First Thoughts on Atlas
First off, let me say how excited I am for this game. Stumbling on a Day[9] Daily is what got me into Starcraft and kicked off quite an RTS addiction. I've never been a part of an Alpha test before and never had the desire to until Sean announced the Atlas playtest. I really appreciate the opportunity to get a first look at the game and want to give as much feedback as possible. Please note that I almost exclusively played Celesta and Eris because my two favorite styles of play in RTS games revolve around speed and positioning. All in all I tried a couple more games with other heroes but definitely prefer Celesta and Eris over the others. I know you have a lot of these, so I'll start with a quick TL,DR broken into 2 parts.:
Bot Matches:
It felt really good to fight for position for central gems. It was challenging and allowed me a chance to test the "seige mode" of the Purifiers.
It felt great to root in a good position and pick off small enemies as they mistepped. It also felt amazing to blind a choke point with the Precognitor and Blinder allowing me to win a battle against a seemingly better force.
My favorite thing about Celesta is the zoning ability she has late game with Purifiers and Leviathans.
It was frustrating to have my mouse occassionally "grip" the edge of the screen and drag my vision while I was trying to control an army. It tended to happen more often at the highest resolution (3620 x 1527) but continued to happen at 2560 x 1080.
The worst feeling with Celesta was losing Purifiers because the uproot takes so long, they feel very helpless.
Playing as a team against bots was fun but the 3rd player on bottom felt very secluded from the rest of the game. It was hard to have one of the top side players go to the bottom to help since the central point of contention was the top portion of the map. Luckily, I did not get this same feeling in PvP because the game was much more dynamic.
PvP Matches:
It still felt like fighting for early gems was an amazing design choice. I loved how much more focused on the enemy the early game felt compared to another RTS games. You have to watch for their units and engage around the gem positions. In most RTS games, the early game is either "do my build perfectly" or "kill him while he does his build".
The second game I played was just incredible. I'm officially in love with this game. Our team won a lot of skirmishes early, expanded quickly, lost a major battle in the central position, and we eventually came back from a deficit and won. It was just incredible and showed just how much potential this game has.
Replay ID: G122f5d0423ea478aa8d215a13b85031b
End TL,DR
I'm going to break my feedback down into a few different phases so that it's easy to follow how
and when any frustrations occurred. The RTS games/MOBAS I've played the most of are Starcraft 2,
Age of Empires 2, League of Legends, and Heroes of the Storm so most of my comparisons will be to those games. I'll also add some basic information to the title of each gameplay section including: Character, Game Duration, Resolution, Graphics Preset. I want to mention that I absolutely love the atmosphere of this game. The music is beautiful and really ties in to the atmosphere. Some games do a good job of this (SC2/AoE2) but many multiplayer games fall short in this regard and you guys knocked it out of the park. My girlfriend walked in on me playing and the first thing she said was "oh this is great music". The imagery and colors used really enhance the experience as well.
The creativity in the factions is amazing and I love that the mechanics are centered around
pulling off combos and including macro focus into your micro management. While this is a
simplified version of the final product, the small taste you've given feels extremely rewarding.
Initial open of the client:
I love that the client opens into the Settings screen. It's a little detail but much appreciated.
One thing that I would have liked to see would have been a quick ping to the location of the
settings button. After closing the window it took me longer than I'd like to admit to find it again.
This may also be because I'm using an ultrawide monitor (3620 x 1527 is the resolution I initially used, 2560 x 1080 is native) so the button feels a little more tucked away than it would normally. Overall a nice layout to the client. Very old-school feel with simple menus. Everything is organized nicely and it was easy to figure out where things were.
Faction Selection:
I really like the faction selection screen. The only frustration I had was with the Mercenary Type mouse-over menus. Every once in a while they would activate while I was looking at hero abilities and they activate when I scroll over a hero's image. It was a little frustrating until I realized the heroes don't have scroll-over menus themselves.
First Match (Celesta, 52 minutes, 3620 x 1527, Ultra preset):
I chose Celesta because I've always loved strategic positioning in RTS games. Marine/tank in Starcraft has been my favorite composition since I first started playing and other siege + light units compositions have been my favorites in other RTS games. Celesta had a bit of a different feel than I expected but so did the flow of the game in general. It felt really good to fight for position for central gems. It was challenging and allowed me a chance to test the "siege mode"
of the Purifiers. It felt great to root in a good position and pick off small enemies as they missteped. It also felt amazing to blind a choke point with the Precognitor and Blinder allowing me to win a battle against a seemingly better force. I really enjoyed the hugeness of some of the units the game had to offer, especially the Leviathon. Target firing a group of Leviathan's felt like I'd
won the game already. I especially appreciated the open feel to the game. One thing that felt frustrating was the long uproot time to the Purifier. While I can understand the design
choice to make this a little long, it never feels good to sit good to watch your units while they try to uproot from a planted position. Any time I wanted to change positions I just sat and watched my army while they moved. It feels excessively slow. I'd recommend reducing this by a 1/2 second to remove a little of the slowness for general re positioning while keeping the need for the player to position cautiously for battles. Another frustration I had was with the mouse cursor itself and moving the mouse around the map. There were a few times where the cursor "caught" the edge of the map and dragged my vision away while I was trying to control my army. I'm not sure if this
is an ultrawide resolution bug but I may try my next game with slightly reduced graphics settings and resolution to test if this issue continues. Overall the first game was extremely fun and felt more exploratory and less stressful than I was expecting.
