Early Access is often a troubling proposition. Is the game ready for the public, or are the public just glorified beta testers? That’s where we come in. Welcome to the Early Access Report, where Player 2’s writers tackle an early access title to determine if it is worth your time now, or if it’s something you should keep an eye on in the future.
The Early Access Report - Masters of Albion
Key Information
The Game: Masters of Albion
The Pitch: Peter Molyneux is back, returning to the god sim genre that made him famous all those years ago.
A bold reimagining of the God Game genre from the creator who defined it. Shape a living world as a god – or step into it and experience it through your people. Build, guide and defend your town by day, then survive the night when everything is under threat. There is no single solution. Only yours.
The Developer: 22 Cans
Peter Molyneux is back at it, once again taking another swing at the ‘God Game’ genre he holds near and dear to his heart. Masters of Albion seems to take a bit of DNA from some of his biggest hits, combining the all-powerful ‘Hand of God’ from Black and White with the humour, 3rd person action and odd bit of chicken kicking of the Fable series. Recently launching into early access, I took control of the ‘Hand of God’ to see if the job was all it was cracked up to be.
To be honest, I expected more smiting and less sandwich making.
MoA places you as the giant hand that guides the lives of the people, choosing what to build, where to build it and who works there. What seems like pretty standard sim management fare quickly escalates as it seems the residents of Albion need you to decide every little thing for them, at least when it comes to the economy. The first half of the main gameplay loop consists of the daylight hours, where your subjects will harvest resources and produce goods in your factory to fulfil requests from other parts of Albion. This may include crafting 35 ‘basic’ sandwiches or even a baker’s dozen of pies filled with dead rat (seriously). Each order has a hint to guide you and a required quality level (e.g. number of ingredients/quality of ingredients), and it is up to you to figure out how to get the best rating. Better ratings equal more points, which equal better profits/recipes/ingredients, etc.
You have to do this for every single order. I can deal with this design mini-game as a new type of order comes in, or if I want to refine a recipe for more points, but MoA makes you do this for pretty much every single order your little town receives. The one quality of life inclusion is that you can remake the last design you created, which is really only useful when equipping multiple heroes with the same weapons and armour.
The weapons and armour do come in handy for the second half of the gameplay loop, as every night your town will be besieged by zombies and other creatures, each trying to make their way to your crypt and take your giant hand out of action. This is where you can choose to take control of one of your town’s heroes and duke it out with enemies in third person, or make use of your powers to unleash some divine magic or hurl boulders and explosive barrels at the invading hordes. When playing through, I found that despite preferring to take the fight to the enemy up close and personal, there were just too many enemies attacking different points for it to be a viable strategy. Fortunately, should you fail to protect yourself, time resets back to the beginning of the previous day to allow you to develop your weapons and defences.
Despite showing the passage of time on screen, it never goes past midday, allowing you as much time as you need to prepare for the nightly horde. Indeed, once you have unlocked the water purifier that regenerates resources, you can produce goods ad infinitum, allowing access to better defences and magics. I will concede, due to a bug, my game has been stuck on Day 12, and it may still be classified as part of the tutorial, and that’s why time freezes, but it still allows for massive exploitation.
And here is the crux of the matter. Is the core gameplay solid enough to keep players wanting to grind out the resources to withstand the nightly horde by being the ultimate micro-manager? Sure, you can take control of anyone and wander around the world with them, but if you do not tell your factories what to make and how to make it, nothing gets done, and you have no funds to play with. It is very much the sort of balance issue that’s perfect for addressing during the Early Access phase.
The great thing about Early Access games is that they give developers a chance to show their product to the public with the understanding that it is still a work in progress. Not only does it allow them to get feedback while they are still developing, but it also helps to fund the continued development and refinement of the experience. Many games successfully use the Early Access model to develop their game. Is Masters of Albion one of them? While nothing is certain, it definitely faces an uphill battle if what I have seen so far is anything to go by.
The biggest problem Masters of Albion will face is the lack of trust in Peter Molyneux, and by extension, developer 22cans. These are the same people who utilised Kickstarter to fund the development of Godus, with a slew of features and stretch goals promised, who then pivoted to focus on a micro-transaction-filled mobile game and, by all accounts, gave up on the original vision, either because it was too expensive or because Molyneaux kept changing his mind, depending on who you ask. So maybe it is best to wait on this one.
Masters of Albion was covered on the PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
