Albion Online

You will notice a large amount of people posting negative reviews are the ones who complain the game is too unforgiving. They'll say it's unpleasant dying to groups larger than them, and how if they can't play solo, the game therefore sucks.
Let me be crystal clear in case the store page isn't clear enough: IT'S A FULL-LOOT PVP MMO.
Full loot: When you die, everything you're wearing and anything in your inventory is dropped or trashed. It's written on the doorway outside, if you don't like it don't play it. If I'm allergic to fish, I'm not gonna go to a seafood restaurant and order trout, then post a bad google review saying it almost killed me.
PvP: Everything in Albion is there to support PvP, which is the strongest aspect of the game. PvE leaves quite a bit to be desired, but in the end it's all used to get stronger for PvP. Groups can literally gank you inside a dungeon/raid and lay waste to you. It's called diving, and it's awesome. Totally possible to fight back and win as well, it happens all the time. If you are not someone who enjoys plentiful amounts of consensual / non- consensual PvP, this is not the game for you, keep looking elsewhere.
MMO: I won't patronize you by explaining this here, but this game as well as other MMOs are designed specifically to play with other people. Playing solo in this game is definitely possible, but it takes a great amount of patience and practice, as well as a deep understanding of gear interactions and game mechanics. These are things you'll learn if you just join a damn guild. Don't be scared to be social in an MMO, there are plenty of great guilds out there for beginners and veterans alike. Start in a guild at least, there are so many people willing to help newer players even in competitive high-stakes games like Albion. Some guy posted a review saying most guilds require you to pay them to get in????? I've never seen this in my almost 2k hours, but maybe I haven't looked at enough trash/scam guilds.
With all that being said, the game is great. For me, I could never get into theme-park MMOs. I played Rust since legacy, and dabbled a bit in EVE online. I also played a lot of league back in the day. I like to think I've grown since then, but I digress. If you really want to compare Albion to anything else, it should be those three games. Take the full loot adrenaline based gameplay from Rust, use the moment to moment gameplay from league (isometric, 6 ability action combat w/ 2 consumables), and then take the economy aspect from EVE. Everything is player crafted and bought and sold on separate auction houses across the game world. Why separate? Why not OSRS Grand exchange style? Some continents/zones give only certain resources, and the cities near them give refining bonuses to mats found far away. This creates incentives to move around and find arbitrage opportunities. You can purely play economic PvP in this game if you want. Transporting goods is a very lucrative activity, and therefore ganking those goods is just as lucrative. The game is also a sandbox, so players more or less make the content for themselves. If you log on every day expecting organized groups for ganking/roaming/gathering/PvE in your guild, it might not work out so well. Try being a leader and being the change you want to see if no one is running a group. It won't be easy, you might get your friends killed a couple times, but you gotta learn somehow. Everyone starts at the bottom, and the only thing separating the good players from the bad are the ones who stick through the rough stuff and keep working at it.
Let me address some common complaints:
"The weapons are unbalanced!": Well, if you're considering the same activity, then yes. But there is large scale PvP/PvE in Albion and there is small scale. There is catching/ganking, there is escaping those people. There is gathering, there is solo play. Most weapons and armor are only good at one or two of those things, so what you end up with is a different sort of meta based on your group size. There's enough variation and frequent balance passes to address absolutely useless items as well, which results in these metas shifting sometimes.
"I can't gather past "x" tier, people keep gang fucking me!": Join a guild, go ganking with them, see how it's done. Then you'll know how to avoid it. There are plenty of gatherers that go without being killed gathering for months at a time. Personally, I've never been ganked while gathering T8 hides. I don't do it too often to be fair, but when I do I make sure I'm wearing proper escape gear and that I'm farming near safe territories.
"The game is pay to win!": There are two types of currency in Albion. Silver and Gold. Silver is used for pretty much everything, and you can buy gold with it on the in-game gold market. Gold is used to buy premium (gives more fame/exp, passive crafting points, etc.) as well as cosmetics, of which you can disable in the PvP zones if you want. Personally I've always been able to pay my monthly premium with silver, and I've been playing since steam release. On the note of people paying for gear with IRL money, In reality, the people who swipe their credit cards for gucci gear are way too afraid to leave the safe zones (almost negligible fame, you will never progress here). When they do, people see that they're juiced and pile on like a bunch of coked out hyenas. It's an amazing system. If you try to P2W in this game, I can almost guarantee you'll end up making someone else rich. You need mechanical skill and experience to truly be successful in PvP, gear quality only helps up to a point.
Lastly a word on the devs. These guys are seriously committed, and they've shown it time and time again, with the icing on the cake being this most recent update. There's too much for me to put into this review, but know this: they aren't going to give up on this game anytime soon, and it's slowly becoming more populated. This is nothing short of a marvel for MMOs today. Most start strong and fade quickly, but not here. I have great faith in this game and the developers, and they have some great content coming down the pipe for the next update.
Obligatory shout out to one of the chillest big tent black zone guilds- Conflict! Join today, and I'll personally take some time and answer questions for you that you may have. Alternatively, if we're full, send me a whisper in game @BeeRye. I'd be happy to give you a hand.
Thanks for reading!

