Introduction
This Albion Online 2023 Review is based upon starting this game as a complete beginner having never played Albion Online before.
One of the first things I noticed was there are some real Runescape vibes with this game graphically. It also makes me think of a more simplified World of Warcraft when it comes to the combat style.
Graphically things are quite simple but this comes entirely down to the fact this game is playable on mobile as well as PC so the game cannot have amazing graphics otherwise it just wouldn’t work well on mobile devices. The interface is basic, again this is likely to accommodate mobile.
Creating a character is quite a simple task, with some basic things to choose from but since the game has no races or classes, it’s purely aesthetical.
The beginners experience is your standard MMO introduction where you do quests and learn the basics of combat, gathering and crafting. There’s room for improvement to make this experience a bit more interesting and teach you a bit more about the game but it does a decent job of getting you started in Albion Online.
Can You Tank in Albion Online?
As a Tank main, one of my first thoughts was, how useful is a Tank going to be in Albion Online and can you Tank in Albion Online? As mentioned already this game resembled Runescape which is a game where you cannot really play as a Tank.
The simple answer with Albion Online is YES, you can Tank!
After completing the tutorial for the game I was sent to a new area and immediately I notice that the in-game chat was filled with people looking for PvE Tanks for a range of content. The good thing is that because it’s just one server with everyone on it, you will never have trouble finding a group as a Tank no matter what time of day you’re playing.
I set off on my journey to becoming a Tank.
One of the hardest parts about being a Tank in an MMO game is that it’s usually very slow and uninteresting during the levelling and beginner process if you start as a Tank. With Albion Online you don’t really have levels but rather you’re constantly gaining experience or “fame” as it’s known in this game, by killing enemies, gathering and crafting.
You need to equip the gear you intend to use pretty quickly so you can progress your Destiny Board and this will increase your combat power. Whilst doing so you can begin to improve your gear to gain strength in your character and this feels like a really effective and progressive system that doesn’t seem as pressuring as a level system.
After a while you will start to realise that you still need to grind out levelling your gear and weapons to boost your Item Power before people will accept you into joining their group for the harder content.
Combat
My first taste of proper combat was when I completed my daily solo dungeon with reasonable ease and this was a good introduction into the combat of Albion Online. What I like is that it somewhat resembles World of Warcraft but it’s just much simpler and easier. In WoW you have potentially 25+ abilities that you need to use and it can get quite complicated but here you only have 6 abilities and these are essentially tied into your gear choices.
Once you activate an ability this puts it on cooldown and so you need to time the use of abilities as some will have a longer cooldown than others. Based upon the gear you use you’ll gain access to different abilities which helps you to define the type of character you are playing. There were a range of different enemy types which had a range of different attack. There were AoEs, direct damage and more, you can overcome a lot of these attacks as a Tank with interrupts and crowd control skills and these even disrupt boss attacks.
The general concept of combat is movement, positioning and timing. You need to keep moving and avoiding damage, hit spacebar to restart auto-attacks, time abilities for the correct moment and manage resources and cooldowns to defeat enemies.
Progression
One of the good things about Albion Online is you are in control of your own success. You’re not relying on random drops and events to improve, you can just walk around and gather materials and craft your own gear and you can do this pretty much from the start. I decided to walk around the first village taking the east exit and I farmed ore along with completing any of the random solo dungeons that popped up.
After a while I took the northern exit to find hide, flax and tier 3 fishing. I used the majority of the materials I picked up to craft better gear and gathering tools for myself and then I used up all my materials to craft additional gear which I could easily sell to the trading post since everything is tradable so I was able to gain a lot of characters benefits from gathering, then crafting and then rewarded with silver for the hard work.
I noticed that Fishing was very rewarding when it came to selling items on the trading post at this early stage so I did that and built up about 50k silver, which I then reinvested into picking up some Tier 4 gear to get my Tank setup in the gear I wanted. I did some research on the Albion Online Wiki and looked through the trading post to see what gear might be good for a PvE Tank – you can find the build at the Albion Online Tank Build page.
One really nice thing about Albion Online is you’re able to buy your own island. On this island you can turn part of it into a farm and grow crops which you can then sell. I had to buy the initial seeds to grow the crops but upon harvesting those crops they yielded x2 the same amount of seeds back along with the grown product so I was then able to reseed the same area plus I had extra seeds to either sell or grow in another area of my island, and then the crop to also sell meaning I had a huge financial return for farming.
You can expand your island to add even more crops but you can also add animals for food products and you can build houses, buildings and hire workers to gather materials which is another income benefit. Overall the whole player housing not just an aesthetic thing but something that benefits your overall game progress and it’s well worth the investment of silver and time to gain the passive financial benefits, because it’s a nice passive income.
I personally like the fact that I can load up the game on my phone or tablet device to do my daily farming tasks but also do a bit of fishing on my island as well.
I setup my first Tank focussed build once I had collected enough silver, so I could begin learning and understanding how to be an effective Albion Online PvE Tank.