Fancy getting your peekay on in an actual PvP sandbox? Albion Online is officially free-to-play today, meaning you can swarm the game without paying a dime, though of course there’s still an optional sub for additional perks.
“With a healthy and growing player base, numerous technical improvements since launch, and a brand-new tutorial for new players, Albion Online opens the gates to all players,” Sandbox Interactive says. Today’s release also comes with a respectable patch to remove inter-city travel cooldowns, add new portals across multiple zones, tweak respawns, make guilds more expensive to create, and lightly rebalance combat.
Prefer to play on Steam? Devs wrote an hour or so ago that it’s still waiting on Valve: “That requires a manual switch from Valve. We’re eagerly waiting for it ourselves. Shouldn’t take too long.”
Do note that as expected, Sandbox says the login servers are “under heavy load,” such that “login can take approximately 5-10 minutes.” The studio advises patience, as restarting will only start the queue over again. As we’ve previously covered, the devs expect long queues today and buffed up their tech accordingly.
Finally, if you’re installing for the first time, make sure you’re careful to create a proper directory structure for your install, as the installer doesn’t appear to do so on its own. One of our writers found this out the hard way this morning: “[Albion] just installed into the folder I picked, didn’t create any other folders and proceeded to try and run an anti-cheating program on the 400+ gigs of other games I have in the folder, which completely hosed my gaming PC and I had to do a hard boot.” Fair warning!
And here’s the launch trailer while you wait:
