Last week introduced information that beleaguered swashbuckling MMO Atlas had been hacked by a bunch of salty ne’er do wells. The keys to an admin account have been stolen, permitting hackers to go on what amounted to a trans-dimensional naval joyride. Invincible armadas armed with inexhaustible provides of cannonballs briefly dominated the waves, which was to be anticipated. But then planes fell from the sky. The oceans boiled with large whales. I believe there was a World War Two tank at one stage, scooting throughout the ocean like an indignant speedboat.
The builders, Grapeshot, pulled every part offline, hosed all of the weirdness off their servers and pressed the massive reset button they hold hidden within the basement. Now every part is again to regular once more. Except, get this, Atlas was removed from regular to start with.
Atlas is a bloody unusual MMO stuffed with grand ambition and a few frankly silly concepts. It’s a game during which you create your personal pirate, whose pores and skin color could be something from “liver transplant waiting list” yellow to “Area 51 operating table” gray. After that, you’ll be able to assemble a ship, begin an organization, discover a shipwreck, run a commerce community, construct a home, captain a crew, sing a shanty, develop previous, discover a fountain of youth, turn into younger, and stab a kraken.
But it’s additionally a game during which, in pursuit of a misguided sense of realism, it’s essential to eat a various and balanced eating regimen in an effort to keep away from issues like scurvy. You have 4 completely different vitamin ranges to handle, comparable to meat, veg, fruit and fish. Eat an excessive amount of of 1 kind of meals and your guts will likely be thrown out of whack, incomes you a debuff in your troubles (often a fuzzy display screen and slowly depleting well being bar). I chugged fifty chickpeas in a row and overdosed on vitamin A, for instance, all earlier than I’d even discovered find out how to craft my first pair of trousers. It’s arduous sufficient remembering to often eat one thing aside from chips in actual life, with out additionally having to micromanage the diet of somewhat pirate who lives in my laptop.
Vitamin D, the fish vitamin, is the toughest to return throughout. To fish, it’s essential to have performed lengthy sufficient to succeed in the third tier of toolmaking in your survivalism ability tree, then punch sufficient timber till you’ve the assets to make a fishing rod, then place bait on it, and wait till one thing bites. This a part of the game wasn’t fairly working final week nevertheless, so as an alternative gamers have been hurling themselves overboard armed with primary spears, and dragging useless manta rays again to shore to suck the candy nutritional vitamins from their bones. At one level, as I used to be approaching hunger, I ate a scorching elephant turd and instantly died.
Before you buckle a single swash, the most important problem in Atlas is staying alive lengthy sufficient to make any progress in a world that’s actively attempting to homicide you, even once you’re standing completely nonetheless attempting to thoughts your personal enterprise. Atlas is extra Lord of the Flies than Pirates of the Caribbean. I as soon as left the room to make a sandwich and got here again to find my pirate had died of neglect.
Such unwavering dedication to piratical authenticity and the inside workings of the intestines takes a agency backseat as quickly as Atlas desires to be a extra simple MMO. My opening hours concerned punching seagulls out of the sky for XP, after which pounding on their bloodied corpses till my pockets have been stuffed with uncooked chicken meat, which magically granted me the perception required to discover ways to assemble a campfire. Building something is a matter of smashing rocks and timber along with your fists — which depletes your HP, after all, as a result of every part on this game is so inexplicably hardcore — till you’ve sufficient wooden, stone and fibre to make hatchets and picks.
Gather sufficient assets and also you’ll lastly have the ability to construct a schooner and go away the beginning island for pastures new, headed for distant lands that require you replenish on water and meals earlier than embarking on the prolonged voyage. It can take about ten minutes of real-time crusing to get someplace new, and it’s right here that Atlas begins to scratch some exploration itches. It’s a wonderful game, no extra so than once you’re out by yourself within the surging inexperienced seas, with the wind in your sails and nothing however your compass to information you. Employing crew to man the sails permits you to management the ship’s pace from the wheel, however with out firm it’s essential to bodily run round your little boat, adjusting every mast to account for the altering wind route. It’s painstaking plate-spinning, however not like sustaining a balanced vitamin consumption, it’s a unusually rewarding approach to get round.
That reward is your protected touchdown on a brand new island, the place you can begin putting everlasting constructions to construct a base that may then function as your new spawn level. Once you’ve acquired a mattress you’ll be able to quick journey to it, and when you’ve acquired a cooking pot and a little bit of land for farming you can begin to fret much less about your advisable day by day allowance of chickpeas, and extra concerning the game’s different pursuits. You can tame and experience animals, identical to pirates in all probability did. You can comply with the game’s solely questline to retrieve some far-flung macguffins. Or you’ll be able to be part of EVE Online model firms of fellow gamers, and participate in ship battles.
Or, as is way extra more likely to occur, you’ll run aground on one of many game’s many desirable bugs. Atlas is gorgeous, but in addition shambolic, like Timothee Chalamet falling down the steps. I’d generally fall by a gap and get caught contained in the hull of my boat. Or I might get caught on different gamers’ boats, locked in a swimming animation and gliding across the deck like a vengeful Torvill and/or Dean. Parrots scurry alongside the bottom like feathery snakes. Snakes fly by the air like scaly parrots. One particularly biblical glitch teleported me tons of of miles into the sky after loss of life. The person interface is nauseating.
Like recognizing a unfastened bolt rattling round your ft on an Alton Towers experience, the game’s common lack of stability quietly undermines your enjoyment of being a pirate at each flip. It definitely would have undermined the enjoyment of the 1000’s of gamers who’d had hours of progress reset after malicious hackers made whales rain from the sky. Atlas is a bulging sack of huge concepts, haphazardly carried out with little consideration for the way or if it’d all hold collectively. There’s one thing magnificently brazen about the entire thing. And if that is solely scratching the flaky floor of what this absurd MMO incorporates, then what lies beneath needs to be fascinating and horrific in equal measure.
