As of this week’s Albion Online dev update, we’re getting a much clearer picture of the philosophy behind the game’s latest quarterly content drop. It’s called Horizons, and it promises to bring “new features to the Outlands, introduces more challenging PvE, and brings long-awaited quality-of-life improvements” – like full UI customization. The first video focuses entirely on the game’s open world strategy.
For starters, Sandbox Interactive game director Robin Henkys explains, the team is working on making the Outlands area appealing to both soloers and small groups without ruining its potency for guild competition. The key fix is to add random portals into the Outlands, both to help lone players access them quickly and to ensure players dropping in are spread out over the whole territory rather than bottlenecked in one spot. The Outlands will also see the addition of randomly spawning camps, new roaming mobs for groups, and new rewards, all with the goal of establishing the area for new playstyles.
SBI is also promising to boost some regular zones on the royal continent too, which basically means some tier 5 yellow zones will now be tier 6 (and so forth), effectively allowing runway for PvP-shy players to continue their PvE play in safety a bit longer. Just note that the resource harvesting won’t be as lucrative as in the PvP zones of equivalent difficulty.
Finally, small groups will find a home thanks to the veteran dungeons update, which will raise their rewards and bonuses to suit their intended 5-person groups (instead of the soloers who do them now). And while SBI understands some of its changes will reduce some open-world PvP encounters, it’s adding a “player count indicator” for some Outland zones that will “help players to gauge how busy a zone is to assess the risk of engaging in PvP combat.”
