[BLOG] ATLAS: Early Access Start and Ongoing Play Diary

All MMO's, P2P and F2P... As MMO's get more interest and we have shows dedicated to them, or lots of news posts, we will add new sections dedicated to them
Post Reply
Darsch
Blogger
Posts: 3
Joined: 22 Jan 2018, 18:45

[BLOG] ATLAS: Early Access Start and Ongoing Play Diary

Post by Darsch »

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »
ATLAS: The ultimate survival MMO of unprecedented scale with 40,000+ simultaneous players in the same world. Join an endless adventure of piracy & sailing, exploration & combat, roleplaying & progression, settlement & civilization-building, in one of the largest game worlds ever! Explore, Build, Conquer!


[New reviewer Darsch will be taking on ATLAS, the new MMO from Grapeshot Games, in an ongoing diary of gameplay, join us in Discord if you're playing and chat about your experiences! ~Lonesamurai]



Image



ATLAS. The pirate survival MMO I never knew I needed, surrounded by controversy over its rough early access launch rendering it unplayable for many players. Then there are game files which are copied from ARK Survival Evolved and its expansions. Many people believed upon this revelation that the game was just an ARK asset flip. Players bemoaned the “launch” saying the game was not ready. More on this in a moment first I want to tackle the ark asset flip accusations.



Image



What is Atlas? For starters it sure as hell is not ARK. The only thing the same about the two are shared game file names, the survival theme, and game engine. Ark had stat points and engrams which are just blueprints you learned to be able to craft items, Atlas has skill trees that modify everything about your character, unlocks special abilities, teaches you how to make things, and unlocks additional skills lines, while forcing you to specialize. For example my character unlocked the bow skill line as well as the taming skill line from the basic survival skill line. From there I went down the bow skill tree learning how to make fire arrows and zipline arrows and how to do the special attack penetrating shot which penetrates armor and hits all mobs in a straight line. These special abilities are called feats and are something ark does not possess. Atlas is not an asset flip, all the art assets are new, new game mechanics such as managing your vitamin levels, having to catch the wind with your sails at the correct angles to even be able to move your ships and raft are all new, the files sharing the same name as ARK’s I can completely dismiss as Atlas feels so much different.



Image



“Well the game was launched incomplete, broken, buggy, and laggy!” some would say. They are just plain wrong and ignorant of what early access means. So time to get this off my chest, early access is a fucking paid alpha people, its an incomplete game sold at a discount to get money to continue development and test the game! The game has not even officially launched yet, that won't be for another two years as the devs have said in multiple interviews.



Image



Yes the game’s early access start was terrible with server pings of 250 ms, terrible frame rate , and some game breaking bugs. The devs worked non stop on the game, some putting in 24 hours a day even to get this game playable. The servers have 120 ms ping still on official servers but I have not experienced any more lag or frame drops. Considering everything wrong and that they did numerous patches the first week that we went from version 1.0 to 7.0 and higher now is astonishing and the devs even apologized for the the rough early access start. I have never in all my years been this impressed and humbled by a game dev team, color me impressed. The was playable on the 27th of December 2018. On top of all the hard work they were doing on their own game servers they helped groups like TwitchRP set up and fix their own private servers



Image



The devs have gone above and beyond the call of their duties, worked endlessly on the game, and care about their players and game. They continue to fix things and balance things while trying to give us the best play experience possible for a game still in the development stages and in testing. Also this game is fucking great.



Image



ATLAS is available now in Early Access on STEAM - https://www.playatlas.com/







Keep an eye here for more news and play diary’s as we dive more into the game



~Darsch
Post Reply