22cans creative director Peter Molyneux’s Masters of Albion rebuilds itself from the ground up halfway to full release

Few designers have promised as much, or been held to their promises as fiercely, as Peter Molyneux. The British designer helped invent the god game with Populous, gave the genre a hand to touch its world with in Black & White at Lionhead Studios, and has since been measured against the ambitions he announced for Fable and Godus, the crowdfunded god game that left many of its backers disappointed. Masters of Albion, which he has called the culmination of his life’s work, is his return to the genre he defined. Its newest update is notable less for what it adds than for what it admits: the foundations needed rebuilding.

New Beginnings is a major update that 22cans, the independent studio in Guildford that Molyneux founded and leads as creative director, presents as the midway point between Early Access and full release. The most consequential work is invisible. The studio has moved the game from Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline to the Universal Render Pipeline, a switch that meant rebuilding or converting almost every asset in the game. In internal testing, the studio says, the change has delivered up to double the frame rate, a gain it treats as a floor, not a finish line.

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The visible changes follow one idea: give the god a reason to stay through the night. The Orkenstone, the game’s ancient antagonist, now spreads a poisonous corruption that visibly warps the landscape of Albion. Product orders, the commissions townsfolk place for goods built at the Design Table, are now narrative-led and objective-based, threading small stories about customers through the economy. The Design Table itself gives real-time feedback on every block, paint and part the player adds. Night Fights, the phase in which the town must survive after dark, gain their own challenges, and conquering them pays out in Reward Cards: buffs, boosters, rare parts and new powers for the God Hand. The Arcadium has been completely overhauled into what the studio calls a card collector’s paradise.

For a Molyneux game, the most telling change concerns the hand. The God Hand, the cursor-as-deity that has been his signature since Black & White, becomes a solid, physical presence in the world, something that can prod, waft and caress the land instead of hovering above it. Colossal new structures also rise on the skyline, left deliberately unexplained.

In the announcement, Molyneux describes New Beginnings as the foundation the studio wants to keep building on, shaped by player feedback and by a team willing to rebuild major parts of the game. 22cans, which publishes its own work, says feedback from the early versions and data from a closed beta guided the last six months of development, and that its focus now shifts to delivering content consistently on the road to full release.

Masters of Albion has been available in Early Access on Steam for PC since April 22, 2026. New Beginnings went live on October 1 and coincides with the Steam Autumn Sale, where the game is discounted by 20 percent. The announcement does not give a date for the full release.

Molyneux has spent a career describing worlds before they existed. This time his studio is tearing down and rebuilding one that already does, in public, with its players watching.

Tags: 22cans, god games, Lionhead Studios, Masters of Albion, Peter Molyneux, video game updates

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