Albion Online hasn’t exactly been the smoothest of launches so far, but I'm hopeful for the future of it

Albion Online [Official Site] recently launched with full Linux support on day-1. It’s an interesting sandbox MMO that I’ve put quite a bit of time into already. Sadly, the launch hasn’t been great at all.



I should note, that my key was personally purchased at the middle tier, with Evolve PR giving me an upgrade to the higher tier just before release so I could check it out on the first day.

To be completely honest, the initial launch was an absolute mess. The server just couldn’t cope with the amount of people they had trying to login. The same issue happened on the second and third day, but now it seems to be quite a bit more stable. On the first day they had no queue system, so everyone was jumping in at the same time. It took Sin 50+ minutes to login during the release day livestream as it would get stuck on a loading screen, or give a black screen instead of the game. Once we did get in it just didn’t work due to lag and overpopulation.


The time on the login queue is never correct, as they let people in quite quickly, so it may initially say an hour and then let you in 5 minutes later.

They do now have a login queue system in place, so they did improved things quite quickly in their defence. However, having a server queue doesn’t fix the other major population issue. Let’s take the town of ‘Fort Sterling’ as an example, the town I decided to base our guild island out of (so you get free travel to it from this town). Regular players of Albion will be quite used to seeing this message at the top of their screen already: “Region Overpopulated!”. At one point it had well over one thousand people in it and the server was so choked you couldn’t move. It would let you run, then rubber band you back constantly. The local chat was utterly rammed with complaints about not being able to move.



What they’ve done now is limit certain areas to a max population, but the problem with that is then tons of people can’t enter. I’ve seen massive groups of people sat outside a town because they just can’t enter. This is a major issue, since each town has a local chest in the middle where you can store tons of loot, gear, resources and so on. If it’s too busy, you’re out of luck. If your guild island happens to be there, you’re also out of luck, unless you want to pay precious silver to travel there from another town.

It's quite surprising that they know full well they can't have unlimited people in one area, so all they do is limit those single instances to a max population, forcing everyone else to wait.

Many other MMOs use multiple instances of the same area. Where only a certain amount of people enter each instance of an area, but the area and everything you can access is the same. It means a single area isn’t overloaded, which is why other games do it. I asked why Albion doesn’t do this and I was told the game wasn’t designed with that in mind. That’s a pretty huge oversight in my opinion, since if they continue to remain as popular as they are, or even more so in future, then it’s going to be a really big problem.

People have argued on their official forum that things will calm down when the initial hype vanishes and people play less or leave, but how is that a solution at all? A solution to overpopulation, is not to wait and see if people leave.



Instances aren’t always the correct solution though, I’m not blind to that, since then not everyone would be able to see each other and it wouldn’t be their dream of a single server MMO where everyone’s together. What they've currently done is hide all other players if a town reaches a certain population, so you end up feeling very alone anyway. As mentioned, if the current population trend stays as it is or gets higher, they’re in for many more complaints. They did say instances become a "more interesting option" if the population numbers stay the same.

It’s still early days yet, but I can't help feeling that these are issues the developer should have anticipated. I don't claim to have any answers on that, as I'm not a game developer. I am a gamer and those are just my honest thoughts on the matter. I’m hopeful for the future of Albion Online and considering the numbers they have playing, it is a very healthy sign for the future of the game. They just need to act fast on sorting the issues out, otherwise I do fear their popularity will be short lived.

It might seem like I'm being overly critical, but the time I have been able to play it properly have so far been really quite enjoyable. The enjoyment does evaporate when you get stuck trying to leave a town for half an hour though. We have a decent little guild going, we have a nice little guild island and it’s a surprisingly relaxing game. My previous concerns about the game not having enough PvE has so far not been an issue, so that's great too.

The most surprising thing is that I'm finding the lack of a story and the void of traditional quests incredibly refreshing. No running here or there trying to find someone with an exclamation mark above their head, to be told to go somewhere, fetch something and come back. I do whatever the hell I feel like doing, and it provides a fulfilling experience.

It’s fantastic to have such an MMO on Linux, I just hope they manage this first month better than the first few days. I will have more to say about it in a week or two, hopefully when it's settled down more and I can experience more of the game without server issues. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.