Guardians of Atlas - Page 61

On November 06 2016 21:58 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
i ran a coverage profiler on the exe and i was impressed how little resources it consumed considering the detail of the graphics and onscreen activity. the software engineer guys knew what they were doing. however, making a game is far more than just good software engineering.

On November 07 2016 02:26 Jett.Jack.Alvir wrote:
I think they tried to make the engine and game at the same time, which ended in failure. I think they should have just focused on perfecting the engine, than design the game.

On November 06 2016 21:41 Hider wrote:


For the last 2 years I can tell you that they tried a ton of different game-modes. Constantly making adjustments and tweaks. The design-team definitely was doing something. Just weren't very good at it I guess.

They started with bottom-up design, but by the midpoint of the project most of the original foundations of the game seem to have been abandoned, meaning they had no consistent, core blueprint for what the game was supposed to be, especially when there was obvious conflict and churn among the lead designers.

On November 08 2016 18:17 tedster wrote:
None of the players could really come up with any significant suggestions on how to bring the game around either - we could suggest balance tweaks and adjustments to objectives, but at the end of the day the overwhelming conclusion seemed to be "I wish there was a better game mode for these mechanics but I'm not sure what it would look like". That sentiment seems to sum up Atlas really well - there were parts of it that felt genuinely fun by the end, but the overall game wasn't really there and might never have been, no matter how much was done to it.

On November 08 2016 19:15 Hider wrote:


I think that when you design a new game - while its absolutely fine (and neccasary) to do a lot of experimentations you have an overall design philosophy on what should be and NOT be in your game.

For instance this is what I would like to see in an RTS:

1. No PvE.
2. Fast and responsive unit movement.
3. People control large armies. Those armies can be split up all over the map.
4. Minimal macro, focussed on micro and "strategy" (as in there are some different viable and impactful options you have at any given point in time - not just an arena micro game).
5. Strong/MOBA'ish defenders advantage to make the game more forgiving.
6. Minimal snowball effect as in when you should always have a chance to win by outplaying your opponent. You should not suffer through 10+ minutes of gameplay where you have < 5% chance of winning.

These requirements comes from a lot of studying and previous testing, that convinced me that this is what (imo) are the core fundamentals for what I like (and alot other) like in an RTS.

Based on those requirements you can test various iterations and see what works and what doesn't.

And when I look of some of the fundamentals of Atlas - It had PvE, it had relatively slow units, it had low army size --> I think that was where it failed. The game developers had not properly realized what makes or creates a fun and skillful RTS game.

On November 08 2016 20:58 JimmyJRaynor wrote:


this same dead end occurs within much bigger companies with much deeper experience in game making. they cancel the project and move on. EA had a studio called Victory Games work on an F2P C&C game for 3 years before it was cancelled. Blizz has cancelled several long term projects. EA cancelled DawnGate.

its impossible to know ahead of time what will feel "fun" and you must just put stuff together.. try it out .. and see if its fun. many of the "monday morning game designers" on TL.Net do not give the game design problem the respect it deserves. its tough, its experimental, and ultimately you are at the mercy of constantly shifting consumer tastes and improving technology.

ok so yeah, we're not gonna give a play by play, but i can answer the "why did the project get cancelled" question which has a very simple answer which is that the game did not retain enough players to have any hope of becoming a business and it wasn't a question of marketing - any money we spent on marketing would have been wasted because the players we brought in weren't going to stick around, except for a very special (and small) segment of the general audience, i.e. you guys
i mean the basic thing we needed was to have the player base growing organically - even if it was very slow, it would have been sensible to say "ok, we're growing, we can keep improving the game and hopefully increase the growth rate" it was not growing organically in alpha people would come in, and play for a bit, and then quit the grubby stream was basically a marketing test case for us: get in front of a bunch of players, get them in the game, see what happens we got a bunch of new players but 2 or 3 weeks later they were gone i mean not all of them but the unavoidable conclusion was that we could not get to a decent player base through marketing spend
i mean i'm not even saying we needed high growth like, remember when the alpha launched we had something like 500-1000 people online the first several days if that number had so much as stayed where it was, it might have been a different ballgame
but 4 weeks later we were nowhere near 500-1000 the kind of business we bet the company on requires a game like, say, tf2, where its what, 9 years old or something and there's still hundreds of thousands of players and it probably hasn't had a single dollar of marketing spend since the orange box it was a big bet, and we lost i won't go into how and why the game was the way it was, we've talked about that a fair bit in the past and its pointless to second guess things now. the bottom line is everyone worked insanely hard and tried to make the best game they knew how to make

and in mid-september i made the call to shut down the game and most of the company and seek out next steps ask you can see, everyone on the team pretty much has found a new home the game's assets and tech have been purchased, but i can't say anything more than that, and i have no idea what will be done with it all i wish there had been a better outcome than that, and we all tried our damnedest, but it didn't work out i'm really proud of what we built, and i'm really proud that we fostered such an awesome community who's still hanging around on discord even after the game is no longer playable you guys rock

On February 21 2017 01:58 The_Red_Viper wrote:
I still would be interested in the day9 story tbh. The whole situation was so weird.
I also do not think that the game was a design failure at the core. Different maps and more work on unit design would have made the game quite good actually.
Yes it was no hardcore rts game, but the (sad) truth is that a future successful rts game will be more like guardians of atlas than sc2. (less/no macro, all about unit control, no big need to multitask, etc)

On February 21 2017 01:05 Incognoto wrote:
Well that's because when you play the game it feels like a MOBA where you also get units instead just a champion. So RTS players are turned off and MOBA players aren't as interested since that market is saturated with great games already.

Our hopes and dreams lie in a new AAA title RTS with proper multiplayer support and instead we get a bastard MOBA. That's all there is to it.

On February 21 2017 02:12 Plansix wrote:
and the need for "fresh eyes" to look at their game in development.