Dear Albion Community,



With the midseason patch out the door and everything for Steam ready and prepared it's finally time to reveal Albion’s next content update: Merlyn!





Goals for the Merlyn Update



The first major focus of the Merlyn update is the royal continent and its economy.



While making Caerleon the central hub for the red zones and outlands during beta has made PvP and GvG readily available for all, it has at the same time harmed Albion’s local economy and the relevance of the five other main Royal cities. With the Merlyn update, we will address this by massively boosting the Local Economy and Trade.



Each royal city will get a special bonus for refining a particular resource, and on top of that, will get special bonuses for crafting certain types of gear. Caerleon won’t have any of these specializations and will hence act as an all-around/fallback option.



In addition to that, we’re improving the resource distribution to make these cities the best place in the world to gather mid-tier resources of their particular biome, particularly in their enchanted state. At the same time the amounts of these resources found in the Outlands will be reduced. This will make the biomes much more relevant for gathering.



Both these changes will heavily impact the flow of resources and materials throughout the game world, make the economy far more local and encourage transport and marketing trading.



To facilitate that market trading, we’re updating and heavily improving the marketplace interface, making it much easier to trade, and in particular, manage buy and sell orders for more effective trade.



But hold on, this is Albion right? Where’s the PvP in that? This is where Faction Warfare comes in. Each main biome city will represent one out of five city factions for Albion, and as it so happens, they are all at war with each other. If you decide to join up with a faction, all players in other factions will be your enemy, no matter where they are, and you can kill them (or be killed) without any penalty - yes, even in the safe zones and with no reputation impact. This will drastically boost PvP - in particular, solo and small scale, around the game world.



As a reward, when being part of a faction, you’ll earn faction points which you can exchange for special resources and mounts. The resources will be used in particular for crafting special bags and capes - which, unlike the current capes in the game - will have meaningful stats and passive abilities that actually influence gameplay. Effectively, we are turning capes into a proper item slot with this change.



That’s not all: as part of faction warfare, you can raid and conquer opposing factions' outposts for special rewards. And you can do trade runs for your faction, also for a reward, but for these you’ll have to venture into an opposing faction’s territories and get back alive, otherwise your trade goods are lost.



For the faint of heart: don’t worry, if you do decide not to join any of the five factions, you’ll be neutral and faction warfare will not directly affect you, also meaning that safe zones will continue to be as safe for you as before.

Season 3 Changes



Even before releasing the Merlyn update, we will bring exciting changes to Outland gameplay, just in time for the start of Season 3.



Here, a key concern for us is to reduce snowballing in the Outlands and make them more accessible for a larger number of guilds.



To achieve this, we will rebalance the energy amounts siphoned by territories in the different sub-continents, making the progression from Anglia to Mercia less severe. While Mercia will of course still be by far the best place to be, the difference won’t be as strong as it is right now. In addition to that, we’ll introduce a soft gear cap for GvG fights on the Royal Continent, hence making it easier for newer guilds to get a foot in the door here.



And finally, we’ll introduce an item overcharge feature. This will temporarily boost the power of your items, however, also carry the risk of the item trashing when the overcharge ends. This allows players with cheaper gear to compete with higher end players by overcharging their lower power gear. Of course, you can also overcharge expensive gear to counter this, but there is a good chance that it will be very hard for you to sustain in the long term. Hence, with this measure, the effective power gap between wealthy and less wealthy guilds is narrowed. And on top of that, gear breaking is always great for the in-game economy to continue to flow.



Stay tuned for more



I hope you’re as excited as we are about the contents of the Merlyn update and the changes it will bring to the game. We’ll be sure to get into more depths about each feature in our Dev Talk videos as we get closer to the release of Albion’s fourth major content update!



Stay tuned!