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[Preview] Albion Online: We Came. We Claimed. We Conquered
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
We came. We claimed. We conquered. Albion Online is a Free-to-Play game in its alpha-testing stage which offers a cross-platform sandbox MMO on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. Think of it as a living world with no NPC vendors, no questlines and no NPCs to report to. Instead you, your guild and your friends decide who owns what: it is an entirely player-driven economy with full-loot hardcore PvP.
Read more of Alexander Brown's Albion Online: We Came. We Claimed. We Conquered.
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Comments
we came We claimed We conquered We failed We ragequited
^This
l2p
this is nothing like UO, The name UO gets abused in pr ofthen when speaking of topdown view games.
Waiting for:
The Repopulation
Albion Online
i would love an alpha invite as i reached my budget already ..
Care to elaborate? That's some pretty harsh language for something I've seen spoken of in a rather positive light for the most part.
Do some research, this game is nothing like UO in any shape or form. The design of the game insures it will be a gank fest which UO never was.
Secondly, F2P means bots and spammers unlimited, which along with the cheaters, they will sink this game fast.
So I'll admit, I only read the first paragraph. But there is something very fundamental that this game has wrong (and many of it's cousin games have wrong as well). When you remove NPCs from your MMO, your game will be very very lonely.
In a perfect world, players will drive the "life" into the world. You will see people and towns as you pass through the game world. But in reality, this never pans out.
Darkfall, for instance, was a beautiful game that was actually a heck of alot of fun to play. But when the only people you ever see in the world want to kill you, and even at that, you only see other players every "once in a while", the game just feels like a shell with no depth.
I'm all for removing quests, allowing players to just "experience" the game instead of being led through it. But in order to experience the world in the game, there has to be a world to actually experience. It can't just be a glorified height map. Any elementary 3D modeler could make that, it doesn't make for an intriguing MMORPG.
So to sum that up: if your world feels dead, I will not be a paying customer.
You just advertised for a pay to test game in alpha MMORPG.COM, shame on you. This is just another free to play release game psuedo-alpha meant to make money now while it can claim "alpha" then it can suck all it wants after.
These games should not get previewed, which is essentially a review...I mean seriously. This ridiculous trend is so bad for the genre and you are helping it happen.
I haven't been keeping up with Albion Online that much. Is it really so gank-festeriffic that even pre-Reputation system UO doesn't qualify as a gank fest compared to it?
Pre-Reputation UO is before Pre-Trammel (the safe PvP-less mirror world) UO for those that don't remember. UO's days before the Reputation system came out were so ridicously PK-erriffic that it was... well, ridiculous. Then the Reputation system came out giving VERY harsh penalties to murderors/PKers and... it was still ridiculous, but significantly less so. If Albion is truly THAT much worse than pre-reputation system Ultima Online that you think Ultima Online was "never a gank fest", that must be insane Oo ...if that's actually the case, of course.
I suppose one major difference I'm seeing already is that houses aren't safe in Albion Online (in old-school UO, houses themselves were safe. Your house keys, on the other hand... but those were safe as long as they stayed in the bank at least)
Another major difference I was aware of but forgot was that in Albion Online, "You are what you wear". That's the equivalent of people being able to loot your maxed out magery or swordsmanship skill in Ultima Online.
....seems a bit too harsh to me but I guess we'll see how it goes.
I was really excited about this game while reading your article until you said that the conquest of a zone is based on 5v5 areas...
That absolute ruins the game for me, you can't claim to be a open world conquest mmo, and have the center of the game's conquest system be based on instanced arenas.
Ah well, at least you saved me the time of ever playing this garbage, at least there are plenty more like it in development, one of which should at least get it right.
To find an intelligent person in a PUG is not that rare, but to find a PUG made up of "all" intelligent people is one of the rarest phenomenons in the known universe.
I admit that 5x5 arenas does fix the zerg problem quite nicely but overall I'd have to say that seems kinda... lousy.
My biggest enjoyment in guild vs guild warfare in various MMOs was being able to fight alongside my entire guild against others' entire guild. 5x5 is so... small.
In addition to that, in a 5x5 arena, it basically means every other guild member but the 5 selected champions just twiddle their thumbs (and maybe pray) when it comes to guild warfare. That's gotta suck.
Still, depending on how gear-dependent the game is and how hard it is to get high end gear, there could be advantages to being in a big guild anyways if only because the 5 champions will be more geared to the teeth. Still seems kinda lame though. (and you'd better make sure the opposition never loots that gear!)
I pretty much agree with the majority here. Dont bother. Why anyone gets excited for a tablet MMO I will never understand, but if you are looking for a AAA title, this isnt it.
The combat is clunky, very limited and done with very poor "old school" animations. The "you are what you wear" sounds like a fun niche thing to do, but limits you even farther, with higher tier stuff giving you more abilities, but early on you have maybe 1 or 2. The options themselves are also very limited, even though I suppose we can assume we will see more as the game gets developed.
The graphics are very poor, but understandably so. Again, this is a game meant for Android and iOS, as a "mobile MMO", so dont expect anything breathtaking. The comparisons to UO are not far off, the game could have released in 1995 and still been mediocre quality.
As for the gankfest of it all, well thats up to the players. But the game does focus on it, and rewards players for doing it, so there is that. Having your abilities tied to the equipment that just got looted off you means that you always have to have multiple sets of equipment crafted before entering combat, if you plan to try to go back out. It also means, for the most part everyone will always wear thier "second best" gear and never really push themselves because of not wanting to lose what they worked so hard to get.
All in all, it has very nice concepts, and also very old ones. For the most part, if you are that interested, you should just wait for it to be free, dont bother sinking money into this one. And I cant even fathom those souls out there that have paid $100 or more to "test" a Mobile MMO. I mean, seriously.
I think it is an acceptable sacrifice, quantity over quality has always been a huge problem for games like this.
Waiting for:
The Repopulation
Albion Online
Looks too old and dated similar to my old Nintendo games.Being we are playing VIDEO games,meaning i see and watch them ,i need them to look decently good.
I also dislike the fake world design of clicking icons on a map.It was ok 15 years ago in single players games but not for MMO's of today.That is what they could do back then,we can do MUCH better now a days.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box. ~ Italian proverb
If you read the post above you will notice, it has no npcs, so you can only intereact with others who most probably will want to kill you. UO had tons of NPCs, they made the world alive. I played UO way before Trammel and never noticed any gank fest. Of course the secret to UO was not to solo, but go in groups.
My blog:
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/Strayfe/
Pretty sure I could run this on my Dreamcast
fixed it!
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