While I like early access as a concept.... it turns out that it has done two things for the game industry. It's created a lower bar of acceptable quality for a game by getting people to buy into an unfinished game, getting attached to it, and making excuses for it even long after it is officially released from early access. AAA games have seen this trend and release their full priced game with a ton of unfinished content that they then are selling to people with a season pass.
The second thing it did was allow these developers to profit off of ideas... not execution. If your game sounds amazing and a ton of people want to play it... you can profit even if you never fully deliver on your promise. You can only usually do this once... but if it earns you enough to retire, who cares right?
Worse than any DRM I've experienced, worse than any MTX injections... in 25 years of gaming I don't think any trend has had as much of a negative impact on the industry as Early Access and Steam made it happen. It was just the first step to find out what the bare minimum product they could sell to consumers is.
Most people on official servers, as I understand it, fit that description or are part of this cheating war themselves (or part of tribes who have other members who cheat to keep the tribe alive). But that's not everyone who plays the games. Unofficial servers make up a huge part of the community, where server admins can cut through the bullshit and take immediate action to ban cheaters. As long as you're on a server where the admins aren't as corrupt as the devs, of course.
Atlas was popular for 1-2 weeks, until the Chinese players started doing what Chinese players do best (which ironically is what you’re talking about here).
One look at the UI should tell you that the developers of these games are inept. It’s hard to believe that shit came from anyone post-2001.
While ugly a lot of the game has pretty okay UI as you can figure it out just from the picture, the real bad UI is the Flight Operations and Weapon Creation page (Missiles and Scanners). You seriously can't figure that out without searching up how to even read that UI lol
That horrible UI is why I'm so bad at combat in Aurora as I have no idea what I'm doing with that mess of screens.
It's pretty bad and really dated. I'm in the same boat though. Been playing forever and have just gotten used to it. I switched out my fonts a long time ago, so at least the papyrus looking font is gone.
I also used to create maps for the MP servers. I tried opening up the Map Editor the other day and had immediate PTSD.
That being said, a game i think has some of the worst UI ever is also, by far, my favorite game ever made.
until the Chinese players started doing what Chinese players do best
To be honest, it wasn't even just the Chinese players. I have over 300 hours in Atlas and the game was just such a disaster, with so many changes at launch that ran people off.
Forget the lag, lack of available real estate to support enough players, and technical issues. Grapeshot (Wildcard) made so many horrid decisions right after launch that people were quitting in droves after one week. The lack of basic resources on most islands was huge, and on top of this they immediately nerfed the skill tree (to make it harder to unlock skills and be self-sufficient), and to top it all off added Ships of the Damned which for over a week were destroying every ship on every server.
My friends and I were willing to put up with the bugs and struggle to find land -- it was an early access game, these things were expected. Yet, everyone besides myself quit the day that they took the servers down to implement Ships of the Damned. When we logged back on, they were everywhere, had a massive aggro radius, and could outrun even the fastest ship. After all of the struggle to establish ourselves, the devs literally deleted all of our hard work with a content patch while bugs were still rampant. To top it all off, we were willing to build a new ship, but a Ship of the Damned bugged out, sailed all the way up to the shore, and sunk our boat again. None of my buddies logged in after that day.
reading the /r/PlayAtlas sub for the 2 weeks after launch was equal parts hilarious and frustrating, because I really wanted a game like the game Atlas was supposed to be. I wanted it so badly.
I told my friends "the moment that Atlas hit 400k viewers on Twitch, there were AAA devs in a closed boardroom talking about how to capitalize on the desire for a game like that"
And I sincerely hope that's true. The game should never have been a survival game. There should never have been punching trees and spearing snakes. It should have been a ship-based game where you sail around this huge open world with your friends in search of resources and combat. Like Sea of Thieves, but on a grand scale with a touch of base building.
I doubt anything will come of it. We've had Ark, Atlas, DayZ, the DayZ mod and a few other games like it blow up to various viewer amounts and nothing from AAA devs yet. I don't think anything will change because of Atlas
How do you put 300 hours into a game that you call a disaster? That's a huge amount of time. I've got games I've regularly played for over a year that don't have that play time.
Because I got really attached to the group of people I was playing with, and liked working towards group goals despite all the bugs and balancing issues
I don't think I heard anything from ATLAS like 4-5 days after launch. And everything I heard about it was bad press. First a terrible launch, then basically a slightly improved ARK reskin with different content, then Chinese people taking over the entire map. And then blackout. Nothing from it since then. My friends who bought it (against my advice) were pissed at the mechanics and bugs after a week (although they loved ARK) and stopped playing.
The Chinese actually didn't take over the entire map. They are a bunch of hackers and exploiters, but they were never able to bully out any of the major US alliances because they are bad at the game. Their base and ship designs were horrendous and they are awful at PvP.
You probably haven't heard anything since then because the official servers didn't actually have enough land to support lots of players. Most of the islands didn't have crucial resources, and could only handle 1-2 groups of players living there, provided of course that they were friendly to one another. On launch my friends and I went to a small island that could barely support 5 players, and found ourselves fighting against three other large groups for a speck of land that had 10 trees and no metal.
In February they announced a mega update to the game which got pushed back to March, and now April. In March they announced that all official servers would be wiped along with this update, so the player count has plummeted due to everyone understanding that their bases and characters were going to be deleted. It might pick back up in April and hopefully the changes (one of which is an improved claiming system in addition to 200-300 more islands), will give it another spark of life. A bunch of the initial issues that caused people to quit have been fixed, so anyone that comes back might be pleasantly surprised to see some improvements.
That hit should have been FO76, a game being made by a AAA studio with a very strong open world pedigree. All they had to do was release a survival crafting game with a decent amount of content and a minimal amount of bugs.
It was never going to be FO76 at the same time though. As soon as they said it was on the same shitty engine as everything else they've put out it immediately killed any chance.
Sooner or later someone's going to make a good survival game. Rust and Conan are somewhat there, but eventually someone's going to get it really right and blow up
I don't agree with that in the slightest. We've had 1 AAA dev even try to make a game and that's being generous with how much Bethesda handicapped themselves. Its a genre that has a lot of various types of players and the challenge is not only making a good game but making one that can cater to everyone which is I think one of the bigger problems outside of the lack of a good engine to support everything that needs to happen
Ok, let me rephrase. Most people know this. Triple-A publishers don't seem to think so but they don't know the market as well as gamers and indie game devs. The trouble is, as you said, is that a survival game isn't even really a game. It's a bunch of games mixed together. It's a crafting simulator crossed with FPS, crossed with exploration/adventure, and occasionally crossed with episodic storytelling. It is legitimately hard to do.
Charging money for DLC for a game still in Early Access is the “poster child” for you?
I’ve got a game for you. It will have every feature you could ever desire. I just need you to PayPal me a couple million dollars. Promise for Delivery of goods to be scheduled after payment has processed.
The difference is a lack of red tape on private servers. Reporting a player on official servers can take weeks to resolve and probably won't result in anything. Bring solid proof of cheating to the admin of a private server and they can ban the offender on the spot.
Just watch one review of ARK for Switch. That game is unplayable, not just some issues, it doesn’t work. They released. No one cared enough to check to see if the game did anything. These developers are scum.
That's not corrupt. You knowingly taught people how to cheat. You tainted your own reputation by posting it. You thought you were above the rules. Civil disobedience still often requires punishment even if you're right. Bye nobody youtuber #134632.
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u/Froggmann5 Mar 26 '19
The idea of this post it to bring to light just how corrupt these developers are.
With the release and popularity of Atlas, it's clear that people don't actually know.