RATINGS:

DBT

Pros: Great look & endgame content apparently very promising.

Cons: A bit more direction in the beginning would be appreciated.

                                                                                                                   

We were granted the delightful opportunity to check out on Albion Online, the new open world massively multiplayer online role-playing game from Sandbox Interactive which is currently in alpha testing. From what we’ve got to know by now, this fantasy themed MMO strongly focuses on player vs. player conflicts and crafting, allowing you to produce nearly each and everything in the game by yourself, which includes items, armour, weapons and even buildings. That's an extremely essential aspect because you can found and join guilds and build up your own guild city that is endangered to be attacked and destroyed by your rivals, resulting in the crafting and PvP focus as you will repeatedly have to reconstruct your city in case you were unable to successfully defend it against assaults.

All this is only endgame content we obviously couldn’t try out instantly. Our own journey through Albion Online started in a humble settlement, scantily dressed with nothing but underwear - a pretty heroic sight, isn’t it? Our very first undertaking was to set out in our underwear to find resource nodes from which to collect wood and stone (almost every tree could be felled to obtain wood). We then took our collected material to a crafting station, of which there are several to be found during your travels as they are scattered throughout the environment. This location enabled us to craft a wooden shield, a fundamental sword and amour to fill our body, head and footwear slots with as well as various tools required to gather resources.

In order to create our armour, we needed leather and had to skin some animals but had to craft a skinning knife beforehand. This made us realise the pretty Minecraft-styled way of production, which perfectly made sense though. Once our tools were ready, crafted on our own in our underwear, we headed off to hunt down some rabbits, still in our underwear, to finally be able to craft our leather armour and set out for adventures. One of the key aspects in crafting is that you can choose different abilities and skills associated with creating an item, such as enhancing your speed or attack power, your defences or even healings and special area attacks. With the absence of classes, it is in fact a game where players are what they are wearing, which enables them to equip specific items in order to create their own hybrid templates.

As there weren’t any tutorial or quests that would guide us or give advice where to go, we just opened the map and took the direction towards the nearest town. Arriving there, we came across some other people who were roaming the area and crafting. As we didn’t notice anything of larger interest - there was nothing more than a crafting area and a bank – we immediately continued our travel.

So we headed into the wilderness for further exploration as the map indicated something there that could have been a guild city, perhaps. For not having any other plans, we made the decision to make it there by imprudently taking the shortcut through the woods. The first sign that we should better return to the road was a skeleton that we shortly after discerned as the rotten body of a killed adventure. When suddenly a pack of three wolves emerged, we selected RPG mode, thinking that these were low-level and easy to finish mobs in a newbie zone – a fatal misinterpretation! The wolves drew nearer and it merely took us a few seconds to become aware of our severe mistake and another jiffy to try to escape the situation running, but in vain! Two instants later, we were killed.

We respawned somewhere in the town, realising that all our items were gone for good and all those fluffy rabbits had lost their lives for nothing. Yet we remembered the skeleton earlier seen and recognised the possibility of a potential corpse drop. So we hurried back into the forest to perhaps recover our items with any luck, following the stench of fear that guided us to our corpse, which already lay in bones. We quickly gathered all our items, then realised that two of them were broken, namely our boots that we had enhanced for faster movement speed (useful to escape from danger) and our sword (helpful in fights against your foes).

We continued our trip towards the place thought to be a "guild city" when several bandits stumbled upon us, trying to attack. This time, we decided to avoid a fight and ran as fast as we could, not really able to shake of our pursuers – how we longed for our dear boots! Eventually, we managed to flee... only to cross the way of a feral boar that stabbed us like poor old Bobby Baratheon, horrible!

Never did we reach our destination, but learned an essential lesson during our travel: banding together with others is quite vital in this game, as even apparently low-level creatures are able to end your life when you haven’t got the appropriate equipment and are outnumbered.

The visuals are tremendously well made; the developers have done a good job for a cross-platform game, making it accessible without having to reduce the graphic quality. The title has a nice feel to it and simple gameplay. Still an alpha version, we’re hoping for little more content though as well as for some direction in the initial stages to comfort the MMORPG players we feel have become accustomed due to the fact that MMOs have taken quite a step away from the early sandbox MMOs such as Ultima Online. For we didn’t have the chance to check out the endgame content and this is still the alpha, our rating is directly reflecting this and shouldn't be considered as an evaluation we would have given to the final version.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2014 at 2:46 pm and is filed under MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Puedes dejar una respuesta, o un trackback desde tu sitio web.