One Year of Atlas

Cycle

Oh my god it's been a full year already. I can't believe I've been hanging out and playing this damn video game twice a week for 52 weeks -- it actually feels like the time has flown by. Does this read like a 4-week anniversary letter between high schoolers yet? Anyways, here we goooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

OLD THREAD #1

The first thread about game design and such that I posted is the following, 11 months ago:

After watching games for the past few weeks between the playtesters and the pro tournament, I think there's a lot more potential and ground to be explored in Atlas' upgrade system.

As of this post, Build 141 has the Squad-specific upgrade building, and 4 slots for stat upgrades. Since games tend to go 20+ minutes, the main base mines for tons of money all game long (ie: late game expansions are just for gaining an advantage over the opponent as opposed to being necessary to do stuff), and you hit unit caps relatively quickly, players can pretty handily get all the upgrades they'll ever want. I feel like this is a problem in regards to long-term freshness and re-playability. I feel like games where I "get ALL the upgrades! insert now-aged meme here" feel too "complete" - I did all the things.
Contrasting this are games like Heroes of the Storm, Path of Exile, League of Legends, Hearthstone, Diablo 2 and to some extent Starcraft 2:

• When you level up your guy in Heroes, you have a choice of 5 traits for that game, and next game you get to try something different.
• In LoL you go through item trees - seldom do you get all the items and roflstomp, and even if you fully slot yourself out, you can do something a bit different next time.
• Hearthstone has deckbuilding - you literally can never do everything all at once.
• Path of Exile (Diablo-esque game) has this style of skill tree, where you level up and grab a node each level. Super high replayability since you have to essentially make a new guy to try a new path for new builds.
• Diablo 2 had a tree feature as well, where you needed to reroll to try new things
• SC2, which Atlas resembles the most, allows you to get every upgrade in the game, but the pacing and specific purposes of upgrades prevents this. There's also the sheer number of upgrades that SC2 has that makes it difficult to do this, and when you do finally get your 3/3s and every upgrade in the game in your 4v4, it's a sense of accomplishment like "YES I got all the upgrades I'm invincible"

When I look at the average Atlas game (well, average to me), I usually see players max out their T3 upgrades on 4 structures and also get every relevant Squad-specific upgrade. Like it tends to happen without fail. When I'm playing, I have a general plan of which upgrades I want and when. There may be some variances between games where maybe I want to go full tank or full offense/lifesteal, but the upgrades feel very very supplementary to me. I don't feel like they steer me towards a build, or that my build and playstyle would benefit greatly from an upgrade path - in fact, there really isn't an "upgrade path" at all. I'm just gated by the tier upgrades (which I should be going through pretty quickly because Captor Laser is easily the most efficient skill in the game) and money.

(Slightly off topic: but with the current "unit caps for each tier" I feel like I'm somewhat restricted in my build styles per squad as well. This can be compared to LoL where, yes there are 4 abilities but you get to choose which to level and this feeling and actual game impact of the build is important to me)

The playtests run about 2 hours twice a week currently, and I get to play at most 6 games per playtest. This is much much less than I play other games usually, but I'm noticing some patterns while I do play and watch Atlas. The core of the game really is army movement and teamwork. The biggest, most impactful decisions are during engagements. I feel like the macro aspects (army comp, upgrades, expansions) all take a back seat to this. I totally think this is how RTS games should be, but at the same time I feel like these macro aspects should play a slightly larger role, or push players into roles a bit harder. Right now Squad choice is a largest indicator of what your role will be in a team, but I would be interested in seeing if upgrades could push a Squad's designated role a bit out of its comfort zone, and if a player could think out of the box of their squad.

At the very least, when I think about upgrades for Atlas, right now if I were to get into a game I have a strong feeling I'll get all the Squad-specific upgrades I need as well as probably 3 T3 and 1 T2 upgrade, and that would be pretty consistent out of 100 games. After I play all the Squads and get a feel for my favorite 2 or 3, what could keep the game fresh for me is the possibility of a completely different build or playstyle per squad, something that makes me feel "one more game".

Does anyone else have thoughts on Atlas' current upgrade system?

Which essentially TLDRs to:
Could buy every upgrade in every game and there were no clear decision-making avenues to go down from the start of the game to the end of the game; ie: no strategic depth.

Today, squads are super-ceded by colors, which give an outline of what your squad could look like, but players have so much more freedom and strategy space to hone in on the playstyle or strategy they prefer. Upgrades, while still having room to become more impactful, are in a much, much better state than they've ever been. In even games, I find myself in the dilemma: upgrades or tech units? I rarely have enough money to get everything I need any time I need it.

OLD THREAD #2

Another thread I made is the following, from 9 months ago:

Inspired by the game design talk in this video, I just wanted to know other people's thoughts on this question:

What makes you feel totally OK with losing in a video game? What makes you feel "okay that was cool" when your opponent makes a play and you start losing because of it?

