Entering Early Access 19th December 2018 on Steam.
ATLAS: The ultimate survival MMO of unprecedented scale with 40,000+ simultaneous players in the same world. Join an endless adventure of piracy & sailing, exploration & combat, roleplaying & progression, settlement & civilization-building, in one of the largest game worlds ever! Explore, Build, Conquer!
With some more details at MMORPG.com
Looks very interesting. I assume it will have full on PvP which sadly would keep me from the game. I like that Ark allowed private servers so as to avoid PvP if you wanted by playing with just friends and making it a cooperative experience.
Actually, they say in the PC Gamer interview that playing on official servers will have 2 options, PvP or PvE. They've also said they are releasing Dev Tools and Server Hosting tools for people to run their own (it doesn't say if those tools will be available off the bat, though)
Atlas will only have one PvP and one PvE server for each major region, so players won't be arbitrarily segregated across hundreds of identical servers as in World of Warcraft.
Appealing to their community's whims is especially notable because Studio Wildcard will also be releasing all of the dev tools for Atlas so that players can make their own servers—an extremely uncommon thing for an MMO. Using either a provided dev kit or the Unreal Engine, players can resculpt the landscape, create their own mods, and host their own Atlas servers at no extra charge beyond the cost of server hosting.
No mention of how much there would be to do in PvE only mode, though.
Also, interestingly:
It will not have any paid DLC or expansions because "the world of Atlas is obviously going to grow, but it should grow for everybody." To help cover the cost of development, though, Atlas will eventually add cosmetic microtransactions before leaving Early Access. The idea, at this time, is that players will be able to buy outfits and decorations but in-game methods will be available to "grind" for these items. And though Atlas only costs $30 USD right now, it will eventually cost $60 USD when it leaves Early Access.
and
For example, players in Atlas will age and eventually die if they get too old, forcing players to start a new character. But Stieglitz tells me the second phase of that feature will include a full systems where players can mate and birth children that they can "transfer" their stats to and take control of when they reach a certain age.
Shipbuilding? I’m in.
90% of my dislike of Ark was the horrible UI and the general look of the game. Maybe I'll give this a shot.
Agree on the ARK UI but once you get used to it (and learn the hotkeys to control your dinos) the game has a lot going for it. The graphics are breathtaking, the building component is fairly solid, and the open world exploration and utilization of both tools and dinosaurs to do things is fun and allows for almost anything you can imagine. My biggest complaint about ARK was each map expansion had something really cool about it but I really wanted it to be all combined into one big seamless map. You can get to the other maps with your character but the process is tedious. There are hints they may be going to an all-in one map route as the story progresses but nothing for sure.
Atlas appears to be doing everything that ARK did but with the seamless map.
" Additionally, Atlas' map is set to be 1,200 times the size of a single Ark server, and will feature ten distinct regions - each with their own unique resources and creatures - including tropics, deserts, and polar areas.
Wannabe pirate lords will apparently be able to "conquer territory, construct ships, search for buried treasure, assemble forts, plunder settlements and hire crew to join [their] powerful growing armada". If that's not enough, there's talk of sunken wrecks and recoverable salvage, procedurally-generated Treasure Maps and challenge zones, and some form of quest line.
Plus there are tombs to raid, creatures to tame (ranging from livestock to mythical beasts), gods to confront, and it's supposedly even possible to build and administer your own colonies, cities, and civilisations. And then of course there's the small matter of battling it out against other players in oceans teeming with fearsome creatures. It certainly sounds ambitious, and there's a load more information on Steam."
Sounds like everything ARK has so I'm very excited about this game.
I really do hope they have some way of quickly moving from one region to another though. If the map is truly 1,200 times the size of an ARK map then travel could be very tedious. Even flying, it can take a while to traverse from one side of an ARK map to another, say like 5-10 minutes.
I lol'd at this though
"For example, players in Atlas will age and eventually die if they get too old, forcing players to start a new character. But Stieglitz tells me the second phase of that feature will include a full systems where players can mate and birth children that they can "transfer" their stats to and take control of when they reach a certain age."
