Atlas: The aftermath of a surprise launch.
It seems like yesterday Brendan Sinclair of GamesIndustry.biz sat down to discuss the surprise launch of Atlas with co-creative directors Jeremy Stieglitz and Jesse Rapczak.
First what is Atlas?
At The Game Awards 2018, Studio Wildcard announced Atlas, a massively multiplayer online game featuring pirates. According to them, the game was 1,200 times larger than Ark and could host 40,000 players in the same game world. To develop Atlas, Studio Wildcard had set up a sister studio, Grapeshot Games, and run a one-year-long recruitment phase to ensure that development on it was not coming at the expense of Ark.
I remember reading Brendan’s article and agreed with all the pro’s and con’s of this strategy which are worthy of a recap.
“It can also be beneficial for smaller teams and people that don’t have big marketing budgets to come out in the biggest way possible and get people into the game and playing it rather than just a little murmur of ‘This thing’s coming’ and later a ‘Please remember me, here we are now.’” Of course, that focus has a cost of its own. For example, the surprise launch meant that the team is launching an ambitious MMO without ever having run an open beta test.
“I’m sure the launch will be challenging,” Stieglitz said. “They always are. It’s an MMO-scale game and this is our first one. Ark was putting a foot in the water, this is jumping into the deep end… We’ve scale-tested this as much as we can. The one thing we haven’t done that would have been useful but wasn’t part of the plan is an open beta period to really stress test these systems. We’ve stress tested them with automation tools, but there’s nothing like getting 40,000 actual, live players into your game to see how they can break it.”
Many of us remember the impact that “human” stress test of 40,000 players, and BOY we certainly did break it. Systems like the fountain of youth were implemented which created a overload of ships and gamers all surging for the goal of rejuvenating their age, leading to 1000’s of ships and angry monsters showering the small island with chaos.
The official servers became plagued with the “Hackers” as dupes of items and gold, and exploitation of the mechanics of the game to sink ships became a major pain point for the community. Eventually this ended as an upside down economy, overload of stress on the servers with items, and finally a complete purge of the game, which many of us veteran gamers know is simply part of the evolution of an early access game.
But the shining star team Grapshot Games not only responded with a clean slate, they addressed the exploits, reworked the balance of the fountain of youth, added control systems to prevent fleets of ships loitering the golden age islands and more. To further ice the cake the team added bonus weekends of double experience, taming, and gold were introduced.
The teams vision for the game originally was to promote players to work in large companies but realized some of us just don’t play nice together. The team again went to the table and added more islands, lowered the points required to own an island, and other new features like automation as well. To everyone's amazement it was the player run company alliances which proved more powerful than the large companies at drawing players together.
For those player that just refuse to play in a community they added a single player version of the game with an optimized map just for single player (Blackwood).
As the game continues to develop in Early Access there are still outstanding issues centric to pvp, vs pve and single player, and Grapeshot Games continues to address them in the least impactful way which would require a purge of the player data. Dollie (as we all know her) Community Manager and Live Services Team had this to say.
During the highly iterative development cycle of EA, there will be times when we need to ask ourselves when big changes that may affect the current playerbase are best placed to go through. Does this need to happen now in order to facilitate future plans? Can it happen later? How can programmers work around it, is it even possible? They can be tough decisions and, whilst we do respect players time investment and progress, we also keep our eye on our long term plans for improving the overall experience and gameplay which can, at times, involve some sweeping changes and tough choices as a Studio. I do hope that sharing a bit of a roadmap in the near future and keeping players aware of the longer term goals can help our players feel in the loop on why certain decisions may or may not be made. I do believe that the majority of players can be understanding of decisions that may be unpopular in the moment if there is transparency in regards to how that decision facilitates progress in the game’s development holistically.
This month a Public Test Realm was added for players to help test and the developers will be hosting a live stream at the end of the month to discuss Atlas going forward, multiplatform, and an open QA session.
You can get all the details on PTR at the link below:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/834910/announcements/detail/1600386707029940552
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