Sandbox Interactive’s Robin Henkys is sitting down one month after Albion Online’s Paths to Glory to talk about what comes next for the PvP MMO sandbox. Henkys says that Paths to Glory’s rebalance of the Roads of Avalon made that content competitive and “led to a sustained increase of activity in the feature” both for PvE and PvP players. And while the team is happy with that patch, the next quarterly update will focus much more heavily on the open world.
“Similar to what we’ve done with the Roads [of Avalon], we want to improve the attractiveness of playing in the open world in comparison to the Mists by rebalancing its rewards, reworking some content, and adding new features,” Henkys explains. SBI wants to make the open world more appealing to solo players, boost rewards for mid-size group content like random dungeons, increase player interest in the inner Outlands, and overall just make PvE better and more lucrative.
Perhaps most notably, the solo-friendliness plan involves “new mechanics to bring you deeper into the Outlands more quickly, reducing the risk of getting ganked near portal cities.” And the changes to higher-end PvE sound like an effort to deal with player character powercreep – basically, bringing mob difficulty and rewards in the open world up to match endgame characters.
We don’t have an official date for the patch yet, but given the four-seasons-a-year schedule, we’re guessing in the next two months.
