Atlas Test Weekend #2

by Eric Burkhart
on 11 February 2016

On Wednesday, March 2nd, we’ll invite about 1,000 new players and open Project Atlas back up for our second pre-alpha Test Weekend. We’ll be sending invite keys to our mailing list, so make sure to sign up and fill out this quick survey for a chance at an invite!

If you were invited to the last Test Weekend, your account will still work. Bots will be available throughout the event (including co-op), and PvP will be enabled on Sunday, March 6th between 12 - 5pm PST. For more details on the Atlas Test Weekends, check out our earlier blog post.

Pre-Alpha NDA

We’d like to extend a huge thank you to all of our players for not breaking our NDA and avoiding public discussion, images, and videos of the game. The Atlas pre-alpha Test Weekends involve showing experimental ideas mixed with placeholder systems, and since most of the current core gameplay systems will see large changes or be replaced, public exposure would cause more confusion and misunderstanding than constructive discussion.

If you do happen to see Atlas being discussed in public, please help us spread the word about the pre-alpha nature of these tests and the scale of changes ahead. As a small, independent studio, we’re grateful to have a community that helps us make Atlas great so early in the design process :)

Atlas So Far

If you played in the first Test Weekend, we’ll be announcing the changes on the Artillery Forums when they open back up. On the other hand, if you just found out about Atlas, here’s a summary of our public game related posts so far:

Atlas will be a free-to-play RTS (real-time strategy) game for PC/Mac
RTS veteran Sean “Day[9]” Plott is our lead designer, and the Artillery team now has 22 members
Our game modes at this point are 3v3 PvP and 3v3 vs bots
Units are individually selectable and controllable
Our squads (similar to a race or faction in other RTS games) have 4 unit types to allow for a cleaner control scheme. We currently have 8 squads and each contains:
- A hero unit with two very impactful abilities
- A low tier unit with a large unit cap and low-impact abilities
- Two high tier units with smaller unit caps and higher-impact attacks and/or abilities
Squads grow in size and power throughout the game
To add additional strategic depth, players can build from a set of neutral mercenaries (referred to as ‘weapons’ in our last gameplay blog) to improve their army
Economy and strategic depth systems will see a massive overhaul between this Test Weekend and launch, along with a new map design
Game replays are viewable in Google Chrome (without any plugins) and we expect to continue supporting this feature

In our next blog post we’ll be talking about interaction, battles, and pathing. (TL;DR: We like frequent skirmishes and dislike blob armies.)

This blog is publicly visible, so please save gameplay questions and discussion for the private Atlas forums when they re-open on March 2nd. We’ll make sure to go over all the changes since our last Test Weekend in depth over there!

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