A month of fun! - FEB 2022

January was largely a month of fun with videogames. I did work on my story ideas here and there, and also on updating my entries to the 1000 Paintings here and there. But most of my time was spent on Albion Online.

Albion Online is a free to play player vs player massively multiplayer online role playing game, or a F2P PVP MMORPG. None of the game content is locked behind any payment wall, so that's why it's free to play.

The developers make money from players buying premium subscriptions or in-game premium currency for cosmetic items.

The focus of the game is players fighting other players. There are player vs environment elements (PVE); in fact you could play the game totally just with the PVE content and not get bored. For me, I found the PVP much more intense and engaging. While doing PVE content out in the world you can get attacked by hostile players acting as roving criminals. You can also choose to fight for one of the cities in the game and take territory out in the world. This is mostly what I have been doing, and it has been frenetic, with wildly varying army sizes that form naturally from the players online at the time. Sometimes we are vastly outnumbered by the enemy, sometimes it's an even fight. Sometimes it looks like the whole zone is flooded with our number and the fight becomes a large scale battle.

From the massive battles I mentioned, it's probably easy to see how Albion Online is massively multiplayer online. In terms of the RPG aspects, the role playing is still there, as you determine the path your character takes into what fighting profession you want to level up most.

As a tribute to the month of fun with Albion Online I did manage to create one more painting for my 1000 Paintings. Here is my character resting next to my mount. In the game I have a horse. In line with the sci-fi theme of my 100 Other Worlds collection, I made my mount a hoverbike instead.