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Albion Online is a 'sandbox' style MMO where you pretty much do whatever you please, and it's proving to be quite popular with a healthy growth in players.

In early May of this year, the team at Sandbox Interactive mentioned how the player-count was continuing to rise with a it seeing a large jump in regularly players from March onwards. As of the latest update to how they're doing, things are looking really good for Albion Online. The post mentions how the population growth has continued, with a new peak 'Daily Average User count' of over 125,000 players.

What's interesting is it seems most of this growth is outside of Steam, as there they only see around 13,000 peak player count each day. However, looking over the charts it's clear they're even having something of a huge rebound surge in players on Steam too.

Sandbox Interactive mentioned they're continuing with new features and updates, with more map expansions to come yet and plans to deepen the gameplay experience. They also mentioned official mobile launches are upcoming, and since Albion is fully cross-platform, it's only going to bring in even more players. This is especially good news since it's one of the new MMO's that's not only popular but actually supports Linux too.

You can play it from the official site and Steam, Albion Online is free to play.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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7 comments

Julius Sep 14, 2020
Tried it recently again. The shop system is just odd and at least on the free tier it is still endless grind.

Definitly has potential, but the f2p nonsense breaks it IMHO.
Tchey Sep 14, 2020
I try it from time to time, since it was in alpha/beta (i had a full premium account for a few months at release).
The camera zoom level, the zone system, make it a "can’t play anymore" for me.

It’s way too divided or split to feel like an open world sand box.
Want X resource ? Must go to X zone, where you will find 2 or 3 types of specific stuff.
Want Y ? Change zone. It’s too linear.

Also the GUI is terrible, and i hate since day 1 the skill tree/wheel.

I wanted to like this game, i tried, several times, but i’m not. At all.
scaine Sep 14, 2020
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It's great to see it succeeding, but I'm with Tchey and Julius - the zoning and endless grind make it super-tedious. And the whole game still revolves around this weird cat and mouse PvP system where high level mobs wait in the "black" zone (where all the good stuff is) and try to ambush the harvesters. It's... just not fun.

I had some good experiences joining random groups outside co-op dungeons, but good groups are hard to find and tend to break up when the dungeon run is over. If you're not in an active clan, you might as well give it a miss.

But as I say, great that people are finding this fun, as it's good to have a successful MMO with native Linux support.
Purple Library Guy Sep 14, 2020
Funny . . . everyone here seems to hate it, but someone must like it for it to be gaining a bunch of players at this late date. I wonder what's attracting them.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 14 September 2020 at 9:05 pm UTC
Julius Sep 14, 2020
Not much recent new MMORPGs and maybe if you spend a bit of money in it, it becomes fun? But IMHO if it isn't really fun the first few hours in the free tier, why would I spend money on it to see if it might be fun then?

Anyways, Veloren is on a good way to become a cool open source MMORPG, if you don't mind the voxel graphics.
hagabaka Sep 15, 2020
Quoting: Purple Library GuyFunny . . . everyone here seems to hate it, but someone must like it for it to be gaining a bunch of players at this late date. I wonder what's attracting them.
Speaking for my own experience, this game was very good at getting me hooked, but it felt like a bait-and-switch. When I first signed up I got a ton of bonus learning points which makes things not very grindy even though I was f2p. But after the points ran out, I noticed how much p2p made a difference, so paid for a month subscription. But then I got to high enough level in things so that most of the resources I need were only in PvP zones, and that made the game completely uninteresting to me.
scaine Sep 15, 2020
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Quoting: hagabaka
Quoting: Purple Library GuyFunny . . . everyone here seems to hate it, but someone must like it for it to be gaining a bunch of players at this late date. I wonder what's attracting them.
Speaking for my own experience, this game was very good at getting me hooked, but it felt like a bait-and-switch. When I first signed up I got a ton of bonus learning points which makes things not very grindy even though I was f2p. But after the points ran out, I noticed how much p2p made a difference, so paid for a month subscription. But then I got to high enough level in things so that most of the resources I need were only in PvP zones, and that made the game completely uninteresting to me.

This, very much. All the good resources after level... 4? They're all in red or black zones which are all PvP, resulting in this horrible, tedious harvest/ambush/run cycle. It's a PvP game and any pretence it's not is entirely misleading.
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