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People who have played, how is it?
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I'm older and having many years behind a keyboard, the click to move isn't my thing as it plays hell on my mousing arm. One of the original design elements of the game however is the portability to mobile devices, so click to move makes sense and it works given the isometric view.
This is a GvG game, I highly recommend that if you're a solo/small group player you work with a much larger guild or bring some p2w power (yes, the game will be p2w). This is their model and they don't (and shouldn't) make a pretense otherwise. It is what it is and many people fit that niche. I also recommend that if you want to get involved in the game that you don't mess around and you get the headstart and the package with the ox (legendary I think it's called now). The headstart + ox will give your guild an insurmountable lead on everyone that doesn't pay for these advantages. It's either pay for the advantage at the start, or buy silver to catch up.
That doesn't mean that a solo/small group can't enjoy the game, but you'll find that you will be limited in the content you can do and your progression will be extremely grinding and tedious.
The game "world" is comprised of tiniest of tiny instanced zones linked together by loading screens.
I was really surprised that this "feature" of the game wasn't brought out more. It completely and immediately destroyed my interest in the game, as instead of a huge sandbox I got a series of small ones (literally square, too) linked by portals.
There is nothing massive about AO, but I guess that's the limitation of having cross play with mobile devices. Wasted 30 bucks for me, but I guess I deserved it for not doing my research better.
And why exactly do you laugh at that? You don't think it's a "valid" complaint? As a former UO player I was expecting a lot bigger zones.
In AO you can literally run from one zone end to the other in less than one minute. If that's not tiny I don't know what is.
Are the zones surrounded by something (Mountains) or there is an invisible wall?
I haven't done any PvP yet, so no idea if you can zone while flagged or not. Hopefully not.
Edit: Nevermind I forgot it's isometric view
But on purely PVP functional side. That connections will be PK camped like hell.
So even if you wanted to be stealthy and move alone around the zones, you will not be able to do it because of this stupid design.
Now I totally lost all the interest in the game.
No idea if it actually works like that though.
Zoning itself in the game is really quick, takes just a couple of seconds.
Some won't be bothered by that, for me it's pretty much a deal-breaker.
To be frank, ArcheAge felt more sandboxy to me. Combat is kind of clunky, but playable. There are few skills, and even then, some of the skills feel "samey"...I played frost mage and healer BTW.
Crafting is all about producing in mass, hoping higher quality items PROC(RNG) --which is a sad state to be in -- A Vanguard-esque production system would fit Albion almost perfectly. Profession Interdependence is good, no matter which skill line you decide to hit....and the skill lines/tree needs lots of work, if for nothing else, clarity and detail. Here, it is called a Destiny Board, and further out you go, the more confined you will be. Its all about Specialization, and that's where the sandbox feel stops for me. We are talking years worth of pre-planned, ultra-specific grind. This is how they are hoping to "hold players for years".
Even still, Albion is a good game. The question is: can the game be made more interesting, less confusing, and most importantly, is combat going to solidify?
Check out this article on Why Crafting Sucks
This game indeed revolves around guild vs. guild warfare, and the PvE side is pretty shallow for what I can see so far. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you want to enjoy the game you will need to join a guild and rely on others. Soloing will not get you far.
One thing is very similar to EVE - you will need to specialize. Unlocking everything would take years and years, so it's best to decide early what you want to be and start working towards it. You can still unlock basic Tier 3 ability in pretty much everything rather quickly, but after that you need to focus.
The loading times between zones are INSTANTANEOUS practically. I'm big on immersion and I don't find it immersion breaking at all. Even if there weren't these brief loading screens, the world would still be organized the exact same way. The only difference would be the resources needed to load the game.
The further out you go, red and black zones, will put you into the most harsh PVP situations. Zoning is often an exciting experience as you never know what you're going to find on the other side. Scouts become important later on because of this reason.
The PVE side of things is actually OK right now. More bosses with different mechanics are in the works, but doing PVE content with the guild is a lot of fun.
When you click "K", you can then click on the zone you'd like to inspect, and that will bring up the map for the zone. In case you wanted to take a look before going there.
Yeah its tough out there to be solo, and you'll have much more fun rolling with a guild.
You don't really get a sense of the hard choices in the game until you hit tier 4 and "learning points" come into play.
Anybody that is serious about playing the game competitively will have premium. (Though honestly premium is EASILY obtained through in game silver.)
Premium players get more learning points, but that doesn't necessarily make it pay to win. You can either spend learning points to unlock skills, or grind out a TON of fame. The idea is that less hardcore players will be able to spend learning points to stay competitive despite playing less. More hardcore players will grind down the learning point cost through fame, and then invest the learning points in other areas. So a more hardcore player may have a secondary weapon that is competitive, or could invest their extra learning points into an extra crafting tree to increase their auction house income.
The 300 learning points a non premium player has, is of course pretty limiting. It is an amount, however, that can be used well, and make for an effective build that a player could enjoy playing. They won't be able to specialize outside of an armor and weapon tree, without a LOT of grinding.
The kinks are still being worked out, and I think the system will get some tweaks before release. The destiny board certainly will.
