Albion Online vs Rend
Albion Online
Albion Online is an absolutely magnificent sandbox style MMORPG that recently went into its summer alpha stages and despite not being fully completed and released yet, it’s an incredible game that puts complete control in the players’ hands and delivers a full-fledged experience that games are rarely able to provide.For instance, the game doesn’t restrict you by imposing a class on you right from the get-go. Instead, you get to develop your character and mold him as you wish. This freedom in character customization makes the game’s PvP quite interesting because you’ll never know which skill sets your opponent will have. Its combat system is also pretty impressive and feels to be a lot more skill-based rather than the common hack-and-slash.
Being a sandbox game, you can build anything you want – most likely a shelter though – using the resource you’ve painstakingly harvested from the game environment. You can even craft items and furniture to be placed within your home, and of course, add some defenses so nobody would be crazy enough to try breaking in your place.
Albion Online is, without a doubt, an amazing MMORPG that fans of games like Minecraft would enjoy. It may not be voxel-based, but many of the game aspects does bring the latter game to mind... a lot.
Rend
Rend is an up-and-coming, Nordic-themed, team-based survival game that is set in a wild and ruthless, fantasy world filled with fantastic creatures, where only the strongest are able to ascend to the realms of the gods. In this game, players are separated into their respective factions at the beginning. They are then given the freedom to explore the many biomes and harvest resources from the environment whether solo or co-operatively. The resources obtained can then be used to craft better weapons and tools or can be reinvested into the faction stronghold to fortify it from potential attacks from players from a rival faction and to advance your base just so you can unlock new technologies. Players have their own skill systems and talent trees as well, and these are the main ways for a player to customize and tweak their characters to their liking.The ultimate goal of the game, however, is to reap as many warrior spirits as you can by battling and defeating rival players and deposit the souls at the Divinity Stone in the middle of your faction base, that is if you're not slain while carrying such precious loot. Somewhat similar to grand strategy games, Rend is more of a continual game. It has game cycles of 2 to 3 months, in which the winning faction of each cycle will get a nice pile of rewards at the end of a cycle.
Rend has a really unique take on the survival genre and this might just give the game the fuel it needs to rise to the top. The game is currently in Alpha and its release date is still TBD.