So far, Albion isn't really a newbie-friendly game, but once you get some levels and experience up, you'll get the game to its full potential.
PROS
- Massive PvP battles that are really enjoyable. From open-world PvP, to large 100 people zerg vs zergs.
- Large playerbase, huge guilds, and plenty of things to do as a group
- Sandbox with no quests, but your quest is mainly to be the richest (i guess?), but really cool for me
- Free to play, lots of things to do even if you're not upgraded to premium
- Classless characters, meaning you can go any character, any build, anytime you want.
- Full loot PvP, as I previously mentioned, which makes the game alot more exciting and challenging
- Cross-platform support
- Microtransactions is pretty minimal to none, usually just spend $10 on 1 month of premium or even just earn ingame currency to get your first month of premium
- Conquering of cities, territories, castles, etc.
- Custom islands where you can have houses, farms, etc.
- HUD and UI is really great (for me)
- Most of the items ingame is player crafted
- Gives Diablo 2 and Runescape vibes, with a mix of some Dota 2
CONS
- NEEDS LOTS OF TIME INVESTMENT, it's really grindy to get higher tier items and rare stuff, took me a decent week to max out my gathering skill.
- Player-driven economy, inflation of items are inevitable, lots of players are shit and raises the tax to 999% in crafting stations, and most of the stations in major cities are owned by players and large guilds.
- NOT GOOD FOR SOLO PLAYERS, as a solo player myself, it's really fucking bad to play this game alone. With full loot PvP in the open world, you'll always go against 3 people or more.
- Guilds are controlling the game. In lots of places, guilds own most of the territory and would instantly kill anyone they meet that aren't their teammates.
- Only one server, which is NA. As a SEA player, and the vast majority of the players from EU, it brings lots of us in a disadvantage, especially in PvP
- Toxic af community lol
- Gameplay gets pretty repetitive unless you're in a big guild that normally starts wars and territory attacks/defense
- Really hard to start out as a newbie, unless you got a group of some sort
- Every fucking city is overcrowded, not good for people with low-end PCs even if it has Dota 2 graphics
TL;DR
Every single thing you do matters, large scale full-loot pvp, player driven economy with lots of unfair taxes and prices but mostly normal, you can be any class or equip any item at any time, yet it feels really nostalgic. Lots of frame and ping lag, especially if you're in SEA or EU or any other place other than NA. But a really good game so far, even as a sandbox, it feels like you always have something to do.

So, what to expect from this game?
Pros:
- Pretty reasonable file size for the game
- Quite fun to waste some of your precious time
- Easy to learn basic mechanics
- You hardly need to pay real life $$$ for in game currencies (just get ready to grind all the time)
- Runs well even if you have a potato PC
- One of the best F2P MMORPG
- Lots of guides on the internet on how to get started
- LOTS OF PVP
- Dungeon Raids
- Lots of active players
- Easy for new players to catch up with the veterans
Cons:
- Hard to master
- Guilds that camp on portals on the black zones (Full Loot PVP on all the time) that will gank on you and squeeze you dry
- GRIND ALL THE TIME
- Fixed camera angle (THIS SUCKS)
- No map autopathing (You either have to click on where you want to go, or just hold the left/right mouse button) can be frustrating because of the fixed angle and limited zoom option whereas the map is quite big (THIS SUCKS EVEN MORE!!)
- If you don't research on how the market works first, you can expect big profit loss even after you gathered for hours
- Toxic chat community (on the general chat)
- Scammers guild that preys on newbies (100% tax)
- No fast travel method (teleport only transport you to the black zone)
- You have to save up to 8.0 Million silver/ 3K Gold to get 30 days premium account, to get your own island which only costs 17.0 K silver (But it's worth it, and you only have to pay for it once) just get ready to farm for quite some time
Well, that's that from me, thanks for reading my review!
If you're the type of guy that likes grinding/farming then this a game for you and expect a lot of it!
If not, SHOO! Don't waste your time here, just trust me.
I recommended this game just because it's free to play and P2W is not really an option.
P.S : Please note that this only my personal opinion and I'm only 24 hrs on to this game

Spent most of my time fishing. I heard there was some other content or something in this game, no idea.

I decided to play Albion Online in these corona days. In the beginning, it was a fun game because I had a team that was playing the game with me. With the team, we did many things easily. We went to dungeons killed the bosses and player killers in the red and black zones. However, after 85 hours of gameplay, I realized that being good at this game is very hard. You have to give all your time to this game because in this game you're what you wear. For this reason, if you want to enhance one class you have to enhance items that require to wear. In addition to this, in the game also you can choose to do the gathering. For example, if you want to do mining you have to wear mining clothes. Therefore, it makes the game nearly endless. Always you can enhance yourself and for it, you have to give your time to the game. Moreover, if you want to good at the game you have to play with your friends, with your guild. Otherwise, you won't be able to improve yourself. Another problem with the game is the gathering system. One friend of mine was playing as a gatherer because he doesn't like PVP. However, after level up, the game pushed him to red and black zones that are opened to PVP. Therefore, he quit the game. I am recommending to you play this game if you have free time and a team. If you don't like PVP and you just wanted to do gathering you shouldn't play this game.

Get killed for the first time = "Welcome to Albion" achievement unlocked

After almost 900 hours in game i can say i've found many many ways to keep the game fun and if anyone here is complaining about not having fun because of the PvP zones then you're welcome to contact me through steam and i may be able to give you a hand at finding said fun in a PvP zone without having being the "Best geared Ganker" or the "Strongest person"
Many a times has my group managed to beat down on a large group of 25+ as a 8 man strong and that's where i find the most fun.
Contact me. I will do my best to help.