Peter Molyneux has been working on the game, which he self funded, for around three years with a team of 20 people at his studio, 22cans, and it’s finally been revealed. The renowned game veteran appeared at Gamescom Opening Night Live on Tuesday to reveal his next game Masters of Albion. It’s also available to wishlist on Steam.
“After messing around on mobile — what the hell was I thinking? — I thought to myself, ‘I need to come home. I need to come home to PC and console,” Molyneux said on the Gamescom stage.
Molyneux has been working on the game “in secret,” according to Gamescom host Geoff Keighley, but the developer has dropped hints in the past. In 2023, he was cagey in an interview with Gamereactor, but revealed the then unannounced title would feature a mechanic “that has never been seen in a game before” and would come back to PC and console.
According to the first look, there’s a lot of granular customization in how you go about playing. You can decide, for example, how to feed your townsfolk down to what ingredients you put on sandwiches. You’ll mostly play in God Mode, with the cursor taking the form of a giant hand that can click around and pick up villagers. If you want, you can click on a character to play in third-person mode. This might come in handy during combat, where you can fight monsters as a warrior or become god again for more powerful, supernatural attacks.
While it wasn’t exactly stated here, Molyneux previously teased that the game, which had the codename MOAT, would take place in the same Albion as the one in the Fable series.
Molyneux has been behind many classic games, including Fable, but he’s arguably best known for his influence on god games like Populous, which put players in a top-down view as a godlike figure who has massive influence and power over the game world and the events.
However, over the past decade, Molyneux has become known for making game development promises that haven’t help up. He’s previously admitted to lying to press and getting too enthusiastic about features he makes up, a move he regrets. His last announced project was Legacy, an NFT-packed “blockchain business sim.”
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.