Jump to content

PeanutBrain

My thoughts on Atlas so far

Recommended Posts

My thoughts on Atlas at this point


Really enjoying the game so far but I wanted to share my concerns with current game as well as for the future. Also, please Grapeshot, always approach PvP and PvE as separately as possible.

Claiming: Right now I think the claim system works pretty well; however there is one major issue. There’s no safe way to allow others to build on your island which is going to lead to everyone locking their islands down.  For example, if you allow everyone to build, your islands will be trashed with structures, bases, and traps etc... And if you add someone to an alliance they can use the declare war feature to destroy you. I believe that in PvE you should either be able to set different rules for different islands or be able to allow certain company ID’s special building privileges.

The base will always be the endgame. Everything you do in the game will be directly tied to upgrading your base because everything else is always at risk of being lost. Tread very carefully with this mechanic. If PvE players lose their islands for any reason the backlash will be severe.

Sailing: Probably the best and most important part of the game. Lots of impressive things going on with this from a technical perspective but I want to address some of the very frustrating elements of it. I get the feeling that you guys are scared of ocean being empty and that’s understandable. Yet, right now the ocean is filled with annoying disturbances. Sailing needs downtime, there should be activities on the ship to keep sailing entertaining. Not to mention, purely sailing a massive ship you built from head to toe is very rewarding in of itself. 

Ships of the damned are annoying, you pass them constantly throwing you massively off course, increasing the already lengthy journeys to even longer ones. Most of them are fairly easy to destroy or outrun but still they keep players from creating their own fun while at sea. Fog isn’t really that bad on its own but paired with SotD it’s just another layer of annoyance. Lastly, cyclones are just awful. Having skills based around render distance is not a good idea. The cyclones literally spawn on top of you and occur ridiculously too often. A lot of players focus on getting annoyed with the wind but I feel like that’s only because of the annoyances they’re trying to dodge while sailing. If you want to encourage sailing you need to reduce the stress of doing so. Add more optional and explorative activities like robbing an NPC ship, or things like the sunken ships.

Problematic Design: I just want to quickly gloss over some big misc issues. 

- Getting destroyed by a SotD while loading into a new region
- Docking a Galleon is extremely annoying and even risky because the anchor is laughably short.
- Large boats having buggy issues with shallow water, sometimes flipping and taking massive damage for no reason.
- Treasure maps bugging out completely when the holder dies.
- Treasure maps spawning in extremely annoying hard to reach places with the same payout as easy to reach ones.
- New maps like Blackwood should be added to the world space as a region even if there needs to be some reworks.

Taming: The process is infinitely less time consuming than Ark but I wish that taming methods were actively designed to be more fun over difficult. Think of breaking a horse in Red Dead Redemption over kiting an animal into a circle of billboards and subjecting it to BDSM until you tame it.

Skills: Very convoluted and extremely annoying for a smaller company to work around. You guys really wanted to incorporate skills into every avenue of the game even in areas where it feels detrimental to the gameplay. Not everything needs to be allocated purely to skill points. Cooking recipes should be on the loot table for example.

Final Thoughts: I would never write something like this for a game I didn’t care about. Grapeshot/Wildcard are uniquely ambitious in their visions and put most triple a developers to shame. I see crazy potential for this game but please talk with the community before making big changes so we can give our input ahead of time. There’s massive investments involved from players, especially on official servers.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now

×
×
  • Create New...