Peter Molyneux feels like a man who can never die. He’s just sort of always been there, and seems like he always will be, making some kind of game where you can hypothetically do what you want, never quite living up to expectations. But hey, he’s Peter Molyneux, what else would you expect? The complicated icon is still ticking away at his latest, Masters of Albion, but in a recent interview, he spoke of one of his old classics, Black & White, and the idea of a third entry in the series (and the fact that there might be something newish on the way).
Asked whether there’s any chance of anything new related to the series by PC Gamer, Molyneux had this to say: “Why has it taken 27 years to do that? It’s such a difficult, difficult, challenging title to develop. It really is. I mean, there were so many systems in there which just were inventions, first-time inventions. You’ve got to remember there was no middleware [back then], so [mastering those systems] is the first big challenge, and this is a challenge with Masters of Albion, too. The player can look and be anywhere in the world at any time, and the traditional ways of doing optimizations on a game is knowing that the player is only in this space, and that means the rest of the world can just be forgotten.”
Unsurprisingly, the difficulty of making one now isn’t really even about those technical challenges, but about who owns the rights. “That genre, that slice of the pie, is withering all the time. So, you know, getting a big developer like EA who owns the rights to Black & White 3, and Microsoft who own rights to Black & White 4, getting them to say, right, we won’t do one of these big wedge games, [and instead] we’ll do four other games [from smaller wedge genres, is really tough].”
This obviously generally makes it sound like there isn’t anything on the way, which again isn’t surprising given that Molyneux wouldn’t be involved in making it. His studio 22cans doesn’t own the rights, and he’s busy with Masters of Albion (which just recently got in a bit of trouble for holding a closed beta when it’s already an early access release). However! All is not lost for you god game lovers out there, as Molyneux also said that he thinks “there are people working on a Black & White remaster. But it would be inappropriate for me to talk about it.”
I mean you sort of just did, Peter, but I suppose if I’m to be fair to you, you mean talk about it in any great detail. In any case, there you have it. No Black & White 3, but potentially a Black & White remaster.