I guess the idea will be that you're not meant to be travelling from one side of the map to the other. On official servers, at least, a persistent map with 40k players? Gonna have to be that size to stop it just becoming a cluster of abandoned beach shacks everywhere.
I'll see what comes out regarding this between now and the 13th, but i'm tempted to pick this up early just to have a play.
I love the idea of a fantasy pirate game (I almost bought Risen 2 until the demo cured me of the notion), but I have zero interest in survival MMOs.
Depending on feasibility, I might host a PvE server once things get going. But there are lots of details needed before I can say for sure. Pretty sure that would make it feel more like Ark, than an MMO. I'd assume that the world wouldn't then be "1200 times the size of an ark map" though 
I'm going to go ahead and pick this up early.
Nice, I might see you there 
Interesting, but coming from the Ark Devs it's probably gonna be an unoptimized mess.
SIGN ME UP!!!
I love all things Age of Sail. When do we get early access? Can we start a pirate clan yet?
Enters Early access in 6 days.
According to the PC Gamer article linked about, it already runs better than Ark (I'll resist speculating on the probability of that being true).
I guess we'll find out soon enough.
I hope it has NPCs so I can grab this as a single player. "Hire Crew" implies it does.
I think the NPC Crew is for groups that don't have enough players to man a larger ship. By the sounds of it, there won't be a 'single player' in the same way there is in Ark, this is an MMO after all.
We'll have to wait and see on the private servers, whenever they become available.
I hope it has NPCs so I can grab this as a single player. "Hire Crew" implies it does.
Unless you want to develop the single player mode yourself with the dev tools and host your own server, the odds of there being a single player mode is slim.
For example, players in Atlas will age and eventually die if they get too old, forcing players to start a new character. But Stieglitz tells me the second phase of that feature will include a full systems where players can mate and birth children that they can "transfer" their stats to and take control of when they reach a certain age.
Wow... so they're copying from Elyria. I've known about this game for about 6 months or so, but had no clue about the breadth of it.
Moving to MMORPG section.
I'll probably pick this one up also. PvE would be fine, but only if there are Pirate AI to fight.
Hosting service where i rent the Conan server just sent me an email with this in it.
Atlas server hosting coming December 13th
Nice. Although I wonder where they got the details needed for having a private server up and running on release day.
Pretty stoked for this, although I'm not fully sure of how much PvE only content there will be.
I'll be getting this, where do you rent your server from Ran? I'm definitely interested in doing a private pve server
I'm still not sure i would want to play on a private server if it's shut off away from the public. The whole conceit behind their mechanics is that there will be thousands of people. I don't think the 6-12 of us here that would play the game would be able to handle content that's made for that many people.
Have been waiting to find out more info about how they're managing things.
Looking forward to tomorrow. However, my gut is telling me it is going to be no more than an expanded re-skinned version of Ark. I hope I am wrong.
I'm still not sure i would want to play on a private server if it's shut off away from the public. The whole conceit behind their mechanics is that there will be thousands of people. I don't think the 6-12 of us here that would play the game would be able to handle content that's made for that many people.
Have been waiting to find out more info about how they're managing things.
Agreed. I think it would feel pretty empty and go against kind of the whole point of the game.
We can always open it up and invite outside people with long-term GWJ members as admin. I have quite a few friends from other games that would probably pick it up if we had a dedicated server. That's what some of my older clans (Kelly's Heroes and Warriors of Anarchy) did with Modern Warfare and Battlefield games (even a legacy Everquest server which was really cool) and it worked very well. We had full servers almost every night. Now that's up to 40 people but still, would be a good way to promote GWJ and keep the trash out. We need to make sure we lay down the rules though and everyone that logs in understands them or can be temp banned or perm banned. That is if we would even have the ability to have that kind of power as admin.
Just want to see what's what first. I would've already picked up a server if i thought it would be fun with next to no one in it.
There are official PvE servers though, which is essentially what GWJ servers turn into. The whole idea is that the world is so massive that you should be able to find some land somewhere and have a GWJ 'crew', but on the official servers...
Obviously need more details, and I'm still interested in running a server if it isn't pointless, but I guess it won't be needed around here anyway.
Looking forward to the game either way.
We can all start on the same server and try to claim an island then. That sounds fun.
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