While 2021 was Albion Online’s biggest year ever, the dev team has a new talk with game director Robin Henkys looking back at that huge year and what's coming in the remainder of 2022.
In 2021, Albion Online released its mobile edition, and the team started rolling out a number of significant overhauls to many of the systems and features. Reworks applied across the entire open world, faction warfare, guild season changes, Hellgates, and even a series of quality-of-life improvements.
There has also been a bunch of new content added to the game including Elite levels, the Conquerors Challenge (and regular updates), and many of the open-world objectives intended to make things more explorable and give players options to progress. On top of this, War Gloves, the new weapons system and subsequent updates, were also added.
So what’s ahead in 2022? Another series of reworks, this time of all of the weapon lines. First up will be the magic staff. These will get some coats of polish with new visuals, audio, and VFX, as well as mechanical changes with new spells added and outdated spells reworked. Also being reworked are castles and castle outposts. These will be changed to provide more dynamic rewards and to also be more viable throughout the day. They’ll also get visual upgrades and gameplay balance tweaks. High level gameplay is also getting some changes intended to make guilds easier to find, safer options for Portal cities with protected access to vital systems like banks and marketplaces.
One of the guiding principles behind some of these reworks is opening the game up to be more accessible to different players, and having better access to rewards no matter when you play is one way.
Encouraging players to get out in the world by making the world somewhere that’s rewarding is still on the table. The Roads of Avalon will get some changes to improve rewards and adjustments to make them more suited to smaller groups. The Mists is another type of Road that’s incoming, and this type will focus on solo play, with special solo-only entrances and the ability to gather, hunt, and get rewarded without outside threat from large groups.
There’s more on the way, and the Albion Online team will have more details on those later.
