boomervoncannon

*Shoots Realist* Wait. Are we *not* supposed to shoot the messenger? I get confused. "Don 't shoot the messenger." "Walk in a straight line with your arms up and out to either side while looking at me." "Don't put turpentine on my waffles." "Never come back to the zoo after what you did." People are always barking instructions. It's hard to keep them all straight.

Any time one reads "people want/don't want x" on a gaming forum, it should always be read as "I want/don't want x" and nothing more. The notion that any one person knows for certain what a majority of players wants in any game with more than a dozen people they know personally is an absurd one. Even if what they are saying is reflected by a majority of posters to that same forum, it is not even close to a majority of players as typically around 10 percent or less of a game's playerbase posts to forums.

No. He’s trying to say he got his hand cut off. https://images.app.goo.gl/6xVjWtZicPenJ6BeA

I am probably guilty of understatement when I say that those are the best screenshots I have seen in months. Classic.

Lady Nancy Astor (thoroughly scandalized): Winston! You’re drunk! Winston Churchill: Yes Madam, but in the morning I’ll be sober and you’ll still be ugly. (They despised each other.)

You leave my egg nog and garlic flavored creamer out of this. You take your coffee however you like it, and I’ll make mine how it suits me.

Ed Zachary. I walled off an entire island one time as a dressing room for the Swedish bikini team (little known fact, the current team are all very tall, and are often mistaken for the Swedish national women’s basketball team. To the observant eye, the swimwear is how to tell them apart.) I’ve also walled off an island so that my close personal friend Josh Brolin could have a place to paint frescos. Not many people are aware of his passion for fresco painting, but that’s because most people don’t get to be close personal friends with Thanos. That’s right, I’m friends with the mad titan and you’re not.

Off the top of my head, I can think of 2: http://www.fanniemae.com/portal/index.html http://www.freddiemac.com/ For explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short

Unsurprising given the incoming wipe, as has already been pointed out. I personally have yet to watch a single twitch stream of anything ever. I love games, but the notion of watching others play games merely for the sake of spectating is not something that appeals to me. I will watch the occasional youtube vid to learn how to do something specific in a game, but that's about it. The whole notion that there are large numbers of people who do enjoy this sort of thing I find frankly a depressing comment on the state of h sapiens, kind of like how I was horrified that The Sims was a big hit, given that it's just a game of people doing ordinary everyday life things.

Kudos for injecting something positive into a frustrating situation. Well said sir.

That's a legitimate point, but here's another to consider: The defining act of piracy, the thing that makes a pirate a pirate, is the act of attacking and seizing commercial cargo vessels. It seems odd that GrapeCard™ would produce a game that they themselves describe as pirate oriented, albeit with a fantasy twist, then leave the single most defining thing a pirate does out of gameplay. Obviously the game is not considered only a pirate game, that much is clear, but it could be argued it's hard to consider it much of a pirate game without including this element at all. It's absence is certainly a headscratcher imo.

Given that the game is barely 100 days from an announced 2 year EA launch, I think you and I have a different understanding of the word old. The game certainly has it's flaws in abundance, but frankly if you are using the word old this soon, then even playing a game in the early stages of a long EA period, when content is at it's thinnest and new content is added slowly as the game's core systems are reworked, is probably not going to be your thing. This isn't a criticism, as I'm taking a break myself (Satisfactory is awesome, for anyone wondering), just an observation.

"can you guess what abilities they’ll have?" Not sure what abilities they will have, but guessing one of the abilities they won't have is right click to make announced content release on announced release dates. Personally I'm hoping one of the creatures will have a special ability that will allow me to target the devs and prevent them from announcing dates for content release, since those dates are never met and the development team just continues to shoot themselves in the foot by even giving dates, perpetuating their own self inflicted negative reputation in this regard.

I would argue that it is more sandbox than theme park. They may put more theme park elements into it going forward, but at the moment it is definately not theme park. There are no linear quests or other hallmarks of theme park MMO's. There are two things that muddy the waters a good bit here. One is how early in Atlas's development cycle we still are, as theme park elements can certainly be added going forward. Another is the fact they are calling Atlas a survival MMO, which is a thing that has never been done before, so it could be argued that Atlas doesn't really fit into any pre existing categories very well. Ultimately what matters most is that what they have attempted to offer has met a decidedly negative response from the gaming community overall. Perhaps the fact the game does not easily fit into traditional genre categories is one of the things people fundamentally don't like about it. I have seen calls on these boards for changes that would make Atlas more theme park oriented, and I have seen calls for changes that would make it more sandbox. Sometimes when you make a thing no one has ever made before, you come up with a new thing people didn't even know they wanted til you made it. Sometimes you come up with a thing nobody wants. So far Atlas seems to be the latter rather than the former.

I wasn't even addressing what Atlas is or is not. I was addressing your incorrect use of the terms.

Sorry man but you're demonstrating a lack of understanding of the terms sandbox and theme park here as they are used in reference to MMO's. Saying MMO and sandbox shouldn't be compatible is like saying Honda and Civic shouldn't be compatible. Sandbox is a type of MMO, in contrast to theme park, which is another type of MMO. Theme parks are called theme parks because the interaction with the environment is at least somewhat structured. Players go from ride to ride in a generally linear and structured way (quests, instances, dungeons, etc.). In a theme park MMO, one can sometimes choose the order of which ride to go on, but the rides themselves are on rails and have linear progression. In a sandbox, there is very little linear progression and even the player's choice of what to spend time on is very non directed and nonlinear. The defining difference is largely the degree to which the player is able to impact the game world around them. In theme park it is to little or no degree. Sandbox to a higher and sometimes much higher degree. So it is inaccurate to say that MMO's have structure and sandboxes don't. A better way to phrase what you're trying to express would be that theme park MMO's have structure and sandboxes don't. If you're not unsure whether this is the way the terms are genearally used, here is a link to a reddit post that outlines and describes the differences:

Not sure how you can say that’s the point and then make a statement which directly contradicts the point. An FPS game with zero players is still an FPS type game. An MMO with no players is still an MMO, it’s just a failed one.

MMO is a genre designation like FPS or simulator. The number of players per sever speaks to the game’s success or failure but not whether it is considered an MMO for design and genre purposes, which is the context here. Atlas is an MMO by virtue of the fact it is designed with massive numbers of players in a same game world in mind. The fact such numbers are not present doesn’t change this.

*nods knowingly*

Personally I am trying out Satisfactory, which went into EA yesterday from the guys who made goat simulator (the trailer for goat simulator is one of those things I go back and watch again every six months or so just to remind myself of how awesome it is all over again.)

No.

This. Realist you need to check your understanding of the terms sandbox and theme park. Atlas at present is most definately a sandbox MMO and is most definately not the first.

Yes. Useless!

In honor of the devs and their long standing tradition of (almost) never putting anything out on time, perhaps the greatest song ever written about time and it's fleeting nature. Ladies and gentlemen, Pink Floyd:

*throws everything into a genre bucket* *dumps the genre bucket over Alan Rickman's grave in honor of his memory* One last thing, anyone who hasn't seen Eagle Eye should. It was an incredibly thoughtful, well crafted film that examined the ethics and morality of drone warfare to show that sometimes there are no good choices, just trying to choose between which option you think will be less awful in the end. The film is dedicated to Rickman's memory because he was in it but died prior to theatrical release. A fitting epitaph to a true professional who took his craft seriously and mastered it.