Gamescom 2024: Masters Of Albion Revealed By Peter Molyneux
Peter Molyneux appeared at Gamescom 2024’s Opening Night Live to reveal Masters of Albion, a project he’s been quietly working on for the last six years with a small team.
“After messing around on mobile — what the hell was I doing? — I thought to myself, ‘I need to come home to PC and console,” Molyneux explained.
Not only is he returning to consoles, but he’s also enlisted some veteran collaborators among the 20-person team behind Masters of Albion. Molyneux specifically mentioned Mark Healy, Russell Shaw, and Iain Wright, who worked with him on classics like Fable, Black & White, and Dungeon Keeper.
Monsters of Albion tasks players with building up a settlement called Oakridge. During the day, players will gather resources, earn money, and building the town up; during the night, they must defend it from monsters. In the process, players can design anything from the town’s buildings to the clothing and diets of the villagers, using a “god mode” hand.
“There is a strategy behind every creation,” Molyneux teased.
God mode isn’t the only way to play Masters of Albion. Characters can be “possessed,” changing the perspective to third-person so the monsters can be fought on the spot. Should that prove overwhelming, players can return to god mode and drop some divine fury.
From this brief overview, Masters of Albion seems to have the usual Molyneux humour and character. Through the design process, it’s possible to make swords out of bread, for example, while at one point, the god mode cursor picks up a random, hapless villager and drops them out of the sky for a laugh. There’s a little bit of everything from (the better part of) his corpus on display, right down to the god mode of Godus.
Time will tell where this new project leads, but for now, Molyneux is writing some modest cheques for Masters of Albion, which should prove easier to cash than some of the other projects he’s overhyped over the years. (And no, this does not immediately appear to be connected to the Fable games, which previously took place in a setting of the same name.)
Masters of Albion is available to wishlist on Steam now; a console version is also in development, with no release window named just yet.