Second Match (Vex, , 2560 x 1080, High graphics preset):
After the second match loaded, the top bar of the screen disappeared. This made it extremely difficult to move units and I kept having an issue where I would right click through to my desktop, causing a menu to pop up while in the middle of gameplay. I was in Fullscreen mode when this happened. I played as Vex this game and tried to get a little more ambitious with the expanding.
I don't like the lack of level/power indicators on the Titans guarding resources. It feels too easy to overcommit to a battle with NPCs and lose an entire army when there's no good way to judge the engagement from the beginning. Another thing I noticed while playing this game was that some of the descriptions are difficult to read while in game. Once again, this may be due to the UW resolution but I found myself having to lean in to read some upgrade descriptions in game. I don't think I noticed this during the Celesta game because my focus was primarily on units and I read through all of her descriptions in the Atlaspedia prior to playing. I really enjoyed the ability
combinations with Vex and the constant attack buffs made the army feel extremely powerful even with few units. Eventually though, the upper screen gap issue became too frustrating to play with so I quit to try again.
Other notes from more bot matches:
After the first two matches, the little gameplay bugs I mentioned (screen "grab" and top cm of screen disappearing) stopped happening for the most part. I believe this is due to the change I made in graphics settings (from Ultra to High preset and from 3620 x 1527 to 2560 x 1080). Below I'm just going to list some of the things that felt great and bad in the other games I played:
With the Engineer (Grath) it did not feel very good to have the tier 1 units launch far past their targets. I would try to spread them out a little to stun as many enemy forces as I could but they never seemed to go where I wanted them to. I'd recommend giving them a little more pivot towards the mouse cursor for this ability, it's very hard to predict where they'll go if they're spread out. This may also just be something you need to get used to with the hero. His play style felt very slow since the units were so beefy and costly and I found myself rescuing a lot of units with the rock ability but I still felt like I spent a lot of time healing up. While his stuns and ultimate are fun, my playstyle didn't mesh well with this hero so I did not try him again. I played another 4-5 games with Celesta/Eris and decided to stick with them throughout the rest of the weekend. When playing with 2 other people against the bots, the game felt a lot different. Playing as a team
against bots was fun but the 3rd player on bottom felt very secluded from the rest of the game. It was hard to have one of the top side players go to the bottom to help since the central point of contention was the top portion of the map. This is the way this map is meant to be played but it did feel like I didn't get a chance to interact with the bottom ally all game. This might change in PvP but I was glad I didn't get stuck going bottom. I think if the map had a few more central expansions that allowed all 3 players to have a base with enough resources for 8-10 workers per player the game would look very different. Each team would have a reason to group and would promote more harassment. When each individual player is in a separate part of the map it doesn't feel worth it to send a harassing force to an enemy base. If there was a single focal point to the map
that required a little attention from every player it would make the harassing units much more valuable. I don't think I built a single harassment unit in any of the bot matches I played.
PvP Matches:
PvP matches were completely different. The things that felt good in bot matches felt way better when there wasn't an obvious pattern to the opponent's movements. I didn't realize it until I played PvP but the bots move in very obvious way and were constantly feeding units into my army. Luckily other people are a little less sloppy in that regard and it made for more competitive game play with similar army sizes. As mentioned in my TL, DR, I only got to play 2 PvP matches. The first game was fun and I really enjoyed it even though my team lost. Our team played pretty well but I don't think our movements were as concise and coordinated as the other team's.
My second PvP game made me fall in love with Atlas. The battles were intense, there was a lot of back and forth, and the game felt close even though our team dominated the opening. The other team had chances to come back and almost won the game. It was just incredible and showed just how much potential this game has.
Replay ID: G122f5d0423ea478aa8d215a13b85031b
I wish I could provide more relevant feedback in my two PvP matches but I think my heart was pumping too hard for me to analyze the game while I was playing. I was immediately sucked in to the competition. Hopefully I'll have better feedback for you next time!