Re: Albion Online: MMORPG we are playing

[Phil Rodrigues]

Hello friends,

The beta for Albion Online ends in early July and the official release is mid-July. I encourage anyone interested to spend $30 to try it now, it buys you more in beta than it will later and you get everything back at release. We have collectively put over 100 hours into the game.

Matt, Karl, Greg and I are playing Albion Online together and having fun.

Matt has played over 20 hours and said "This game reminds me of Guild Wars where you have a limited current set of skills (ie: 5 buttons instead of 100 WoW buttons), but is a sandbox game with no quest givers rather than a theme-park game with quest givers."

Karl has played almost as long and said "Excellent fun. I am enjoying the crafty-buildy side of it a lot. Simple enough recipes, but with complexity through skill development. And there's whole craft aspects we haven't touched. I think I can play this game for a while."

I have played for 52 hours over the last 28 days. What do I do when I play?

By myself:

We have a network of personal islands that contain our farms, an animal pasture, some basic resource processing buildings like a smelter for ore and a lumberyard for wood, a saddlery to turn the horses we raise into mounts, and a chest to share equipment between us.

I plant crops, water them, wait 24 hours for them to mature so I can harvest them. We either sell the raw materials on the auction house or turn them into food for our laborers. Selling the produce from the farm plots gives me a steady income, which is used to improve equipment as I level or replace equipment as I die in full PvP zones.

In PvE combat versus computer controlled monsters I experiment with different equipment sets, which give my character different skills. For example, do I want to wear a leather armor chest so I can vanish for a few seconds, or would I prefer the better defense of a plate armor chest but maybe paired with cloth shoes that allow me to teleport a short distance away?

I take my horse and ride a few zones away, from the swamps where we are based to the snowy mountains, and harvest ore and stone. We use these materials to turn into metal bars for crafting weapons and armor, or to create or maintain our the buildings on our personal islands.

In a small group:

Enter above-world dungeon zones where we fight small groups of monsters like skeletons or mercenaries. This allows us to experiment with different equipment sets and team compositions, and brings in fame (ie XP) which allows us to use better equipment over time. The monsters drop rare crafting components that we can use to turn special materials into special items.

Turn on our "player killer" flags in the basic PvP zone and hunt down gatherers, attacking any we see. We often run into other groups that trigger larger fights. For example yesterday the 3-4 of us dropped two other players, and lost to two larger groups of players. When we lose a fight in the basic PvP zone our equipment is damaged but not lost, the penalty is the price of repair (about 10% of my daily farm income per loss) and the few minutes of downtime while you lay unconscious on the ground.

In larger groups:

Descend into large elite dungeons that are in contested PvP zones. Focus on tough mobs that take 5-10 people to fight effectively, warily eying other groups that occasionally will attack when you are weak. I have died this way when we pulled too many mobs and two of us went down, and while the rest of the team retreated some other players flagged up, killed us while we lay unconscious, and took our stuff.

I have guarded an escort caravan as the guild I am in was moving supplies to set up buildings in a new city. It took a few trips while the officers rode fully loaded oxen while the rest of us were on horse, ready to defend. We hauled 50,000 items over the hour that were worth at least US$100 (at current exchange rate of 250 silver per gold and 2 gold per US cent). If any other player or group killed those oxen while we were hauling the supplies then they could have taken those items for themselves.

Surveyed for the rarest ores in full PvP zones alongside the best gatherer on the server. Ore locations are randomly set each day, and at the start of each day he takes a small team out to map the new resource locations. Once a few zones are mapped, then the dedicated gatherers set out and work for hours to mine the ore to bring back for the crafters to turn into top tier equipment. There are only 10 of these top tier ore nodes in the whole world and they are hotly contested. While surveying I was nervously dodging small "gank" groups from non-allied guilds. We often send runners out to try and draw the enemy's attention away from the gatherers - I was the junior person so I was the bait!

We also form into small teams and scour the gathering zones, killing any non-allied gatherers we find. When they die they lose all of their stuff including their expensive dedicated gathering equipment and any materials they had in their inventory. The gatherers are sheep and we are wolves, so the risk of dying is low, but when we meet other enemy player wolf-packs then intense battles break out since neither side wants to fall and lose all of their equipment.

In summary, I enjoy the link between gathering in the open world, crafting items that are used to define your character's skills, selling and buying materials and items in the totally player-driven economy, and forming up into groups to hunt for and kill other players.

The gathering creates the equipment which is risked in the fights that deny other players access to gather. The circle of MMO life. :-)

Join us!

Phil