Sea battles, pirate romance and all this with good graphics. What could have gone wrong? It seemed that there shouldn’t be any problems, the developers have a very cool destructive wave 5e project behind them, in which people have spent thousands of hours and are still playing. Let’s try to unearth the chest with the dead.

First meeting

It’s been a long time since I abandoned ARK, having played almost two thousand hours. And then a new survivalist, and even about the pirates. There are few projects on a pirate theme, and there are only a few good ones. For me, the best ones are Black Flag and Risen 2.

I started playing Atlas from early access, as soon as the servers were launched and forward, because I was waiting for this game. At an early stage (and even now, probably) there were a lot of bugs in the game. It would be more correct to say that the game was empty. There were no animals needed for the recipe of resources, they often threw them onto the desktop, textures were not loaded, fps drawdowns and a bunch of all the charms of early access. But I was ready for this and gradually, through the pain, I recognized the game.

Soon, the game was brought into more or less working condition. The settling of the islands began, and a large construction project began. I played alone, friends on the arch played singles and later thought to join. I like to build and having found a good place, I plunged into work. I turned on a podcast or music in the background and ran to collect resources. Everything went well, but the translation of the game was bad at first and I got confused with the tribes and untied my house from myself. All over again.

All game mechanics are standard for this type of game, gathering resources and building a house. You can tame animals, this process is more difficult here than in ARK, since animals need to be caught, not euthanized.

Animals will help in the extraction of resources and pvp. And most importantly, you need to build a ship, thanks to which you will earn gold, bring animals and resources from distant islands and, of course, fight. Crafting in the game is very diverse, but with a pirate theme, sabers, muskets, mortars, guns of different calibers and a bunch of everything that will help in a siege or defense.

What to do in the game

Of course, I will not describe all the 400 hours that I ended up playing. Friends did not join, they tried it, but it didn’t work. I was on different servers and islands, pumped my character well and started living under the wing of a large tribe, which, in turn, waged a fierce war with Chinese players. There was a time when they built a small building on our island, and we could not destroy it for eight hours. Enemies simply spam there, patched up the walls and ran out naked with bows and fiery arrows (Eldritch Blast 5e). But then they entered into an alliance and lived together and guarded the island, having different time online.

The most difficult moment is when your character is 100 years old and has debuffs. Both you and hundreds of other players need to sail to an island full of high-level creatures (dragon, hydra, trolls, golems) and go into a small cave in order to drink from the fountain of youth. Everything slowed down there, but the people did not end, and all the monsters were in a narrow corridor leading to the cave, in general, horror and I miraculously coped.

Then all the delights of such games began, wars between tribes, raids, protection of the island. Then, on the Chinese New Year, we were knocked off the island by another alliance when our neighbors were not online. Then everything changed several times, new islands and a search for a place in the sun. The house and animals were destroyed several times, but I continued to play. The game got better, developed, more pve content appeared. But there were still stability issues.

About the main problems

This is a typical survivalist. A game that is, of course, very difficult to play alone, but even with friends you will not be able to play for a long time. The reason for the small online and rather fast churn of players after the start is primarily the social side. The thing is, as soon as the game stabilized, the pirate ARK began.

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  At first, the people conquered vast territories, setting up the “Great Gates” which were not very expensive in terms of resources. Then this idea subsided, the resources were balanced, but a new problem, you will not be given life. It seemed full of space, and now you found a cozy corner and started construction. By the look of the building, it is easy to understand that you do not have valuable resources and the robbers will spend more resources than they earn.
• I understand perfectly well that all this is fun and in such huts experienced players can disguise cool houses with resources. But more often in large tribes, a huge building with a bunch of walls and, in addition, several ships, and not a small schooner. And it would be fine if you were simply robbed, but with a high degree of probability, half of your house will be broken, all living creatures will be killed and an unfinished ship will be drowned.
• Another big problem is the lack of servers for players from Asia. Of course, there is vpn and all that, but making separate servers for people who can play games day and night is a reasonable decision. But why spend money, and as a result, huge territories have been captured by Chinese players. And players from other countries simply cannot oppose them with anything in the long run, time zones are very different. There were many complaints, but the developers never got through.
• Well, the last nail in the dead man’s chest was the transformation of the game into a second job. In Firebolt 5e, this was also and remained, but somehow the responsibilities were gradually tightened. Here too quickly they killed the romance of pirates with gradual construction and research, in the extraction of gold and a huge amount of resources. And I realized that this is not possible alone.
• In order for you to be guarded by “bots” on towers with cannons, they need to be paid every day, multiply by the number of zones from which they can attack, add the n-th number of cannon cores and plus resources for crafting cores that may not be on your island. Equally, you will die, mining all this.

Outcome

That’s how Atlas dies, the game is really good. You can put up with the technical side and I would not say that the game is very buggy. But spending a lot of time on the same thing, so that in the end you will be carried away – it gets boring. Game of Thrones S08E03 Torrent also has these problems, but they got used to it, and it was not so boring right away. Plus the game is more varied, better development and faster at the expense of animals. I’m thinking of going back to Atlas on pve, and playing a bit on raslabon, exploring the world.