Albion Online
Sandbox Interactive
Albion Online is a sandbox MMORPG set in an open medieval fantasy world featuring a player-driven economy where nearly every item is player-crafted. Explore the world, take on other adventurers in thrilling battles, conquer territories and build a home. Craft, trade, conquer and dive into a fantasy world where everybody counts.
Albion Online is a free-to-play MMORPG that first released in 2017 and since then, has gained over 5 million registered users and has been translated into 11 languages with no signs of losing popularity. Instead of using a set class system on character creation, Albion Online assigns class to equipment so players can change class as much as they want but, they do need to level up each class regardless. It’s a simple system and one of the many reasons why players keep coming back.
Albion Online is set in a medieval fantasy world where there is a strong lore background with ancient wars that split the world into factions and ending with Albion being hidden by mist. When the mist finally lifted, brave explorers began returning to the lost world. While there is lore, Albion has no set story, with the “story” being defined by the players themselves. It doesn’t have a traditional linear questline with the quests focusing on individual player progress, economy, and conquest.
This is a very player-focused MMORPG with a player-driven economy where almost every item has been crafted by players.
Being a sandbox MMO, Albion Online places emphasis on gameplay. However, this MMORPG doesn’t have traditional levels or classes and allows players to skill up specific pieces of gear, which allows players to change between playstyles whenever they wish. All the skills, abilities and passive abilities come from the gear with lower tiers not offering much choice, but higher tier gear will often have 2-4 choices per slot. Albion Online offers a lot of flexibility with customisation.
Pros
Not pay-to-win
Very player-driven world
Crafting and gathering is very lucrative
Emphasis on PvP but has PvE too
Mobile full cross-platform access
Cons
Balancing issues
Lots of grinding
Levelling the gear does take a lot of time and grinding; the skills are tracked with the Destiny Board and general progress as a hero. The progression system is based around Fame, which can be earned by completing different actions, such as defeating a bandit. Each action will give Fame for the weapon, armour and items used. This system also works for crafting and gathering materials, but it’s very specific with experience for crafting specific items. It’s a simple system, but the Destiny Board isn’t very user-friendly and can get quite confusing to manage later in the game.
Combat is typical for MMORPGs with a basic auto-attack and a hotbar for skills that have cool downs. Skills have different activation times and can only be used once the bar is full. Players can move during combat to dodge attacks or try to interrupt an attack, but some enemy attacks cannot be interrupted and will have a different colour outline to show this.
PvP is popular with multiple zone types; yellow and red zones need players to flag themselves as PvP before being allowed to attack other players. Death in the yellow zone is a knock-out, where the downed player will drop some silver, which is the non-premium currency; meanwhile, the red zone is death, and the victor gets to fully loot the corpse. Black zones are the highest tier and are the lands that guilds fight over, with some areas having powerful bonuses.
There is a lot to explore and do in Albion Online. Thankfully, this is not a very pay-to-win title in regard to premium currency. Gold is the premium currency, and it can be used to purchase “premium” time for a character, which offers some benefits such as more Fame, higher gathering yields, more loot from mobs and a reduced market tax when selling items to a shop. The game is playable without paying for this; however, it does take a lot longer to level up gear, and it does feel like a grind. I have over 1,000 hours of live stream gameplay and despite the grind I’ve really loved playing.
The most recent event in Albion Online was their Crucible II event, where we joined over 100 content creators taking part to earn points in different ways. Each creator formed a guild that their fans could also join and help them by completing different missions for PvE and PvP. It’s a friendly competition to keep players engaged and the community active with some harmless fun and some nice rewards. We joined with our Egg Cult guild and although we had a tough battle the winner, Zizaran beat us to successfully defend his title and claim his a real-life Kingmaker sword!
The Crucible II event was brilliant we had a lot of fun and although we lost we still had a mass of Albion in-game items to hand out to the community from Twitch and Albion themselves!
Overall Game Rating
