First Impressions From A Casual Player Who Loves Competitive games.
Hey hey everyone. I was surprised and delighted see that I was given the privilege to participate in the Atlas alpha. EAT YOUR HEART OUT OVERWATCH! (but seriously blizz plz invite). Since Artillery was kind enough to invite me in, I'm going to share some of my thoughts on Atlas after playing yesterday with some very friendly people.
Just so you can understand the demographic that I personally represent, I've been a casual SC2 player since WOL launched, and have been playing less and less with every expansion. In all types of games (MOBA, RTS, FPS, etc) I really like seeing unique and creative builds (big Spanishiwa fan). In addition, I like competitive games. I don't aim to be a pro gamer, but I enjoy competition and games where high skill can be demonstrated.
Positive
There is A LOT I like about this game, but I'm going to boil it down to the key features
- I really like the squad+merc combo. I think it allows for each player to have a set of interesting and unique 'core' units. Supplementing these core units with an open merc pool is a cool concept and also somewhat of an equalizer for end-game unit balance.
- Being able to have all unit abilities on one command card is great. I think that was one thing that really inhibited my micro in SC2.
- As somebody who is not very good at macro in SC2, the fact that there is no real worker management is awesome for me. I love that I can just plop a base down, kill the neutral monsters guarding resources and go back to managing my army instead of remembering to keep building harvesters.
- The 3v3 format gets a
from me. Playing with friends > 1v1 ladder - Skirmishing over gems nodes is fun!
My Concern With Resources
I like unique army comps. Since each army only has 3 units, it seems like mercs are the way to really stylize your composition. Gold is on rails, so it seems like it's always going to be the case that your army consists of:
[my. coin worth of squad units] + [my.gem worth of mercs] where my.coin == enemy.coin
I'm the kind of person who may want to try out an all squad unit build, or a super merc heavy build without many squad units at all. Because I can't really do that I feel a bit limited in my options. As a possible suggestion, maybe we can take another look at how we get coin vs how we get gems. Instead of gold being your constant income, and gems the thing that gets you ahead of the opponent, maybe we can reduce the collection rate on coin, and add ways of getting coin similar to how we get gems. This way, we can decide "Ya know what? I think I'll just forgo mercs until my last push and build 100 upgraded stingers."
Visuals/UI/Interface
- I don't think the orange icons in the top right are enough to let people know they have units to deploy. The audio alert is nice, but sometimes gets lost with the other game sounds. Maybe we can make the icon flash orange to better catch the eye when you're not focusing on the UI?
- I find HP hard to see in it's current state. The attack timer is nice, but putting the HP there is a bit hard for me to gauge.
- I find it hard to distinguish my mercs from enemy and allied mercs. Could our personal mercs have a slight green or blue tint to them and enemy mercs a red tint?
- Upgrades don't seem to have visual feedback at this point. I'm sure it's on the to-do list but yeah
All in all, I've had a good time with the game so far. I've still yet to test out all the squads so I plan on doing that after this post. Unfortunately I don't think I'll have time today to try out the PVP with you all 
but hopefully next time around.
I love competitive RTS. SC2 is still my favorite competitive game to watch. I'm not sure if Atlas aims to be an eSport or not, but either way I'd like to see this game have great success. I'm rooting for you Artillery.
Comments
Thrilled to have you Neon!