Thoughts from 30,000 feet up
Before I begin, let me just preface this by saying that I'm a very experienced RTS player who has played pretty much every RTS since Dune 2 at a high level (Master level SC2, etc). I'm not going to pretend that I really understand Atlas yet, because I clearly haven't had enough of an opportunity to really explore it. That said, here are my thoughts:
I like the idea of taking a complicated genre (such as RTS) and simplifying it down to something that is more approachable and manageable for casual players. Minimizing base management, resource management, and other macro concerns in favor of pushing players out into the field (to collect gems) is a good thing. However, I'm a little worried that the current squad structure is too simplistic. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like players are locked into specific unit compositions with few available upgrade paths. The real issue is the order with which you upgrade your forces -- not where you eventually end up. This lack of flexibility may compromise the game at high levels and reduce it to an exercise in squad drafting. There were times in games where I felt like I didn't have an answer to what the enemy was doing and fielding.
The overall pace of the game felt brutally slow to me. Unit movement is snail-like compared to other games. I also felt badly gold-starved throughout all of my games. Developing an army (both unit building and upgrading/researching) takes forever due to gold constraints. Expansions are too hard to take as well given the strength of the neutrals that guard them.
Heroes feel insignificant. They're basically walking "t-bots." They need more active abilities such that they're more interesting and more impactful in combat.
I think I'm okay with the idea of respawning units. However, I did feel like there were a lot of times where I simply needed to sit in base or behind towers and wait for my units to respawn. I can see in game tactics becoming very MOBA-like as the playerbase becomes more experienced. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Just something to be aware of.
Comments
Hey, I've been testing for a few months. You have a lot of the same concerns that I did when I started, so I feel sort of but not really qualified to at least give a short answer. Some of them I got over pretty fast, but some I think are still really valid.
I definitely agree on this. Responses have generally been that they're very much looking at expanding the way that late game plays out to provide agency and decision making to players in a macro sense. The way I phrased this was "I want to have the freedom to meaningfully make my own decisions and my own mistakes, and I want my opponent to have to do the same." ... and that was agreed to be a good thing by the design team.
The overall game speed has been tweaked a couple of times. I personally think it's a bit too slow still, but I think this is intentional so that combat can be experimented with more clearly even though we're not very good players yet.
This is something that I got over quickly. Two reasons: the first is that Heroes give a ton of experience, and so killing one or losing your own starts to be a really big deal. You don't really notice that right away, though. The second is that there's a clear tradeoff between the power of your hero's basic spell and its cooldown. The design team has opted for spells that can really be impactful and change fights, and this is something I've grown to like.
Agree. I personally think the respawn queue needs a tweak to scale less dramatically over the course of the game, but start out a little higher. We'll see!