In addition to Fairytale Distillery (The Valley), another German company is working on a sandbox MMORPG: Sandbox Interactive is further along with Albion Online, with an Alpha starting this summer that could pave the way for an upcoming Beta.
What stands out first in Albion Online is the colorful graphics, featuring a cartoonish style that is nonetheless captivating. From an isometric perspective, you explore a fantasy world in a classic manner. However, it has much to offer.
After you have created your hero, you find yourself in the world. What you do there is up to you, as the MMORPG uses an open system where your hero is defined not by classes but by their equipment. If you wear sword and armor, you are a fighter. If you switch to a robe with a wand, you become a mage, and if you run around in underwear with a pickaxe, you are a mining worker.
This is how you envision a sandbox
Albion Online is a sandbox, so there are no quests to guide you through a story. You decide how your hero and the world develop. Since there is open PvP, you are almost never safe. At any time, a hostile player could appear wanting to beat you up. Therefore, you should quickly team up with like-minded players into guilds to help each other.
In the guild, you now assign tasks and set out to establish your own town. As the world continues to turn even when you are not online, you should properly protect the borders of your realm; otherwise, you might return from a vacation to Albion only to find that your kingdom has been reduced to rubble and ashes. Guild wars are also possible.
Crafting and housing also play an important role, as the best items can only be created by players. In addition to a town, you will also build your own house, which you can furnish and expand according to your ideas. Albion Online thus incorporates the full range of sandbox features.
The economy of the game world is also determined by players. You gather resources, create items from them, and transport them to various locations. These trader caravans should also be protected – you know, open PvP and all… Additionally, there are also monsters, demons, undead, and followers of the dark sorceress Morgana lurking in the game world. So there is plenty to do for the heroes of Albion Online.
The summer alpha starts soon
Those who want to get a picture of the online game will have the opportunity starting June 29, as the summer alpha will begin, bringing several new features. However, for access, you will have to hope for key giveaways or purchase one of the founding packages available on the official website albiononline.com.
Albion Online is designed as a cross-platform game. This means you can play not only on PC but also on tablet or smartphone in the same world. However, the also announced browser version of the MMORPG has recently been canceled because it became too large for a browser game and there were some technical issues. Moreover, very few players were interested in the browser version at all.
Andreas says: Albion Online looks really good. The colorful graphics somehow appeal to me. The sandbox elements, the open PvP, the opportunity to manage a whole kingdom, and the unusual character system where you change classes by switching equipment could bring fresh wind into the genre. How Albion Online plays and whether it can motivate in the long term will be seen with the soon starting summer alpha. If you want to see what Albion Online looks like now and get an impression of what to expect, then check out the latest trailer of the game.
For more information: We previously introduced Albion Online a few months ago. However, since a lot has happened and we have gained many new readers, we thought – fitting to the summer alpha news – to provide you again with some details about the game.
