The world of MMORPG is old, new, and eternal at the same time. Old games like Runescape retains its charm even to this day. And let’s not question the popularity of World of Warcraft. In terms of popularity, WoW might be the dominating MMORPG of all time.

Yet those games weren’t the first one that hooked me into MMORPG. To give you a little context, I’ve never really gotten into online multiplayer games, especially MMORPGs. Even when I played Call of Duty back then, I always played the single player campaign. However, everything changes when I met Albion Online.

I was a bit shocked to see that I only wrote like four blog posts in these past two months. And, when I opened steam and I saw I had racked up more than 500 hours into Albion Online, yeah, so that’s why. Incidentally, my fascination for MMORPG led me to write comparing this game to the anime BOFURI. However, I have loads of other stuff that I must say about this game.

First Impression On Albion Online

Now, before we get into it. 500 hours might sound a lot. But, for gamers, it is a rookie number. So, be advised that I’m not an expert of this game. I’m just an average newbie who figures out stuff as I play. And of course, a good game must impress newcomers before they get bored, or feel the game is too complicated.

Luckily, even though the game can be complicated later on, the tutorial is quite simple and introduces ninety percent of the content on a surface level. When you first got into the game, well, some of you might get turned off. At least that’s my impression of the graphic. However, the simple 3D graphics make sense since this game can be played on pc, mobile phone, and tablet. Even my old 2016 low-spec laptop can run it without any issue.

If you’re a new player and chose either the America or the Asia server, you’ll be welcomed by an established world. It means there are already people who have unlocked the highest level of mastery in various things, and they do dominate almost everyone else when they play. Lucky for European gamers, a new European server is on its way and will be available this April. The game will open its official free-to-play server on April 29th for the European server. But, how do we even play this game anyway?

Albion Online gameplay is more similar to MOBA rather than other MMORPGs. Essentially, you have fewer spells at a time than what I’ve seen in other games. The spells themselves are specific to whatever gears you have equipped, rather than the ones that you learned. If you have a fire staff, then you hurl fiery balls to the enemy. If you pick a spear, then you can poke them from a distance. Each armor also comes with different abilities, so it’s not that you’re limited to using a plate armor to negate an enemy’s attacks. There are other less protective armors with abilities that serve the same purpose, if you time it right.

This game is also a full-loot PvP sandbox at its core. It means you can take whatever gears and stuff any hostile players you defeated as your reward. Or, if you’re feeling more spicy, you can flag yourself as the hostile player and roam around lethal zones, looking for prey.

The PvP Zones In Albion Online

I mentioned there are places we call as lethal zones in this game. Does it imply the existence of non-lethal zones? Precisely. In Albion Online, there are four kinds of zones. Blue, yellow, red, and black zones.

Blue zones are safe from pvp, except for people doing faction warfare. Yellow zones, yes, you can get attacked by another player, but you won’t lose anything in your inventory. These two are non-lethal zones. Red and black zones are lethal zones, where you can lose what you have on you, except for silver and gold.

The only difference is that in red zones, the game tells you how many hostile players are roaming the zone. Also, players’ reputation will dip every time they kill a non-hostile player. If their reputation got into a certain level, they’ll get blocked from entering blue and even yellow zones. However, in black zones, anything goes. There is no information about hostile players, there is no reputation hit, every man is for himself.

My mistake as a new player was that I roamed the black zones too early for my own good. Why did I even do that? Well, the dungeons and the random chests in the black zones simply offer way way more loot than those in the safe zones.

So, naturally I went there thinking I’ll grab easy money only to be robbed by a group of five people, or even more. And, yes, robbing or ganking other players is a perfectly valid way of making money in this game, which brings me to the next fascinating point in this game.

The Complex Economy

In Albion Online, every player has two kinds of currency, your usual silver and the gold. You can buy gold with real money from the game and trade it with silver. However, you can also buy gold with silver and, in a way, make an investment since the gold to silver price always fluctuate.

Fluctuating price is something that you’ll always hear in this game. Why is that the case? It is because the economy in this game is completely player driven.

All the items we can buy at the marketplace are made by players who decided they want to be crafters. All the horses, ox, and even tigers we can use as mounts are bred and saddled by players who own a private island, like me! I breed tier three horses because… I like horses, don’t ask. And, those low level horses are disposable mounts which everyone buys all the time.

Because of the marketplace of each royal city is separate from each other, there are people who purely flip things to earn their silver. For example, they buy blocks of stones for cheap at the city of Bridgewatch and sell them at Fort Sterling. If you want, you can completely ignore the fighting bits in this game and strive to become an economic overlord.

In fact, there are so many ways of making silver in this game. You can gather natural resources and sell them immediately. Depending on the biome, you can chop wood, gather ores and stones, or hunt and skin animals. I personally love fishing because there is water almost everywhere, and it’s actually pretty fun and chill.

And of course, you can be refiners and crafters. Turning raw materials into ready-to-use goods, turning those refined materials into a plethora of weapons, armors, tools, food, and potions. Heck, be rich enough, and then you can buy a plot in the city and tax players who use your building. Although, just like in real life, land owning is exclusive to people with an immense amount of fund.

Cheeky Ways Of Making Silver

I mentioned quite a few ways of making silver in this game. But, it’s funny that there are other less legitimate ways to earn you millions. Of course, Albion online will ban anyone who violate their terms of service. However, it seems like they do understand the brutality of their own game and allows quite a few unconventional money making ways.

The first one that I want to talk about is begging. The fact that players can’t see each other’s bank account really makes it viable to just stand in town and say in chat, “please give me silver.” Seeing this kind of chat really annoyed me at first but then I got used to it, and to a degree, kind of understandable really. It’s not a rare sight to see newbies go bankrupt after they boldly venture into black zones with everything they have.

