ATLAS is a sad victim of Grapeshot Games and Instinct Games' tight schedule, many terrible marketing decisions, and lack of communication with players. The title was officially announced during The Game Awards and instantly became one of the biggest highlights of the Geoff Keighley-produced show. In its reveal trailer, the developers were promising a vast open-world filled with activates to do, combat between hulking pirate ships, underwater exploration, first-person brawls, and much more, as
ATLAS was even supposed to boast over 40,000 players in the same world, all discovering it simultaneously.
The open-world title is ending the year with a bang for all the wrong reasons, as
ATLAS' current early access build is getting not only terrible reviews from Steam users, but also direct comparisons videos that would make
Watch_Dogs proud, as the title looks nothing like its reveal trailer. To make the game better, Update 7.4. will focus mostly on the server-side crash fixes and overall stability improvements.
The development team has finally decided to address the situation and issued the following apology:
"Hello all, apologies for the challenging launch here! Between the intensity of preparing for the release of a massively multiplayer title, and the needs to get all of the new infrastructure prepared to roll-out, we let the schedule and initial launch builds get away from us. Hunkered down in our development bunker 24/7 subsisting on Red Bulls and stale pizza, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture, which ought to start and end with communication to the players. Despite it all, I’m so happy that so many of you see the potential in what ATLAS is, and are enjoying the immense scale of sandbox freedom that can readily be had in the game. As we churn through issues and continue to build out the game in the days, weeks, and months ahead, I’m looking forward to seeing what’s just over the horizon for the game and its growing community. As a great poet of the sea once wrote: “All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.”
While it's good to hear that Instinct Games is not abandoning
ATLAS just yet, the fact that Grapeshot Games, the studio responsible for
ARK: Survival Evolved and the game's producer, was forcing this small development team to work during Holidays and on Christmas Day is absolutely unacceptable.
From the creators of ARK: Survival Evolved comes ATLAS - a massively multiplayer first-and-third-person fantasy pirate adventure. ATLAS will host up to 40,000 players exploring the same Globe simultaneously, with an unprecedented scale of cooperation and conflict! Stake your claim in this endless open world as you conquer territory, construct ships, search for buried treasure, assemble forts, plunder settlements and hire crew to join your powerful growing armada.
ATLAS is now available on Steam Early Access.