Peter Molyneux, the mind behind the original Fable games and Black and White, is back. And the crowd goes mild.
As announced at Gamescom yesterday, Molyneux and his developer 22cans are back with their new game Masters of Albion after their long stint developing mobile games.
22cans are best known for their work on both Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube? and Godus, the former of which served as a sort of social experiment (by which I mean advertisement) for the latter.
If you take a look at their Steam page, you’ll notice that Godus is no longer available on Steam even though it did see release on the marketplace.
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This is because the developer announced some time ago that they could no longer support the development of the ongoing title, so they opted to simply remove it from the Steam store for… some reason.
Fans of Molyneux’s most popular game, Fable, might notice that Masters of Albion’s title shares something in common. Albion is the same name of the land that the Fable games are set in, which might make you think that the games are set in the same universe. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
As Molyneux explained in his interview with IGN, the two locations simply share a name and aren’t interconnected in any way.
Or, as he explains it: “Albion is like saying if you set a game in America, you can't set any other game in America… so Albion can't be copyrighted. It's the name for England and Wales and that's how we get away with it.”
Tying this together with the obvious gameplay similarities between Masters of Albion and Black and White, it seems a little bit like Molyneux is essentially giving Microsoft the middle finger here, as they now own the rights to both Black and White and Fable following their acquisition of Lionhead Studios - the studio that Molyneux founded.