First impressions from a hardcore MOBA/RTS player.
Hi! I'm a mid masters starcraft player and plat 1 league player (I've also tried a few other smaller MOBAs but I was never as good at those as I was at league). I wanted to give my first impressions while they're still fresh!
Things that I have really enjoyed/appreciated:
- The game feels unique! I really like how it combines the MOBA and RTS genre.
- The game is very intuitive. Ya'll have done an absolutely fantastic job of taking away the stress/lack of fun that new players in an RTS style game feel. This is the type of game I can imagine convincing my casual friends to try as well as my hardcore friends
- Mac support - I cannot over state how much I appreciate when someone puts resource into making not only a mac client, but a good mac client. Kudos to whoever headed up the mac side of things, you're awesome!
Things that I think need a bit of improvement on:
- Units sometimes feel too similar to one another. Part of this is the graphics (which I'm sure will improve as your development progresses), however, one of the big things for me is their auto attacks. All of their auto attacks feel about the same - sure some are a little faster, some are a little slower, but they don't have that unique feel that units in, for example, starcraft have. There is a huge difference in how the auto-attacks of a roach, stalker, colossus, marine, phoenix, and cyclone feel. However, I don't get that same sense of personality in Atlas units quite yet.
- There isn't any strategy in end-game unit comp. You build what you can, and thats that. This is one of my huge gripes with MOBAs - if your endgame is approximately the same each game it makes the story of each game significantly less important. Maybe I'm the minority in this thought though.
- There doesn't seem to be too much advantage to multitasking. In fact, it seems like it is usually bad to split up your army as it just makes both sub-armies weaker. I'm convinced that a large reason for that is map-design which brings me to my next point!
- The map feels too linear. You move forward, unless there are turrets, in which case you kill the turrets, and then you move forward again. There is a little bit of opportunity to harass bases, but that is overall a relatively small portion of the game. It would be absolutely fantastic if there were some way to get behind enemy lines and harass. Take out units that are traveling to their rally point, or take out critical bases. Maybe this gets too frustrating though - but its something that would add a ton of strategic diversity.
- I'd love to see more diversity in movement speed. It adds a whole separate level to the strategic thought process! You have to decide - if I start losing this fight can I actually escape? If I try to defend these two gems can he surround me and then take me out with the help of his teammates army? This thought process doesn't seem to exist yet in Atlas.
I'm mildly concerned that I don't feel as much success and happiness from winning games, but I think the main reason for that is that I'm not playing against actual players yet.
Overall, I'm enjoying the game, it definitely has places that could use some polish, but it seems like a very good start. You should all feel very proud with how much you've accomplished
Comments
I agree really strongly with this observation. The end game feels very boring to me. The interesting units are the squad units: they're the reason you chose the hero that you chose, but the amount that you can build is so limited that there's no strategic choice to be made in terms of amount of units or composition: you just get to your max, and there's no more thinking to be done.