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Masters of Albion's 'New Beginnings' update launches today, and it overhauls and upgrades many of the original early access release's systems. The above video gives an overview of what's new.
I bought Masters of Albion when it launched in April. But after scoping out what's new in this update, I feel the moment that I and, no doubt, many other PC gamers have been waiting for has arrived: it's the moment when Peter Molyneux's final title has properly started to take form and genuinely recapture the god game magic of old.
Here is what's new in Masters of Albion, with commentary from Peter Molyneux on each new feature. This is followed by my personal take on the New Beginnings update.
Engine performance just doubled
"You know, my hope was to get to 30 frames a second for everybody for the recommended system [specs]. But we now sit at between 60 and 80 frames [on average]. That's a huge jump. You know, if [the framerate] drops below 30, it feels awful. If it's over 60, it just feels super slick and smooth. When we release, that will be felt by everyone."
Nighttime gameplay is overhauled
"The whole premise was you build your settlements up, and you have more than one of them, and then at night things attack those settlements. If you succeeded, you moved the next day. If you failed, you stayed on the current day, and that was OK. That was fine, but it didn't get to the edge-of-the-seat gameplay which we were really after.
Yes, we could have introduced more creatures and more monsters and more different attack patterns. But the fundamental problem was people's emotions when they face nighttime were, 'I've just got to get through this.' And that's not what we wanted. So the the answer was to introduce these things called buffs, and what buffs do is they increase your power as a god as you're playing the game. How you acquire those buffs is by winning a nighttime battle effectively and efficiently and strategically. So the better that you do, the higher score you get, and you spend that score on those nighttime buffs. We've [now] got something like 200 different buffs, which you can unlock."
There's a brand new, card-based Arcadium
"[Before New Beginnings] we had in the game something called an Arcadium, and that was like a tech tree. You [would] spend in-game currencies on that tech tree, but it was like a spider's web of stuff, and there wasn't really the feeling that we wanted, it wasn't visual enough, and it wasn't compatible with the nighttime buff cards. So we completely re-authored this Arcadium, and now it's these cards you use your in-game currency to unlock. For example, the lightning bolt card, you unlock that, and you can now cast lightning bolts. But each of these cards can be buffed by the nighttime gameplay, [linking day and night together]."
Product orders now are narrative lead
"How do you earn currencies to acquire the cards in the Arcadium? You do that by designing orders on the design table, but there was a really clear direction from the community and indeed from the press. It's very boring and tedious just making the same thing over and over again. And the design table wasn't feeling visceral. So we went back, redesigned the whole sort of visual metaphor of what the design table was, and realized that there isn't an emotional connection to the orders. So we added a whole narrative to each one of the orders. It's more of an emotional engagement."
The design table has been reworked
"[Following the implementation of the new product order narratives], we needed a way to hint at what an order giver wanted. We [thought we] could hint at what the order giver wanted, so we introduced the notion of a tip. If you complete an order and you guess or solve the puzzle of what a hint on the order is, then you get a tip. Suddenly orders now are something that you don't just do to get away with. They're something which you're far more likely to engage with."
The Orkenstone now warps the landscape
"To make nighttime more exciting we have this premise: every single night, the power of the Orkenstone increases, and the corruption over the land increases. So you see this purple corruption spread out every night. It gets bigger. Anything it touches will wither. So trees will wither, crops will wither. It can't be held back by walls or defenses, it will just spread. But there is a decoration that you can place that will push that back."
The god hand has been upgraded
"We've really looked at what the hand does in the world, what it can interact with, and that started with community feedback. As you move your hand through the wheat or through the trees, they will react. You should be able to pick up the wheat. You should be able to interact with everything, every single object in the world. You should be able to pick up trees and move them.
We've got this thing called a dunking stall, where you can tap on it and the dunking stall goes down, or you can pick up a character and put them in the dunking stall and dunk them. If you want to be particularly evil, you can dunk them until they die. We've got things like a bench where you can pick up one character, put them on the bench, and then you pick up another character, put them on the bench, and they'll chat. And if you keep on doing that, they'll eventually fall in love. So we've got this whole host of hand interactions."
Masters of Albion's start has been enhanced
"We really wanted to remaster the start of the game, so we've re-authored this at the very start of the game, and it's completely changed [to be bigger and better]."
Mysterious new colossal structures now exist
"If you look at a certain location in the world, there is a clue to it. It's a hidden thing."
My take on New Beginnings
Speaking candidly, before the New Beginnings update I struggled to recommend Masters of Albion to most PC gamers. And this was because, at launch, I felt the game was lightweight, even for an early access game. It had plenty of god game systems, sure, such as building and settlement construction, product manufacturing, and combat (strategic and action), and yes, there was the famous god hand of old to wield, but much like the game's rudimentary opening, the well of what you could actually do with those systems soon ran dry.
Be that the repetitive nature of product manufacturing, the eventual grind of nighttime, or the limited way in which you could impact the world with your god hand, what you could do made you recall Molyneux's great games of old, such as Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, and Fable, but you were left wanting more, as the systems were not as complex, fleshed out, or varied.
Molyneux has since described the original release of Masters of Albion as an 'initial sketch' of a game, and in many respects that is to be expected from the very first version of an early access game, but when you're trying to combine multiple parts of other genres together for your game, individual genres that in single-genre releases tend to flesh out their core loop at the earliest moment as it is all they deliver, rather than just a facet of what they deliver, it feels a harder sell to convince gamers to get invested when your game's systems start off in a more unfinished state.
To me, this ability to combine multiple genres together has always been where Molyneux has been at his creative, magical best, delivering unique experiences not offered elsewhere. But combining genres also poses its own problems, with the two most pressing being the depth of the systems and how they interact. You need the systems, such as city building and RTS combat, to be good enough to stand on their own and combine into something new, as otherwise the draw for gamers to just go play the single-genre game that does, say, RTS combat better will be too strong. Molyneux hit this problem in Black & White 2.
The good news is that the updates that New Beginnings bring all seem to directly address these two fundamental aspects in both fleshing out the bare-bones original early access release, or overhauling its core systems for the better, while adding extra interactivity and strategic weight. And I genuinely think those changes shift the game up to a whole new level. Suddenly Masters of Albion feels like a proper PC release and, while far from finished, is now in an early access state where I feel I can recommend it to god game fans, as well as PC gamers interested in getting a taste of this old-school PC gaming genre.
The game's engine optimisation is also a huge deal. This was my number one criticism from playing the game at launch. Despite having a powerful gaming PC, I struggled to hit 30 fps at times, despite the game not being a AAA graphical powerhouse. A much higher fps is going to make a big difference.
Finally, what I consider to be the really tantalising addition in this update, though, is the appearance of these mysterious colossal structures that dominate the skyline—especially because they are called out in the New Beginnings press release, which asks if they are "a link to the past or a foreshadowing of the future?" This, along with Molyneux's cryptic commentary above, indicates that Masters of Albion could very well be heading towards introducing Black & White-style giant avatars in a future update. If these are added, and we continue to see this level of acting on community feedback to refine and upgrade in-game systems, maybe Masters of Albion really will evolve into the ultimate god game. And that would be a fitting swansong for the man who created the genre.
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