Peter Molyneux is back with yet another new take on the “god game”

If you’re a gamer of a certain age, you probably have fond memories of Peter Molyneux as the mind behind ambitious games like Populous, Dungeon Keeper, and the Fable series. If you’re of a slightly younger age, you probably remember him as the serial overpromiser behind Project Godus and a recent NFT game that somehow attracted $54 million in player pre-investment (it did actually launch in some form last year).
I bring up this history because, after years of keeping his head down, Molyneux made a surprise appearance at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live event. He was there to introduce Masters of Albion, a title that host Geoff Keighley said Molyneux has “secretly been working on for the past three years” and which Molyneux himself describes as “an open-world god game full of combat, choices, mysteries, and story.”

A short early trailer for the game takes us back to Fable‘s “familiar vast world of Albion, packed with stories, quests, treasures, and monsters.” There, the residents of the town of Oakridge have to work to gather and process resources by day and then defend themselves from hordes of creatures by night.

You get to help those citizens out as the kind of disembodied god hand that will be extremely familiar to players of the Black & White games from decades past. That hand can help direct resources, design new buildings like Lego bricks, or cheekily drop villagers from high in the sky.

Players will also be able to leave god mode and possess characters like the “Town Hero,” who in the trailer engages in some extremely generic melee combat with some exceedingly generic-looking zombies. If your hero gets overwhelmed, don’t worry, you can just switch back to your god hand and unleash some powerful lightning and fireball attacks.

Do what you want

The trailer talks up the deep levels of micromanaging customization you can engage with, down to designing the residents’ food, clothes, weapons, and armor. “You can be as silly as you want,” Molyneux intones as the trailer shows a sword made of a loaf of bread (which “doesn’t cut it”) and well after a scene where he force-feeds rats to the town’s citizenry (who react with Sims-like over-emotion).

Following some controversial funding issues for recent games, Molyneux is self-funding the development of Masters of Albion, leading a team of 20 that includes Bullfrog/Lionhead veterans like Mark Healey, Russell Shaw, and Iain Wright. “I think my first realization was I had to get the old team back together again,” Molyneux said of the developers he’s gathered to “make something new, unique, and different.”

You can already wishlist Masters of Albion on a fresh Steam page that goes on to promise “a world full of quests and moral choice” as you “unravel the mystery of the mages, defeat the enemy that lurks in the night and conquer a sorcery that could kill us all.” You’ll forgive us for waiting until the game is released to see if it lives up to that promise.

Listing image by 22cans