I said "A" modern UO, not "The" modern UO. Guess what UO had back in the day? Items that were crafted by players, a grand total of MAYBE 15 resources + reagents, mobs that were pretty much identical and the ability for characters to do whatever they felt like doing instead of being limited by a pre-selected class or "you can only pick 2 of the 12 trade and gathering skills".
Then I take back what I said, owing to your clarification: you're wrong as usual.
UO had items crafted by players. So what? So does practically every MMO. But UO also had item drops; Albion doesn't: every usable item is obtained solely through crafting because the devs read somewhere that mob item loot is bad in a sandbox game.
In keeping with the homogenized nature of the game, raw materials are tiered like everything else and producing a refined material requires refined mats of all the preceding tiers because the devs heard somewhere that it'd bolster the economy of a sandbox game. In the world of Albion, steel is smelted from bronze bars because the ends justify the dubious means and fuck making sense.
As for mob diversity, UO had at least 50 distinct mob types. Each mob of a given type didn't have the exact same stats, either. But Albion has only 4 mob factions and some resource critters and all mobs of a type have the exact same stats. There is no variability in this or any other aspect of the game. It contributes to the uniformly sterile nature of the world, if you can even call a graph of copypasted zones with predefined exit points (like the solar systems in EVE Online, the only comparison that holds) a world.
Finally, despite not having levels or classes, the character advancement system in conjunction with the brainlessly simplistic mechanics makes for some of the most restrictive gameplay I've ever experienced in an MMO. You literaly "are what you wear", to use the devs' buzzphrase, and nothing more. It's meant to be some RPG/MOBA hybrid but it's the worst of both worlds. You're locked to a total of 6 abilities (you can't swap equipment in combat, thus you can't change your abilities) and all but one or two of them generally have cooldowns between 10-60 seconds. I'd take classes over this shit any day of the week if it meant the combat was more about decisions made
during the fight than
before it.
Really the only thing Albion shares in common with UO is the reputation system the devs tried to plagiarize from it.
What do you expect from other MMOs that make you feel any differently?
Most other MMOs in the same vein (Albion is
not a sandbox game despite the devs touting it as one) attempt to mask the fact, however inadvertently, that they're checklist grinding simulators, but Albion doesn't because its devs are too clueless to realize that the directive is to create something fun first.
The game is garbage and there's no salvaging it because it's made for the mobile generation by a group of incompetent amateurs not much older or wiser. Six months post-release the only people left playing it will be a scattered contingent of eurotrash manchildren with anime avatars reposting memes and talking shit to one another on the forums.
If saying this means I'm mad or rustled, so be it.
