Opinions, questions & comments
First off a little introduction: My handle is SaveHolt, aka Jason and I’m 28. I’ve been playing RTS’s since WarCraft (1) however I have never really been that competitive. Not because I don’t possess the spirit, but because I’m painfully average at video games. Thank you to the dev team and Artillery Games for the invite into the ATLAS technical-alpha.
Watching tutorial video this looks like a MOBA/DOTA clone and an RTS/StarCraft had a love child and named it ATLAS.
Likes: “Squads” not whole armies, keeps it relatively small compared to other RTS’s. 4 main unit types, keeps things simple and easy to remember. Definite “Squad” differences laid out at selection, ability to look at each unit’s abilities and costs.
Easy hot-key setup and placement, intuitive and all around one hand. Familiar mouse controls.
Small yet highly informative UI with all hotkeys displayed for building and unit abilities. Few selection screens (units buildable from main screen, no need to select the “Barracks”). Unit build timers are displayed on the side of the screen. Units respawn, no “wasted” resources on main army. Also that the respawn timer is on the main UI.
Dislikes: I felt like there should have been a little more information in the squad selection screen for each squad. The selection screen should have each unit stating clearly if it is melee or ranged, physical or magic damage (do basic army units even differ?), output, HP and unit cap, ect. Possibly if the squad is more Macro or Micro focused? With such a streamlined UI, there is no information on armor/damage mitigation, damage output/type, attack speed or HP numbers/percentage. Would be nice to have something that told me all of that.
As Sean said, there is a lot of information to take in at once. I highly recommend an in-game tutorial, with steps/levels such as basic movement/attacking & ability use -> resource gathering/army & structure building -> gem use and “neutral” unit use -> a small or quick match against the AI. I understand that in this stage of the game that is a huge request and I’m not saying to implement it immediately – but for future thought.
Questions: Will there be plans for 1v1, 2v2 or 4v4 in the future?
What is the average intended game length? I seemed to be right around 30-40 min before big attacks and pushes were happening.
No real technical issues to report (slow upon initial load – saw that it was known about).
EDIT condensed
Comments
These are great things to add. As you're talking, I'm imaging something akin to a "Hearthstone style card" for each unit that displays the cost/basic stats in addition to the basic info. It literally never occurred to me that ranged/melee wasn't displayed until you noted. Adding to my to-do list!
We won't be doing any beautiful in-game tutorial until we have all the systems finalized. And boy will we ever need a tutorial when we're done lol.
Our plan is to try to nail one mode (3v3) before considering any other mode. Other game modes would be awesome though!
We expect the average game to ~25-35 minutes with probably another 10+ minutes if both teams are inexperienced.