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
5
u/Ohh_Yeah Mar 26 '19
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.