Legendary game designer Peter Molyneux’s latest – Masters of Albion – isn’t off to a stellar launch. While a city-building god game amassing over 300 Steam reviews in a couple of days is a decent go for a relatively small team, said reviews landing at ‘mixed’ can threaten to make it a bit of a hard sell going forward.
Still, the team at 22cans seems primed to attempt a turnaround. Lucky for them, the criticism leveled at Masters of Albion so far has been surprisingly tame, with someone 42 hours into a game that released 72 hours ago simply saying, “not all that great in the optimization department, but not horrible.” It’s the little things.
At the end of its first day, the team at 22cans put out a blog. The “what we’re hearing” launch day introspective outlined things like performance and stability, and the likely minor future request of inverted mouse controls after thrusting your divine fist into a fella (or dog) to possess them. You heard me.
There’s also the problem of what is probably a common issue in this kind of open-ended game -being able to place a key structure long before it becomes an objective, effectively soft-locking progress when the game doesn’t dare to look for what might already be there. D’oh.
Fast-forward a few days, and Friday saw the team put out another message – “48 Hours In”. Filled with genuine thanks for players’ early support and their constructive feedback, the 22cans team has called the response “a real boost of motivation,” which is a million times better than the usual accusations of “braindead” and “lazy” devs I’ve been conditioned to expect when looking at any user reviews for something sitting shy of an overwhelmingly positive’ aggregate.
According to our own Lauren, he’s definitely on the right track with Masters of Albion, with the game bringing the “joy” Molyneux repeatedly expressed in our interview as the one thing he wants his work to bring to someone. Anyone. Enough to keep the lights on, presumably. With the team “excited to continue the work next week” – suggesting they’re doing right by taking this rare sunny UK weekend off – it’s refreshing to see the post-launch pint talk start with gratitude rather than a profound apology.
I say all this from a genuine area of intrigue. While Molyneux has certainly put out some stinkers in the past (and left Godus unceremoniously abandoned), the man is the mind behind Black & White 2. Oh, and Fable. Have you heard of Fable? Theme Park? With Masters of Albion being a modern take on the strategy genre that put him on the map, I can’t help but be strangely optimistic toward his next attempt to bottle up some more of that god game magic. If that means waiting for a couple of bugs to be squashed, then so be it.
Masters of Albion is available in early access through Steam for $24.99. It’s also 10% off for its first week, bringing it to $22.49 / £20.24. For that price, it looks like a solid attempt at the late-90s medieval city builder, and one that I’m still very much looking forward to finding the time to play.
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