If you’re at all into fantasy MMORPG’s, Albion Online should be somewhere on your radar. I’ve fiddled around a bit in the closed beta and it’s definitely scratching all the right itches for me. If nothing else, the idea of playing the game on your PC/Mac, needing to go somewhere, and picking off exactly where you left off on your mobile device is super cool. I’m superbly reluctant to invoke comparisons of Ultima Online, but at least on the surface level, it feels pretty similar.

What sets Albion Online apart from a lot of these modern MMORPG’s is that it totally isn’t just a generic fantasy game with knights, armor, trolls, and all those typical tropes. Instead, they’re putting a ton of stock in fully fleshing out the lore side of the universe. They’ve got a full timeline on their site of history of the game’s universe, which segues into an actual book they’ve released in both paperback and eBook formats.

Even cooler than that, the book not only tells the tale of Albion Online’s world, but it also includes the adventures of some players and guilds from the actual game. It feels a little like fan service, for sure, but it’s also really neat. Stuff like this makes Albion Online feel worth getting excited for, as if they’re dumping so many resources into the game that they’ve even got people writing books about it… It seems like a good sign.

Albion Online has only been in closed beta for a couple months, but if you want to jump in right now you can buy one of their premium accounts, otherwise just hold on to your hats and keep an eye on TouchArcade for when the game is finally properly released.