The new survival MMO Atlas has been playable for some time now. After a rough start and divided opinions about the game, let’s take a look at how Atlas has developed after two months in Early Access.
This is what has happened so far: Atlas was released on December 22, 2018 in Early Access. This was already the fourth scheduled date, after Atlas was postponed three times. The launch of Atlas was characterized by many bugs and crashes that made the game partially unplayable.
Accordingly poor were the first reviews of Atlas, the new survival game from the creators of ARK: Survival Evolved. Despite the major criticism, Atlas still sold extremely quickly on Steam.
Meanwhile, 2 months have passed and we check what has changed in the community since then.
Improvements After Launch
Since the Early Access release, the developers have been continuously working on Atlas. Special focus has been placed on a few things:
- Improvement of performance
- Elimination of critical bugs
- Improvement of rewards to minimize grind
Already after 6 days there were the first innovations that addressed the issues. Improvements to quality have also been continuously made afterward.
The majority of improvements still referred to performance, but also conveniences like lower weight for some items or a fountain of youth to preserve older characters were introduced. Atlas is also actively cracking down on cheaters.
In the upcoming Patch 19 for late February, there will also be new features like the promised submarines, curses, and player shops. You can find the complete patch notes in English in the official Atlas forum.
Player Numbers and Community
This is how the community stands towards the game: The reviews of Atlas on Steam were initially “mostly negative”, with only roughly 30% positive reviews in the first days. At least this has largely improved.
Meanwhile, the recent reviews have risen to 44% and thus to “balanced” (as of February 19 at 3:50 PM). However, players’ opinions are quite diverse:
- The biggest point of criticism remains “land claims”, which ruin the entry for new players.
- Especially official servers receive little positive reviews, often speaking of griefing and poor performance.
- Conversely, players find the experience on private servers with friends good, where they can play according to their own rules.
After 216 hours, I can only say, keep your hands off… Totally unripe… Yesterday it was patched that a character with 100 years dies. […] Now I have to travel to a fountain of youth that is guarded by 100 Chinese who kill anyone who comes too close to the entrance after 5 hours of travel.
– Kellogz on Steam
Steam should offer a third option alongside YES and NO as a recommendation: CONDITIONALLY. […] It [Atlas] is fresh enough to provide at least 100 hours of gaming fun and for this reason, it gets a recommendation. […] AVOID official servers unless you really want to travel the ENTIRE map […]
– VanTjorgen on Steam
From the reviews, it is evident that Atlas still needs to improve further and remains, above all, a multiplayer experience. The author also agrees that Atlas is only worthwhile as a multiplayer.
What do the player numbers say about Atlas? The player numbers of Atlas have significantly decreased. Since the release, Atlas has lost just over half of all average players.
According to Steamcharts, the average in December 2018 was just under 40,000 players. In February 2019, there are still about 15,500. The number of peak players at the same time has also decreased from 58,788 to 37,997.
A similar picture also emerges on Twitch. Due to some issues with recording Atlas streams, no concrete numbers can be provided. However, both at the statistics page SullyGnome and at twitchtracker, Atlas has indeed become less popular in recent times. Fewer and fewer people are streaming and watching Atlas.
Nevertheless, the developers continue to work on their game and release new updates weekly that improve Atlas. Whether Atlas is worth playing must be decided by each person for themselves.
What do you think about Atlas?
Part of the development has now been taken over by players who have created the hottest game mode themselves:
