Sandbox Interactive Game Director Robin Henkys has another lengthy Albion Online dev recap today, this one all about the Outlands, one of the key pieces of content being rethought and redesigned in the current beta stage.
As designed, the Outlands were intended to foment guild warfare — that’s probably why you’re playing a PvP sandbox, after all, if you’re not there to gank miners. But Henkys says that in practice, the Outlands were designed too small and too compact, which created relatively small guild battles and in turn allowed just a few incredibly powerful guilds control over the whole area, leaving no room for anyone else. The next iteration of the Outlands was bigger and allowed more small and medium guilds in but didn’t create “hotspots” worth fighting over.
The build planned for launch, Henkys explains, splits the Outlands in multiple pieces with scaled resources. The idea is that the uberguilds will fight over the spots with the best resources and leave the lesser areas alone. Ideally, if the game is overloaded, the team can just add more pieces of proper value.
Worth a listen even if you’re not interested in the game just for its run-down of the core problems faced by every PvP or RvR sandbox ever.
