During last night’s Gamescom Opening Night Live, veteran developer Peter Molyneux took to the stage to properly reveal his latest project, a god game called Masters of Albion. While there was plenty about it that’s designed to remind people of classic Fable, it seems the game also bears some similarities to Molyneux’s ill-fated blockchain game, Legacy.
For a bit of context, Legacy was announced back in 2021 by Molyneux and his company 22cans, with the pitch being that it was a blockchain-based business sim in which players would buy NFT ‘plots’ of land using cryptocurrency, as, to paraphrase Grandpa Simpson, was a bit of a style at the time. The game was released late last year, and is still a live thing, even if the NFT bubble it was designed to captilise on fell flat.
Enter Masters of Albion last night, which, while it currently seems free of any actual blockchain or web3 mechanics based on what was shown, does look to intergrate some similarsystems and mechanics to Legacy in terms of what you do during the day.
In this part of MoA, Molnueux said in the reveal, “you’re tasked with building the town up, gaining resources, and earning money.” Legacy’s description, meanwhile, states it tasks players to: “design and manufacture your own products, sell and trade on the market and maximise your profits”.
If you look at the product creation bit of Legacy and then the way you “design and manufacture products” in Masters of Albion – this is the bit that lets you feed people rats and create bread swords – there’s a similar system/UI in place facilitated by a circular pedestal surrounded by stuff to add. Both games share a focus on managing workers as they create goods from a top-down perspective that involves a lot of mouse-click dragging and dropping via a pointer that you can unlock upgrades/powers for as you play.
The buildings you put up look to be split into similar single floor segments that suit being stacked on top of each other to create, via an “innovative block system”. The bits of paper used to indicate how orders of resources are progressing in Masters of Albion also look to be doing the same job as the signs indicating resource creation progress in Legacy.
With all of that said, in the event these elements do draw inspiration from Legacy, there’d be nothing wrong with that on the surface level, as reworking established building blocks is something that features in a lot of games pretty regularly, especially in situations when it makes sense to save time and resources during the development process.
Plus, Masters of Albion’s ability to let you take direct control of a character in order to smash some undead and explore the open-world a bit does look like it’ll aid in helping the Fable-esque medieval art style and narrative elements set it apart from the cartoony capitalism that drives Legacy’s gameplay.
Masters of Albion will be coming out for PC and console, with Molyneux working alongside Fable vets like Russell Shaw, Iain Wright, and Mark Healey on the self-funded project.
