Masters of Albion is not only Peter Molyneux’s final game (so he says, anyway), it’s also a sort of getting-the-band-back-together moment with collaborators from the early days at Lionhead. All of which is apparently rather nerve-wracking: In an interview with The Game Business, Molyneux describes the team as “incredibly inexperienced,” and warned that there will likely be some big bumps in the road “because we are going into a world we don’t fully understand.”
He’s not talking about the process of making games, something the four collaborators in the interview—Mark Healey, Russell Shaw, Iain Wright, and Kareem Ettouney—are all very familiar with, having worked with Molyneux on games including Magic Carpet, Syndicate, Black and White, and Fable. The business side of things is a different matter, however. 22Cans is self-publishing Masters of Albion and so matters that are normally handled by a publisher, like PR and marketing, falls to Molyneux and co. instead.
“We are incredibly inexperienced,” Molyneux said. “I am petrified, because we are going into a world we don’t fully understand. We’ve been lucky that there are lots of outside people that are coming in and helping us, but I’m sure we are going to make some horrendous mistakes. But… if this is going to be the last game, why not give it a try?”
Masters of Albion is going to be an early access game: It “has so many systems, we need to refine and balance and tweak those,” Molyneux said, and much of that will be determined by what players are doing with the game. But that also opens the door to more potential headaches arising from unmet expectations and decisions that just don’t fly with players, which is where experienced and effective community management and public relations can really make a difference. But not having that can be interesting, too.
“We’re going to make some horrendous mistakes. Horrendous, horrendous mistakes,” Molynex said. “Almost everybody here, we have hired them for their passion, including the community team. They haven’t got any experience because, for me, passion trumps experience every time. And they truly care. We’re just setting up a Discord server now. How the hell does that work? I don’t really understand it. But making the mistakes and correcting them quickly is the important part.”
‘We’re going to make such a mess of this’ is an interesting approach to pre-release PR, but managing expectations is in some ways a new tack for Molyneux, who has earned a reputation over the years as, in the words of PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens, the “emperor of overpromising.” He’s explicitly stated that he wants to avoid that approach with Masters of Albion, but it’s been something of a mixed record so far: Citing past classics like Dungeon Keeper, Black and White, and Fable in 2025, he said, “it really feels [like] the magic is back,” and in January he described the game as “the culmination of my life’s work.” That may not be quite up there with the worst of Curiosity’s excesses, but it’s certainly setting the bar high.
Whether it can reach that bar is a big question. I hope it does, but senior editor Rich Stanton has doubts: Following the release of a deep-dive gameplay trailer last week, Rich said “Masters of Albion looks like three games in one, but it also looks like none of them is any good.” Ouch. We’ll get a proper look at it in a couple months: Masters of Albion is set to launch into early access on Steam on April 22.
