredients together. That’s what we’ve done with Masters of Albion.

“There’s quite a bit of Dungeon Keeper in there – there was a possession mechanic in Dungeon Keeper that I really wanted to use again, because I felt that it wasn’t really explored enough. There’s the open-world freedom that we had in Black and White: the ability to go down and look at the minutiae of detail, then interact with it and scale back to this overall god-like you. Then, from Fable, there’s the humor, the world, the lore, and the ability to go out and explore and adventure.”

“Taking all of those seemingly totally disparate parts and mixing them together in a new way was our intention, and it’s one of the reasons the game has taken so long,” he says, but adds: “As you can imagine, mixing those pieces together in a totally new way is a nightmare to develop.”

Returning to Dungeon Crawler’s aforementioned possession feature, he felt like it became a “little bit of a gimmick.” With Masters of Albion, he “really wanted to take it and explore how you can make that a real game mechanic that’s meaningful, and that people would really look forward to, and that’s exactly what we’ve done. It’s the same with Black and White – we had the hand, you could do things with the hand, but there are many more things that you could do with the hand, so we’ve expanded that portion of it.

“It’s a little bit of taking bits from [previous] games that we didn’t explore before, but also taking the familiar,” he says. “What I really hope is that, when people play Masters of Albion, they think ‘I’ve never really played anything like this.’ For me it feels unique: maybe for other people it won’t feel so unique. But while it feels unique, it feels familiar. So if you’re a fan of Fable, you’ve got all that Fable humor: that slight weirdness, but you’re more in control of it.” That, to me, sounds pretty damn good. Those chickens better watch out.

Another familiar mechanic that we can expect to see pop up at some point in Masters of Albion’s lifecycle is a morality system. Personally, Fable’s horn-sprouting, halo-acquiring feature is easily one of my favorite videogame mechanics ever made, which makes its absence from Playground Games’ reboot so disappointing. Morality has been at the core of many of Molyneux’s games – I remember my Cow transforming from your standard, loping farm animal into a hellish, raging bull. I ask if we’ll see a similar system appear in Masters of Albion, and how it’ll manifest.

“The real power of [Fable’s] alignment system wasn’t seeing a bar saying ‘you’re this good, or you’re this evil,'” Molyneux says. “If you put that bar [there], people will play that bar, when what you really want them to do is just play the game; just play who you want to be, you don’t have to be ‘this evil,’ or ‘this good’. So we never really exposed that: we showed it by morphing things the player owned. In the case of Fable, it was the hero. I always thought of Fable as being a big personality test: not a personality test that happens by answering questions, but by how you play. I love [the morality] mechanic, but it’s a very difficult mechanic to get right.

“When it comes to Masters of Albion, we have an alignment system in there, it is monitoring everything you do, from the houses that you build to the way you defeat creatures, to the way you look after your worshippers. It’s never shown as a bar, we will morph things in the game to reflect your alignment – I’m not going to tell you what we morph exactly, because I want that to be a little bit of a surprise.

“I’ll be completely honest here,” he continues. “We are releasing Masters of Albion on April 22. It is going to be early access, and one of the things that we’re going to be doing is refining that alignment system based on what [players] do. This was not possible in Fable, and it’s incredibly exciting for me. In early access [the system] is there, but it’s one that we’re going to continue to improve.”

In passing I bring up Fable’s scar mechanic, one that, again, I absolutely adored. The idea that your character visibly changed with every defeat made them feel like a real human being: your body literally became a living progression chart. “We’ve got similar things in Masters of Albion,” he responds. “If you’re up against archers – again I’m going to be careful about spoilers – you’ll notice that their arrows stick in and stay. You can look like a porcupine at the end of it. I’d love to get that scar system just right so that the hero is a reflection of how well you’ve treated them.

“It’s exciting for me that we’ll get to refine those systems in early access,” he continues, concluding, “But I’m not promising anything, by the way! That’s just our intention.”

Masters of Albion releases in Steam Early Access on Wednesday, April 22. You can wishlist it on Steam right now.

Aside from what Molyneux has teased, that trailer has some interesting little tidbits in it, too: that spire at the end looks familiar; that possessed chicken probably means something (or nothing?). We’ll find out soon enough, but either way, I can’t wait to get my god-like hands on it.