Why is it easy for newbies to go bankrupt in this game? Well, it comes to the full-loot nature of red and black zones in Albion Online. In these zones, people who are confident with their PvP skills and character build often hunt unsuspecting solo players. And, sometimes, these solo players can have some good loot on them too, maybe they’ve been dwelling into solo dungeons, or they might be ganking on their own.

If your style isn’t beating people physically in game, how about outwitting them with your words? Yes, surprisingly, the game allows you to “scam” other players. As long as it doesn’t violate the TOS, it’s all good. Some well known scam (and some that I’ve seen with my own eyes) are the duel scam and the “I’ll upgrade your weapon scam”.

I’ve seen people challenging randoms to duel them with a low level weapon, only for them to grab their most powerful weapon and beat the poor sod who think it’s a legitimate duel. You can wager some silver in duels, so that’s why.

On the other hand, the let me upgrade your gear is way more sinister in my opinion. Basically, if anyone offer to buy you your gear but one level above, there is a high chance you won’t see that item ever again. Luckily, the community pays attention to this, and it won’t be long before someone warns you if a player a scammer. Good thing Albion Online doesn’t allow players to change their name, so their reputation is tied to it.

Solo VS Group Experience In Albion Online

Now, like any other MMORPG, there are guilds in this game. You could bring your friends and play together, join in with randoms you meet or, join big guilds that already established themselves. Trust me, every big guild always wants some new recruits. Don’t be surprised when you get a ton of guild invitations when you just arrived at the blue zone starting towns.

I played solo for the majority of my time. Although Albion Online is a group-focused game, there is no denying this game has a lot of content for solo players.

For instance, we have solo dungeon, which is a classic dungeon dwelling that exist in any adventure and RPG games. There is corrupted dungeon, which is similar to solo dungeon. However, the catch is, you can choose to invade another player’s dungeon or just wait to get invaded. We have the mist which serves like a mystical dimension where players’ names are hidden as “mysterious stranger” to prevent people from partying up.

I’ve always been a shy person who doesn’t talk a lot, even in games. So, my early days in Albion consists of venturing to black zones looking for solo dungeon, since it offers decent loot. However, this game really shines when I tried the group activities. I buckled my self-up and tried to make friends, and it works!

Trying out 2 vs 2 hellgates with a friend was so much fun, in my experience. Hellgates are similar to corrupted dungeon, but it’s intended for groups. I also usually follow my guild whenever they go policing around red zones, looking for hostile players to eliminate.

Suffice to say, the group content is triumphant over the solo content in Albion Online. Not to say you’ll have a bad experience as a solo player, but everything changes for the better when you have friends. Guild wars, big group dungeons, all of those sweet stuff are mostly group activities.

However, for those who don’t have friends or just wanna try this game without commiting to guild’s call to arms, worry not. You can try faction warfare. In Albion’s royal continent, there are six royal cities, Martlock, Thetford, Fort Sterling, Bridgewatch, Lymhurst, and Carleon, the bandit city. We can align ourselves with one of these cities and essentially just blob up with other from the same city. Well, except for Carleon, it’s the bandit city so, anything goes there.

Albion Online’s Monetization And The Money Problem

Okay, so the last point that I’d like to point out about Albion Online is its monetization. Although Albion Online is a free-to-play game, you can choose to buy its premium package for a week, a month, and up to a year.

Of course, there are skins and what not that you can buy from the in-game shop. But, the purchase that would benefit your gameplay experience the most is purchasing Albion’s premium. Essentially, premium gives bonus to your progression, more loot from chests and mob drops, and gives you access to buying private islands.

I did buy its one week premium with real money, since it’s the cheapest just around 5 USD. However, the game does allow players to buy premium with in-game currency, be it gold or silver. Well, it’s where it gets complicated. You see, I managed to hoard enough silver to buy me a one month premium, which costed around 20 million silver at the time. But, a few days ago when I logged in and see price of premium, it has gone up to 22 million silver.

It took a lot of grinding, be it fishing, hunting for open world chests, dungeon chests, and gathering for me to reach 20 million silver and bought a single month of premium. Why does it cost so much and how in the world the price goes up? It’s because the game’s economy is completely player driven, it allows purchasing premium with in-game currency, there is a gold market that affects the price of premium and value of silver too. But, I hate to inform you that this game also has an RMT (real money trading) problem.

When I scoured the internet to look up what RMT is, I was a bit upset to see so many MMO games had fallen victim to it in the past. The common RMT in Albion is people buying silver from other player for real money. However, it deprives the game developer of the profit they might get. I’m not trying to lick the game dev’s boots here, but I understand that in the end of the day, video games are products and people need to sell stuff to get money.

These players who do RMT often use bots to gather raw resources in the game and sell them to the market for silver. Then, they sell the silver the bots have accumulate for real money. Despite this problem, Albion Online periodically do ban waves to supress these RMTers and keep the game fun for free-to-play players. I suspect the reason why premium price is so expensive if we want to buy it with silver is because of real inflation is happening here.

Verdict

Suffice to say, it took a relatively a short time for Albion Online to be one of my most played games. The freedom it offers as a sandbox MMORPG and how oddly it mirrors real life is both horrifying and fascinating at the same time. As a new player, of course, I reccomend you to try out this game if you have the time to spare. Especially, since the European server will be available for better gameplay experience for Europeans.

However, I do highly suggest to skip becoming a solo newbie. Grab a friend to play together, figure out the game together, try out all the content togeter. Although being a solo player is still okay, playing with a friend amplifies the experience ten times better in my opinion.