Post Technical Pre-Alpha Feedback.
First off, before I get into the feedback part, I really enjoyed Atlas. It was a nice blend of traditional RTS and MOBA gameplay. It’s an interesting concoction that makes it stand out. The team based play definitely makes it less stressful and easier to get into than traditional RTS games.
BUGS
Playing the game, there were a few things I noticed in the bug department.
If you switch between screen type (example: Window to fullscreen) during a game or on the hero selection screen, a couple of things could happen. It would either cause the screen to black out, and you would have to quite the entire client or you would be unable to select your units or click on any of the buttons.
The detection for window mode is off. If you get too close to the edge of the screen, the cursor will register that is on the outside and do things like shrink the window (If you happen to drop the cursor after clicking) or click on icons that are on the desktop.
UNIT INTERACTION
-Collision detection is off. Sometimes it appears there is a large enough path to move units between other units, but they will get stuck and try to go around. This can be frustrating when trying to micro units out of the battle. This happens especially with heroes. The space between two separate units will appear to be about single unit wide, but the hero will be unable to pass between them.
ART
-I enjoyed the art style. It was cartoonish and fun. It’s a style that will allow for anything to go. You could have a super cyborg type unit next to a traditional bearded wizard, and it would look appropriate. It really allows for any idea to be on the table without something looking out of place in the game world.
However, there were some issues with the art.
Units are too small. A lot of the units are the same size as each other. This makes it harder to immediately identify units as x type on the fly. I’ve noticed that especially tier 1 and tier 2 units are very similar in size. Sometimes it just looks like a swarmy mess on screen. I would recommend increasing the sizes of the units and increasing the size difference between tiers.
Units of the same “faction” are too similar. I like that each hero has a separate theme, but the units all appear to be the same color sometimes, and it leads to confusion as to what is what unit. This goes with the size issue. Change up how units are colored to allow them to be easily identifiable at a glance. Each “faction” can still have a color scheme, but they don’t need to be exclusively that color.
Sometimes abilities are not easily identifiable as being in effect.
Some higher tier units do not look like it. For instance, the Ice frog looks more tier 2 than tier 3 in appearance.
I think that there needs to be more work to make each unit look visually distinct at a glance.
UI
Some things I noticed while looking at hotkeys was.
1.No Location hotkeys for jumping back to your base.
2.Rally being unable to be set to units. Would be helpful if you could rally to hero.
3.Trying to change how you make controlgroups didn't work. If you tried to make it say options +1. It would register the options key as mouse button (If I remeber it was the wrong button anyway) and then trying to hit a number with that would cause it to type in chat and not change the hotkey preference.
part 2 below
Comments
Part 2
GAMEPLAY
The meat and bones right here.
1.Upgrades-This is two part. First I thought there were too many upgrades. You have 2 attack, 2 def and speed, plus three levels. I never found myself being able to get those plus unit upgrades. I think with as few units as each faction has 5 upgrades is a bit excessive. The other thing I noticed was that upgrades seemed to have little impact on the game. It was always better to try and max out your forces before trying to get upgrades. Getting 4 units + an upgrade early game was inferior to getting 5 units. Lots of games would go to mid game and despite having upgrades they never seemed to affect battles at all. So it was really not a good investment to try and stay ahead in upgrades.
The units themselves feel weak. It seemed like battles were decided by spamming abilities. There wasn’t really much positional advantage to be had. Some heroes and tier 1 units are better than others, so that seems to dictate the early game. The units felt boring because they didn’t feel powerful. Ability use dictates early-mid game rather than units themselves. It is especially noticeable in the early game when it’s just tier one. Not a lot to do and leads to a slow start of just prancing around the enemy until you can get to tier 2.
The Hero mechanic seems like it would be a big deal, but upon playing, the heroes don’t lend much to the game. They are kind of glorified harvesters. When I think hero gameplay, I think of an army leader who can influence the tide of battle. They do not do this right now. I was really underwhelmed by the heroes currently.
Neutral items are too spammy. There is too much of a reliance on neutral turrets to end the game. Not much really happens until once side starts getting more gems to spam turrets. I’ve had games, where the opponent got control of the middle, and my team had no real access to gems. So they just kept spamming turrets and slowly won.
Games seem to snowball. Someone gets an advantage and then the rest of the game is one side slowly dying. It’s really hard to comeback. The start is slow because you can’t really start doing stuff until you get gems and tier 2 stuff and then the end because if you are behind your chances of winning plummet.
I thought there was too few units. There doesn’t need to be 14 units per side, but 6-8 seem appropriate. There wasn’t really any strategy in picking what units to make. Just max out on all the units and that is it. It’s nice that each commander has a focus, but it felt too limited once you picked your commander. There was really no way to adapt on the fly because you were locked into only 3 units. The limiting on units can be irritating because you can't really split up your army at all.
Gems felt unneeded. They felt like a chore to get. They are not shared among allies so sometimes it can feel a bit like you are stealing from your ally, and if you lose control of the center, then you are cut off from them completely. Two resources is fine, but the way they are currently collected isn’t very interesting.
8.The late game has a lot of downtime. It can be hard to make things happen in the late game, and if you end up losing your army, there is a huge window where you can’t do anything. You basically have to wait for everything to respawn before you can get back out on the map so that's like 1-2 minutes of doing nothing. The respawn feature was interesting, but I’d rather be able to control the flow of my production. It disincentives taking risks because if it doesn’t work out you just kind of have to sit there for 2 minutes waiting for your army. I found myself just being passive because I had allies. In normal RTS, I mess up it’s my fault move on. But here I had allies to think about, and I didn’t want to leave a 2v3 happening for 2 minutes because I tried to be aggressive and it failed.
10.There wasn’t anything interesting happening on the maps. Even the art map, the extra gems from the reactor in the center was just boring. I think that objective based maps would be interesting and having neutral merc camps, healing shrines watch towers, etc. as points of contention would spice up the maps. The two maps that were played seemed basically the same except for the tile set. The units move too slow for how big the maps were. Either shrink the maps or increase the units movement speeds. I think making things faster is the better option because then it allows for more map diversity.
Overall I enjoyed the game. For a pre-alpha is was pretty good with the art and no real crashing bugs. I look forward to seeing how the game evolves over development. I think it has a lot of potential to be epic.