- Joined
- Jan 23, 2015
Out of absolutely nowhere and barely more than a few months following the release of ARK: Extinction, Studio Wildcard (Now known as Grapeshot Games) announces a brand new open-world "MMO" with such lofty aspirations as high-seas sailing with 40,000+ players per server, 700+ explorable islands, and a game world literally 1200x larger than The Island. The release date? Two weeks from announcement, from a studio that's notorious for absolutely botching their game releases.
That's a good sign.
The game was scheduled to release somewhere around December 13th. That got delayed. It was pushed back to the 19th and given a big, fancy countdown clock, which was delayed, which was pushed back to the 21st, which got delayed, which was pushed back to noon the next day, which it failed to meet, and then when it finally appeared in the Steam store, people were unable to purchase it, or were charged more than the intended amount.
Once that entire fiasco was over and done with and the Streamers all finally got their access to the game 7 hours later: No servers were active. Twitch and YouTube streamers were left sitting and waiting for more than four hours for anyone from Wil--Grapeshot to let them know when they'd even be able to do anything other than just stare at the main menu for their audience.
When the servers finally came online almost a day later than they expected: It turns out that it's not 40,000+ people per server, it's dozens and dozens of smaller servers on each server that are capped at 150 players per server. Essentially, it's ~200 islands the size of a default ARK map all stapled to each other and some of these islands are literally just copy-and-paste rotations of other islands.
So no one was terribly thrilled about that discovery, but don't worry: The servers might be online, but literally no one can log in, anyways. Every single login attempt is met with crashes and disconnects and time-outs and then nearly two days after the scheduled release has come and gone, when people can finally start to login into the actual game: It's pretty much unplayable.
Rubber-banding that runs in five-second loops, graphic settings so janky and laggy that you can barely see a few feet in front of you, and keybindings that only seem to rebind in theory but not in actual function, if you can think of it, Atlas managed to break it. I spent a solid half-hour rooted in place next to a duck watching a man get mangled to death by a bear, only to get resurrected and get mangled to death all over again in five second loops.
The best part? The forums have been nothing but frothing salt-farms for the entire week, and Atlas is such a blatant reskin of ARK that if you used a controller on the main menu you could access a residual menu that the developers left inside of the game, which showed literal ARK maps and functions.
I was a pretty big fan of ARK, and I was looking forward to seeing another absolutely disastrous release from Studio Wildgrapes, and I have to say that they did not disappoint. This entire release has been nothing but a big, beautiful train wreck.
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