From the accounts of its creators, Atlas is an absolutely sprawling game. It`s a survival game. It`s an MMO. It`s a pirate fantasy with a ton of sailing. It`s a government simulator with real-time character aging. It has full support for drawing your own pirate flag and painting your boat, which you construct plank by plank.Listening to Jeremy Stieglitz, Atlas`s director, talk about the game, the amount of stuff that you can do becomes overwhelming. Following the game`s reveal at The Game Awards 2018, Stieglitz told GameSpot about what players can expect in the game, which launches in early access on December 13. It might be quicker to talk about what the developers aren`t planning on putting in the MMO than what they are.Developer Grapeshot Games is a spin-off team of Studio Wildcard, the developer of Ark: Survival Evolved, borrowing its co-creative directors Stieglitz and Jesse Rapczak, and others who worked on Ark. So it`s no surprise that Atlas borrows a lot from Ark as well, refining and adding onto many of its systems and ideas. But as Stieglitz said, Atlas is more MMO with survival game elements than the other way around.`One thing we like about Ark is the emergent gameplay aspects--what happens when you get a lot of players together and they start doing things that you don`t expect,` he continued. `So we figured, okay, if you get interesting scenarios with a hundred players, what will happen if you got thousand players, or 10,000, or when we ultimately did the math, 40,000, into the same world and have them all interact in ways we don`t predict? And we think that is frightening for us as developers, but also really exciting, and so with Atlas we`ve tried to construct systems that facilitate those kinds of emergent gameplay behaviors.`A Fantasy Ocean WorldYou can play Atlas in both first- and third-person, and the MMO side means that there will be quests and objectives for you to complete, Stieglitz said. You play as a Pathfinder, a descendant of a magica ...
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