Search the Community

Here are my suggestions that I have derived from my experience after playing ATLAS from its original launch: The game has some cool islands to go and explore. That it is until you begin exploring and quickly discover that each island is practically the same flavor, only their biomes make them different. There really is not much diversity in the predators and prey on all of the islands. It is almost a "Blah" feeling like all of the creatures feel bland and unoriginal and nothing is really that intriguing or challenging. The lions and wolves are too unrealistic in their behavior, making them erratic and extremely difficult to deal with up close. Arrow and bullets tend to miss them despite the fact that the shots were solid hits and despite that the arrows are still lodged deep into their head. Their movement is very unnatural and very erratic. Instead of a realistic jump, they actually defy physics and logic and seem to fly/teleport to their prey instead. I used to enjoy swimming in the oceans before the last patch was implemented to change the shark's behavior. Now, with maximum points invested in the "Improved Water Swimming Speed" skill, swimming in the ocean is an impossible notion, as the shark's swim speed has been increased too fast and the sharks will always catch you. Their aggro radius is also too large. This means that there are usually more then just one shark on your sorry, meek, and defenseless arse! The special islands that actually yield challenging, mythical monsters are again boring and offer nothing really in the way to make them such a challenge in the first place. There is no incentive to even go here unless you are farming for XP or Mythos. And these particular monsters are ONLY challenging because they are erratic and buggy as hell. The treasure maps are the ONLY dungeon equivalent in the game and they are once again, repetitive and boring. They offer the same kind of loot, gold, and experience but that is it beyond that. They really should be sending us to cool underground caverns, castle ruins, caves, underwater grotto, some really cool and intriguing encounters/notable locations instead of just the boring and "same-old-same-old" island settings. The skills in the skill trees are not really very useful and should really force players to invest their points in a dedicated build for their particular play-style. As there are now, there are so many useless skills we HAVE to invest in just to get to the ONE useful skill you needed and they are so cheap that most players have skills in many different trees making all the players to play with the SAME builds. The combative system is really worthless as the sword, mace attacks will lock your character into an unforgivably long attack animation and in a PVP game, this is extremely detrimental rendering them useless. The grappling hooks allow players to merely throw it to the ground and then you can simply drop off cliffs and high places without any fear of taking fall damage. The grappling hook uses no stamina and one can simply hang off of it all day without ever losing stamina. A player can use sprint and jump in a bunny hop combination as they repel themselves across vast distances (entire islands) before losing all of their stamina if the jumps are timed correctly. There are several skills from the skill trees that do NOT work as they are described: From the Archery skill: "Strong Arm" is not working correctly. I have tried both with 0 points invested and with the maximum points into the highest tier and my archery shots still seem to produce the same damage results even in their usual critical shot locations are the same values. From the Music and Dance tree: The skill descriptions and lack of information about this entire skill line make this tree a complete mystery to most players. These songs and dances don’t add much to the game to be worth their point investment. I’d recommend redesigning these to be more useful to players. From the Hand to Hand tree: Brass knuckles are uses as both fists are lunged out in rapid succession but their durability drops extremely too fast for this as during one or two combative encounters they become broken and then require to be repaired in a smithy. Additionally, their damage output is not really on par with the other melee weapons to even be a viable combat option. From the Archery tree: "Strong Arm" shot does not actually enhance the bow's damage output as it describes. Invested points in the tier do not add any more damage than bows would deal without the invested points. From the Beastmaster tree: "Stealth" needs to be re-coded to allow the player to become invisible from aggressive creatures. Right now, there is NO difference in the line-of-sight radius with predators. They always aggro just the same as they do with or without the points wasted in the Stealth skill. The Throwing knives need an increase to their damage output. As a consumable, they are too expensive and deal too little damage to be worth their current investment. I recommend adding a skill to the skill tree to enhance their damage, range, or make throwing a secondary attack and allow players to dual-wield them as daggers that do melee damage instead of just their ranged attack that consumes them. Would be nice to see a skill for stealth vs humans. Would be nice to see a skill for higher and longer leaps. Would be nice to see a skill for damage mitigation or hit avoidance, such as parry, deflect, or dodge. Would be nice to see a skill added to create and bait our weapon tips with a poison of some type, such as a debilitating or deadly poison. Every night I build a few ships and the following day they are either nearly stolen or sunk. From a player's perspective, this is a major game breaker. Makes us NOT want to continue to waste our hard work and time. The Cyclones are not acceptable. They behave like heat sinking missiles, stick on you like glue, always move into your path so you cannot steer clear of them, and they perpetually re-form themselves to envelop your ship. This makes them extremely unrealistic and the damage they inflict too great and I have lost so many sloops to them it is not even funny. The paint palettes should consist of actual colors from objects within the game such as rocks, grass, lakes, dirt, trees, and leaves. The current color pallet available does not allow for adequate camouflage. The color palette is very limited in scope and does not provide logical colors that match any of the game's surrounding environmental palettes. Also, most structures and materials will NOT reflect the suggested color and often times they seem to change once applied or do nothing at all to alter their appearance! The saddles for players' tamed creatures need to provide an armor value or there should be an option to craft armored barding that does. To enhance the PVE side of your game, you might want to consider adding in AI pirates building their own structures, sailing their own ships, fortifying their own defenses, and planning their own sieges on player-made bases. How about creating more unique locations and dungeon encounters employing lots of different denizens such as ghosts, skeletons, zombies, pirates, primitive tribes, dogs, slimes, kobolds, orcs, mermen, and goblins to name just a few? And would recommend avoiding designing all of the dungeon encounters in the same fashion. I sure hope you consider this Grapeshot as I would really like to see the game continue to evolve into a solid MMO blockbuster. Good luck.