My technical pre-Alpha feedback

SwipitySwipeSwipitySwipe Member
in Feedback

A brief background about me
I've been a fan of the RTS genre since Warcraft II, playing a ton of that one on local LAN against my roommates. Played a lot of StarCraft 2 multiplayer (lots of 2v2 a little 1v1) when it came out, but have played a lot less lately. My skill level was always around the Silver level in SC2. I get the most enjoyment out of RTS games when I feel like I'm able to react to my opponent and make skillful plays. My gaming lately has been mostly dedicated to playing Heroes of the Storm, which is the first MOBA that I'm really into. I like the tight teamplay aspect of it, including team strategy (objectives, builds, positioning) and making skillful plays through unit micro. In general I have enjoyed HotS more than SC2 multiplayer because I can get frustrated with my inability to keep up with macro when dealing with a lot of unit micro.

Atlas feedback

  1. When I launched my first game after watching the tutorials I felt overwhelmed by trying to figure out what squad to play as a beginner. A suggested squad or two would be great for the first games.

  2. When I launched my first game I felt excited to get to try the cool looking characters depicted in the artwork.

  3. When I saw all my team's bases for the first time I had a hard time determining which buildings were mine, and got mixed up and clicked on the wrong buildings a couple times during the game, which made me feel slow to react. Better differentiation between each squad's buildings and between the different types of buildings within a squad would help.

  4. Whenever I recalled my units and redeployed them I had to reset my control group and felt bored by this tedious task. I'd prefer if control groups persist between recalls.

  5. When I microed my units during battle I felt both challenged in trying to land my abilities as intended and skillful when I was able to.

  6. During combat anywhere from the mid game on I felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of units on screen and found it too challenging to make good decisions for positioning and team fighting strategy.

  7. During combat in many cases it seemed like my micro didn't have that big of an effect on the outcome which made me feel frustrated. This could have been just because I wasn't noticing the effect because of being visually overwhelmed as mentioned in item 6.

  8. When I was viewing any of the units of the game on screen and couldn't make out many details, I felt like I was missing out on part of the experience of playing and fighting against some very interesting characters.

A suggestion to address items 6, 7, and 8: I feel like making the maximum number of units in each squad smaller, increasing the size of the units on screen, and slightly increasing the zoom level of the camera would address these issues. If each squad had the hero and a fixed number of "slots" they could fill with other units, with higher tier units taking up more slots, then there would be less units on screen overall, and you could build each squad in a number of different ways in terms of proportion of total units at each tier. The combat would be less visually overwhelming, which I feel like would make micro more enjoyable to more casual players who want to play a RTS with some MOBA-like elements, while still allowing for a high skill cap for expert level players in terms of unit control.

All in all a very promising game with some cool original concepts. I look forward to seeing how it progresses and hope my feedback as a more casual RTS player is helpful.

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