The game deserves a look from any MMO player that enjoys guilds and pvp. The guilds with the best organization and planning will succeed the most in this game, and that makes it fun. Players have to work together to get a good synchronization of their respective skills and help one another out.
Lastly, "grindy" can mean "hard work = rewards", and that shouldn't be a bad thing. The latter is how I would describe Albion. How much fun you have in PVE, PVP, Crafting, gathering, or farming is entirely subjective. They give you the choice to find out which you like the most, and then focus on it.
It will just be ganker camping spot. Even if there are gauards around the entry points ( how terribly immersion breaking) they can simply camp little bit further.
This means that you will not be able to go around alone, no matter how stealthy you are. And that very high lvl kids will no life will simply be there and make the game unplayable.
Gank heaven.
If they only at least made 5-10 entry points to each zone (dont see why not). Or make the whole zone line be entry point (as I assumed they would do).Than this would not be a problem.
Maybe they are trying to promote ganking gameplay ?
Business wise its a suicide bullet.
Still, I'm willing to give the game a shot now that I've invested the 30 bucks. I like the fact you cannot easily do everything by yourselves, and I've always had a soft spot for player faction (guild/alliance) PvP. I'm also looking forward to their Guild war system, which if I understand correctly would allow guilds to PvP between themselves in safe zones, too. I hope they're smart enough to make it a mutual war invitation system and not a forced declaration like in EVE.
The pvp zones are also just crap this yellow zone where you only drop money is just boring and not needed.
Like you cant even fight lower mobs to lvl your lvl3 tier weapon skill to tier 4 you need to fight tier 3 and its just so slow kill him heal wait for cooldowns, next one well as a hunter anyway...
This is as a solo player, In a group with friends all on teamspeak I could see you having abit more fun to a point.
there was more i wanted to add but ill leave it there its a good concept it just hasnt been done right.
It starts off decent as you feel you can do a lot and you jump into the gathering dig the game tosses you into the moment you first log-in. Now if you enjoy that kinda thing it can keep you going for awhile, though after about a week a lot of the holes start to show.
One such hole is that the game calls itself a sandbox but it really isn't. There isn't a variety of things to do or ways to progress or any of that sort.
What you CAN do is gather resources til your heart is content and possibly dump some of those resources into a crafting station or home. The home is of course instanced so doesn't really matter and any crafting station you put out there is the same as everyone else's of the same tier, only building you a bit of silver.
You can kill the same 3 mob types spread over the entire world in reused dungeon maps to try and earn new weapon/armor unlocks. I have read they are adding another mob type and more dungeons, but these 'dungeons' have barely the bare minimum of what you'd call a dungeon. There is a zone in and usually a single path with spattered mobs and 3 bosses, all of which have no rhyme, reason or story and all of which are duplicated like 10 times in other areas of the world. The weapon and armor types are decently interesting, more options would be nice but I don't dislike the system, though the destiny board to actually unlock them is a mess.
You can pvp in yellow/red/black zones. Yellow zones no one drops anything but silver, so it's all rather pointless to pvp there, while red and black zones you drop your items if your killed by a player and that player gets to loot some of it that isn't broken and made worthless.
So you basically have these 3 things you can do, except each one further has holes in it to screw with them if you somehow were alright with any of those three.
The way the progression works you obviously 'have' to venture out into red/black zones eventually to either progress your weapons/armor and or craft. Then depending on the type of player you are, this can lead to a full on dead stop in progression. Not even talking about the fear of going into those zones, but the fact that everything after about T4 is locked in areas that basically out there only for fully organized guilds. So if you enjoy casual guilds and or doing a bit of gameplay on your down time instead of roaming around all the time with 5-15 people from your guild, your game ends about there. There is no being a lone wolf/casual guild gatherer/crafter/pvper, all of them will end up with you being ground to dogmeat over and over and over every time you enter these zones to progress.
You will die every time you try to do any progression out there alone or duo to groups many times your size, and sadly there are no alternatives for your progression, or anything TO do but try to progress in these ways. Not only are there not any alternatives, but the way the learning of skills work with learning points, you'll find you need to farm these dangerous zones 5x-10x as much as you needed to farm the safe zones (can get to T4 in like 2 days hardcore, two weeks for the most casual of casuals). So if you are not the large guild type you hit the wall of dangerous areas you have zero chance of surviving in on top of the wall of needing to farm those areas magnitudes more than you did lower zones to progress your gather or craft.
So in the end, your basically required to be in a large active guild and joining fame farming runs and the like to continue progression a week or two into the game. Many actually don't mind this since they are the large guild types anyway and the endless grinding can be made more fun with friends in voice chat and such.
I myself enjoy the group pvp enough to where I'm sticking around until one of these other actual sandbox games gets off the ground, but my general playstyle is that of a solo player that is self sufficient in crafting and loves to pvp. Just none of that is possible without a large guild here.
tl;dr: Only for those that like being in large guilds and parties for roaming PvE/PvP and occasional group resource run and or crafting for those types of people. Otherwise you will hit an impossible progression wall from several different factors that only takes 1-2 weeks to hit.