For me, I enjoy playing games when they're really back-and-forth. I like when I'm winning, sure, but I want to feel like I'm earning that win, and most of the time that means that within the duration of the game, my opponent is beating me at some point.

I can think of a lot of examples where my opponent starts winning and it's absolutely frustrating for me. For example in Starcraft 2, if you're happily macroing along and you're getting ready to go kill your opponent, and then there's a DT in each of your mineral line, it can feel frustrating. The modern-day example of this that's been floating around /r/starcraft is "an Oracle comes and kills all your workers". I personally think the frustration here comes from "easy-to-execute with heavy implications". It's very easy to multiprong drop as Terran, and hard for the defending player to judge how much army they need to split, send it over to the respective bases, pull away the workers so they don't die, make sure they don't die to a frontal push, etc, compared to the aggressor who drops three places, forgets about the drops, and then pushes forward with their army.

This leads me to actual thing I'm trying to say, which is I do not feel frustrated when my opponent does something skillful (or crazy lucky) to gain an advantage. Of course this is really subjective, but I've noticed my feelings have been pretty consistent across many different games. Here are some examples:

• excellent micro in big fights in SC2 (storms/FFs, marine spilts, burrow micro, target firing, pull-back micro, stutterstep)
• stealing Baron/Dragon in LoL
• jukes in LoL
• I just picked up Rocket League yesterday but literally everything in Rocket League because it's so damn hard to control the damn car
• kills in CS:GO
• crazy combos in MtG and Hearthstone (the ones where it's like "wow this will never work 1/1000 times but it did this once and I got to witness it that was awesome)

Whenever something is like, a "rare" occurrence, it doesn't matter to me whether a game is being won or lost.

---

With regards to Atlas, the showcases for a high skill ceiling are much more subtle at the moment. Watching a replay between the highest-level players and watching one between medium-level players doesn't show much visible difference. Maybe you could compare the experienced players' income and resources and army value to the medium-level players', but the amount is very minimal. During engagements, impressive micro is mostly limited to landing spells, pull-back micro, and target fire, and while there definitely is a layer of complexity, I feel like with the current game speed and unit movement engine, players are gonna top-out their skill ceiling regarding micro within a year. I believe it's true that if stuff is moving slowly and it's easy to control, it's easier to execute things the way you want to.

That said, it feels like the shift of focus comes off of solely micro, and onto more the broad strategy, decision-making, and team coordination regarding tactics and strategy. I think that the skill ceiling for strategy is much, much higher than micro at the moment in Atlas, especially because it's a team game where each player's decisions add to the complexity overall. However, when talking about "satisfying losses", it's gonna have to take a really sick strat for me to be happy about losing, as opposed to losing to getting my whole army nuked and thinking "yeah that was awesome; time to re-queue".

tldr What makes you feel OK with losing in a video game? (all the rest of the block of text is my thoughts :D)

And while I tldr'd inside the post, looking back on it now I think I'd rephrase the tldr as:
Need higher skill ceiling plox

Honestly, with today's iteration of Atlas, I feel like there definitely is a larger variance in skill potentials. I have no idea how, but the combination of the new collect-gem-plus-titan mechanic with camp clearing timings, three lanes, and three players per team to coordinate with makes Atlas feel like it has a ton of space for interesting plays and multiple paths to victory. Do we push with the titan to win? Do we wait and try to win 2 consecutive titans and push? Do we just use titans as a distraction to clear camps and win through economy? Do we avoid titans completely and play a race game? How should our armies engage most effectively? Where should we fight? When? What unit comp at early/mid/late game? How to best use my squad's abilities? In previous versions of the game, these questions weren't as prominent as they are now.

CONCLUSION PROBABLY

There have been soooo many iterations of this game, and although I haven't played on all of them, I've been present since playtest 133... wow. Just shy of 100 playtests now (I mean I guess that makes sense for 52 weeks * 2 playtests a week - a few test weekends). I still feel so honored to have been lucky enough to have been around all this time, but it gives me the confidence to say that the current version of Atlas, for me, is by far the most fun and most fleshed out iteration thus far. Units feel awesome. Heroes and colors have an identity. Games have an overall flow and arc that is easy to understand, but not quite as easy to master. I don't feel like I'm fighting against the mechanics of the game when I play (for the most part kekeke) but rather feel like I'm fighting my opponents' armies (or coordinating with my team to execute dope plays).

And this might be kind of odd to say, but I don't even feel like I'm playtesting the game anymore, looking for errors or faults or anything. I just feel like I'm playing a game like any other that I own.

For the still-persistent lack of an ability to conclude posts,

marktillery

@Cycle Thanks for the post! We're lucky to have you playtesting for us

Treisk

@Cycle Thanks for everything, Sam, AKA CycleSam, AKA Sam #1 or #2 (depending on FireSam's availability), AKA PlantDad.