I swear we had a thread on this but for the life of me I couldn’t find it.
Atlas is an open world Pirate MMO from the creators of Ark: Survival Evolved. I was skeptical if this was a “MMO” in the sense that Ark is called a “MMO” by some people, but it sounds like a might be more massive than that game was.
RPS has an interview regarding the game here.
The game launches in Early Access today (Dec 19th).
Sounds awful based on how Ark is still a performance hog on even great PCs.
This game sounds fantastic on paper.
Developer pedigree should matter here. ARK is hot garbage, so I have unbelievably low expectations for this.
Did you know that they ported ARK to the Switch? It looks awful and still runs like crap.
I mean, was anyone expecting a Switch version to run better? :) Point taken, though!
It always drove me nuts that Ark never really got polished or optimized. They’re on the Unreal engine for crying out loud, it should feel great!
One huge connected world sounds pretty cool. I guess you could say Eve Online is like that, but not really. Using thunderstorms to shepherd players around when it gets too crowded in one area seems like a neat device.
I’m sure the game will have lots of problems but I am definitely in on this early just for the experience.
Yeah, I’m curious how the “one huge world” thing is in practice. The developer said it would take 30 hours to sail from one end to the other with favorable winds, but how does it actually work? Is there fast travel with congested hubs where everyone is at, making the game much smaller in actuality?
I have a thing with MMOs. The genre went to shit for me when everything stagnated post-WoW, but it used to be my favorite type of game before that. I like to at least tour each one and see what works/doesn’t work for me. And new MMOs are pretty rare these days, so I’ll likely give this a shot even if it’s just as a tourist.
delayed 2 days
looks amazing, they’re going full ambition on this one. I wonder how much of this works on day 1
I spent some time observing this entertaining launch, so I can give a quick summary.
The game launched with no servers up. A couple of hours later there was a new client patch and the servers started coming up, but went down 20 minutes after for a server side patch.
This is where it gets interesting.
It goes without saying that most of everyone cannot log in, as all those starting zones are capped. Those who are lucky either crash a minute later or are frozen in place as the game lags/rubberbands too much to allow actual movement.
But even more telling is the actual map:
https://map.playatlas.com/
It didn’t take too long for people to discover that many of those islands are actually the same one but rotated. So essentially the same island copy/pasted across the map. (Not sure if then there are random spawns or stuff that could at least create a variation)
To top it all, you can get into Ark options menu with a gamepad through a poorly hidden menu button:
If you could make a game with this setting, and Blizzard levels of polish and depth, it would be amazing and I’d probably play it forever. It would be awesome if this wasn’t another 10000000 miles wide, and 1 inch deep type of game.
The developers of Ark are the last people I would trust to make an MMO work. Despite all the money they’ve made the game continues to run like garbage on basically every platform. The recent Switch release is so low res it looks like pointillism, and it still runs at like 12 frames per second.
I was looking at a close up of the map and I noticed not only the islands repeat many times across the whole thing, but even that they copied the exact same zone.
The yellow squares show two identical sectors.
…Then I looked more closely and noticed that even in THE SAME sector you have the same island one in front of the other.
EDIT: Nope, I’m stupid. ALL FOUR are the same island.
(in the meantime the official twitter is advertising a private server company just to take advantage of people not being able to log into an official server…)
caveat emptor
Ah, this is such a shame, this is such a great environment for an MMO…I would be so all over this if it was good.
This does not a ‘launch’ make.
I did lol, however.
Is this a more serious version of Sea of Thieves?
Do you mean “serious” as in theming? Because I hear it involves things like ship-to-ship cavalry charges and shooting yourself out of a cannon to fly by enemy ships with a glider, so…no.
This looks like ARK in a pirate skin. And janky as hell, as far as I can tell.
I like the idea, but I don’t really trust Studio Wildcard to pull this off.
This is all you need to see of this game. The UI is a pure work of art. If you thought Ark was awful and it couldn’t get any worse, this is the proof there’s no bottom:
In product marketing there’s a concept known as the minimum shippable product. This is the list of features that the marketing people give to the production people saying that these things need to be in the game no matter what before you ship the game. This is important because about 60% of the way through production the devs will start cutting features and they often decide what to cut based on what’s the most complicated or time-costing thing, not what people need in games to play.
It seems that the devs of Atlas didn’t have an MSP document and literally just shipped whatever was ready before Christmas.
If a dev team showed me what I’m seeing on Twitch, I’d say it has a lot of promise and as a proof of concept you’ve gotten me there, but you’ve got about a year of work to finish it up.
Early Access really just screws everything up. Paying $30 for this is insane.
