Sandbox Interactive (SI), the developers at Albion Online hosted two different AMAs (”Ask me Anything”) events following the success of the Galahad update on Reddit on the 14th and 15th of March – and Stefan (aka Bercilak), the CEO of Sandbox Interactive, answered questions with the help of some of their Game Designers and Community Managers . Here are some of the highlights:
- There will be no limited free trial or free weekend as ”it would be unfair to our founders (and) we are very concerned about chat bots/spamming and gameplay botting (also) the game is extremely well populated as it is, and we’d be worried that free trial could slow down the servers”
- Also, SI stated that their ”business model is loosely inspired by the one used by Eve Online” and that ”the only way to get the in-game currency, silver, is by playing the game”; the premium currency, gold, can be bought with real money ”but it can only be used to get the premium status (essentially, a soft subscription) and vanity items”
- The game still has some issues running on Android devices:”We still get the occassional crashes on some android devices, but this is something that we are definitely working on fixing.”
- When asked about ‘equipment inflation’ SI stated that:”it’s one of the areas that we have thought a lot about, and developed a self-balancing system that deals with it” which loosely revolves around item rarity and items getting looted and destroyed upon death.
- SI stated that it is possible to play as a dedicated farmer/cook although ”admittedly, the grow times for crops are usually set at 22 hours (and) the reason is that we wanted to allow players to maintain their farms by logging in once per day, as opposed to having to get up during the middle of the night if some crops come due” and furthermore since ”new watering/nurturing mechanics and varied seed spawn rates” have been added ”there is far more strategy to it, in addition to of course identifying the right crops/food/farm animals/mounts that the player market is most looking for”
- Fishing will be added to the game however there is no ETA for this yet and furthermore ”when it comes to boats and the high seas, we have bounced some ideas back and forth in the game design team, but have not come up with something that we think is worth implementing as this stage, due to other more important features taking precedence”
- Asked whether SI acknowledges the ping as an issue, SI stated:” We chose our servers’ location in such a way that America, Europe and Russia get a good ping. The game’s combat is not as fast paced as League of Legends or Dota, so you can easily play it well with pings as high as 150. 95% of our players are below that. We even have a lot of Australians play Albion Online, even though their pings are usually the highest.”
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