Quick thoughts of a first time tester.

ImpJesse · May 23

Good evening everyone!

My name is Jesse, and I'm sure I talked to a bunch of you over the weekend of awesome games. This is my first test weekend and I just sort of wanted to make a post giving my thoughts and reactions of the game in its current state. A bit of background, most of my RTS experience is with SC2. As far as other similar games, I played LoL for years and have reasonable experience with DOTA and HotS. I'm not super competitive, but I like learning game mechanics and strategies and trying to improve.

This end up longer than I expected, so here's a TLDR:
Good: Overall gameplay and objective design, no real character design overlap, art and sound, game time, THE COMMUNITY!
Bad: Trebuchets, Deadeyes/Purifiers, Pathing, snowballing

Day 1 (Time to get learned):
Once I downloaded the client, I hopped right into the tutorial. While it lacked info about productions buildings, I think it gave a reasonable rundown of the basic mechanics of the game. Then I hopped into a bunch of bot games with the goal of trying to get a feel for each of the characters. Luckily no two character seemed like they filled too much of the same niche, so there was a reasonable amount of variety when I switched things up, even in the same "color group". Still at this point I hadn't figured out the "macro" part of the game as far as selecting the buildings and controlling the resource flow, so I was kinda lost for most of the first day. Most of the issues I had at this point could be chalked up to being pre-alpha:
- Lava-spitters have no animations for burrowing, so it was unclear when they could move.
- Pathing feels awkward, as if it has no internal logic and units just move in straight lines to the destination. Units often get stuck on each other and made microing a bit frustrating.
- I didn't notice any notification for when units were attacked and died, so I just lost things without noticing, though a lot of that is on my skill level.
- There is no visual indication of hotkey grouping, so I actually didn't know there was the ability to hotkey until Day 2.

One thing I'd like to point out here is how awesome the devs and members of the team were to me. Mark invited me and another to play a bot game, but when I went to get on Discord it didn't seem to let me in. For an hour people helped me and my fellow tester try and get our accounts authenticated. After a while they just made an exception to let us on. When the Discord Bot reset, the same thing happened. Again, a few Staff on the server help make sure I was about to participate.
So Marktillery, ZeldasCreed, Decency, Burdock, and whoever else help me, thanks.

Day 2 (The PvP-ening):
Now that all my Discord problems were out of the way, I was able to spend the entire pvp test phase in voice chat, which added greatly to the experience. This community is amazing, 11/10. First game I figured out how to use production buildings and someone told me the hotkeys for them, which made my experience so much better. Being able to macro in an RTS helps, who woulda thought? I was able to get 5 games in, all of them had a bit of variety in comps, which is a good sign. There doesn't seem to be a set meta at the moment and I was able to see strategies be discovered and developed literally over the course of the day, which was super interesting. So, things I noticed for Day 2:
-TREBUCHETS! They are so good and once word got out, everyone was using them. Many have suggested changes that I would like see tested. Including limiting their cap further, providing vision of them when they shoot, or even making them a T4 unit. Regardless, I do think if there needs to be a nerf based on this playtest, it'd be with the trebuchet.
- Witnessed a strange bug where if a Titan was killed before it spawned its model materialized and it just stood there immune to all damage. Check it out here: G168dd2dc19ea4a9d9021fa39fa555e07
- Snowballing. Many games that follow similar mechanics to Atlas have to contend with this problem. Once a team gets behind it, seems that they can't come back. While I experience my share of stomps, both sending and receiving, I don't think this is a big a problem as others. Hero abilities can change battles enough that good enough coordination can even let T1 units can win fights lategame. Though demoralization will always be a problem in snowball situations and I don't have any idea how to deal with that.
-I seemed to favor using Vex most of the day due to him being the tutorial character and he seems rather straightforward. Especially coming from SC2 experience, so I just massed not-lurkers, which worked and was fun. I have nothing really to add to this, but I am just curious to see who else used Vex a lot because of the tutorial like me.

Day 3 (Basically pro at this point):
At this point I was able to start recognizing people, so every game had at least another person in Discord to talk to, be it an ally or enemy, which was cool. With a few games under my belt I was able to start strategizing and using units in a more than "A-move" type of way. Without further ado:
- Trebuchets all day erry day. Nothing to add here that wasn't said in the Day 2 section other than to express how word-of-mouth works in these small tests. Day 3 had a player going trebuchets in every game but one for me. Once word got out, it got popular, especially since the consensus seemed to be that it is going to be nerfed soon.
- Kingpin drops. Oh god Kingpins are fun. Their placeholder model makes them just look like lumbering blue-Groots of death. Dropping 3 on the enemy's flank as they retreat and watching everything evaporate is so satisfying. Though because I had issues with hotkeys, things often got jumbled up and there are multiple fights where dropships just moved right into the line of fire. Also the slow speed of Kingpins made the mechanic of summoning at the base a risk, because they often could be ganked and die before they made it to my army, especially if I was macroing and summoned them during a fight.
- Rage and toxicity. It sucks that this is a thing that needs to be discussed but it is. Team based games, especially competitive ones, have players that take down their teammates before they look at what they can do to improve the situation or game-state. Luckily it only really happened once and the Artillery were very responsive about wanting to deal with it. A report system will help with this, though that probably shouldn't be a priority since these tests are rather small and issues can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Though at some point, Artillery probably needs to get a code of conduct or something, similar to Riots "Summoners Code", to be a basis of player behavior in the game.
- Speaking of rage, Deadeye! Seriously though, several games with players who went full Deadeye and Purifier made me think that on top of individual caps for units, there might need to be team caps for units. 16 Deadeyes invalidate pretty much everything and can't be fun to play against. It's a constant game of whack-a-mole that eventually ends in death.

Overall/Misc thoughts:
-Art is not bad. Nothing too special to me, but the units are different enough to tell them about on the battlefield. Voice acting was nice and honestly unexpected at this phase.
-Character abilities seem to have unique audio queues, which is amazingly helpful. This is something that players oftentime over look, but is vital to providing clarity in a fight. I can tell when to back away from an Eris by the sound she makes when using her ultimate ability.
-3v3 caught me off guard. Interested to see if other team-sizes or even 1v1 will be attempted.
-Clarity seems to be something that can be improved on. Like I didn't know that multiple players could click on the orbs to gain resources until like 5 bot games in.
-Game length seems to be between 12-30 minutes in my experience. I only had one hit 40min. I believe at one point I saw Day9 say that they were aiming at a 30min gametime average, so it seems to be a bit low in my case. Though I enjoyed the shorter games, so thats a plus for me.

I apologize if this is more stream-of-consciousness than you wanted as far as feedback, but I said this was something I wanted to do and other testers encouraged it. Please feel free to pick this apart and let me know if I was wrong about anything. I think Atlas is unique and interesting and want to help it grow in any way I can.

Jesse