Albion Online

Albion's thesis is that a virtual economy is only interesting if everything in it was made by a player. There are no vendor-sold weapons. Every sword, every set of armour, every potion in the game was gathered, refined and crafted by someone, and destroyed when its owner died in a red zone. That closed loop of production and destruction is what makes the markets real.

The progression system deserves credit for its elegance. There are no classes — your abilities come entirely from the gear you have equipped, and mastery is tracked per item line. Switching from a heavy melee build to a nature-magic healer means changing clothes and levelling that line. It removes the alt-character problem entirely.

Risk geography

The map is zoned by danger. Blue zones are safe. Yellow zones knock you down. Red and black zones are full loot — die and lose everything you carried. Reward scales with risk, so the best resources and the best content sit in the most dangerous territory, and the decision to venture out with good gear is a genuine one every time.

The mobile client is the underrated part: this is a full-featured sandbox MMO that runs properly on a phone, with the same servers and the same economy. The trade-off across the whole design is that the endgame belongs to guilds. A solo player has a decent time; a player in an organised guild fighting over territory has the game Albion was built for.