Water, Water, Everywhere: Atlas First Impressions, Part The Third.

Steam claims I have now played Atlas for six hours. It feels a lot longer than that. Probably because I've spent at least as long again writing about it.

Yesterday, once again, as soon as I'd finished recounting my previous day's exploits, I logged back in and knuckled down to getting the hell out of Freeport. Spoiler: this time I succeeded.

The big difference happened in my head. Instead of trying to tear through the minimum requirements at the fastest possible speed I sat back and thought about it. The problem was hides. Hides, skin, fur, fleece, whatever you call the coverings you strip off an animal.

Everything else you need to collect is incredibly easy. Punch a tree, you get wood and thatch. There are trees all over. Wave your hands at bushes or grass, you get fibre. No shortage of bushes and grass. Stones? Pick them up, that's what the beaches are made of. Flint? Punch a rock.

Wait, what? Punch a rock? Is that wise? Come to think of it, punch a tree?

Okay, you have stone, wood and fibre. Make a stone axe. Now you can chop wood by the cord. Make a stone pick. Now you can break rocks and get stone and flint by the ton. And your hands don't bleed.

You still don't have any hide, though, do you? That's because you can't just go up to an animal, wave your hands and have its fur magically fall into your pack. More's the pity. No, you have to punch it dead and no animal is going to stand still for that. They all either run away, a Benny Hill scenario that's not funny even once, or they fight back and mostly they win.

Oddly, my success at killing wildlife seemed to deteriorate as I ostensibly became more powerful. When I started and didn't know any better I won three consecutive fights with two pigs at once, wearing nothing but my underwear, hitting them with my bare hands. As I levelled up and began to make weapons and wear protective clothing, even a single pig got the better of me every time.

I am gradually revising my opinion of the visuals. They are better than I thought.

My problem, then, wasn't collecting resources per se. It was killing animals. In order to get the hides I had to fight. Every time I lost, any materials I'd gathered vanished into the void and I was back to square one.

As I was standing around by the docks, thinking about all this and wondering what to do about it, I noticed that the bay seemed remarkably full of craft. There were rafts, schooners and boats of various designs moored up and down the coast in all directions. Clearly not everyone was fleeing the starter area at the first opportunity - or if they were they were coming back.

Maybe I didn't need to rush so much after all. And what was that on those rafts? Boxes? Didn't I read something about storage that persisted after you died? And hadn't I already spent skill points opening some talent tree relating to furniture?

Ah, yes. Talent trees. I haven't really mentioned them, have I?

Atlas has a very extensive and intriguing progression system based around a multiplicity of talents. It does look fascinating. At the moment I'm pretty much picking things at random since you can respec at no cost. That's how I came to put points into building even though I had nowhere to live.

And how glad am I that I did! I opened my Inventory and browsed the Crafting panel. Yes! I can make storage boxes! A plan began to form...

If I made an axe I'd get hugely improved gains from skinning animals. If I could just kill one animal and skin it with an axe I'd have enough Hides for a raft. If I had a raft I could make a storage box and place it on the raft. If I had a raft with a storage box and I kept it moored at the dock in Freeport I could stash all my stuff before I tried to kill animals and then if I died I would still be in the same zone as my raft and my storage box and I wouldn't have to start from scratch.

Bed, boards and box.

So that's what I did. I very carefully and cautiously hunted down a single, low level pig with no friends. I'd made a spear to increase my damage and with that I managed to kill the pig. Then I skinned it with my axe, took the mats to the man, got my raft and named it and I was off and running.

The box was easy to make. Next I needed a bed so I could respawn on the raft after I travelled to the next zone. The bed needed more hide which meant more animal fights. Since it seemed next to impossible to find single animals near the dock I went exploring along the coast.

Within a few hundred yards the landscape changed completely. Whereas the coast to the left of the docks had been rocky and barren, to the right it was all forest glades and dappled sunlight. Quite gorgeous. And I had it all to myself.

I found a spot where animals wandered aimlessly around in typical MMO fashion. There were some sheep there. Sheep are famously non-aggressive, aren't they? Also they are fat and they run slowly. And what do you get from sheep? Fleece and lots of it.

That solved my Hide problem for the time being. Night was falling and the nagging prompt warned me I was getting cold so I headed back to my raft. I built myself a bed, lit a fire and waited for dawn.

While I waited I messed around with the options on the raft, the box and the bed to figure out how they worked and what they could do. I'd made Level 8 while I was preparing my escape and that's the cap for the starter zone. I had most of what I needed to survive the journey (although not, as I was going to find out, everything) so there didn't seem to be any reason to hang around.

This is all the fog I have cleared so far. This is one zone out of maybe a hundred. If you squint you can see my old raft.

I was curious to find out whether my original raft was still where I'd left it. It was still marked on the map. My plan was to sail the new raft to where the old one was and find out. That didn't happen due to circumstances beyond my control. Or at least beyond my ability to plan ahead.

As soon as it got light I unfurled the sails, spun the mast and set off at a fair clip. The raft is easy to steer once you get the hang of it and it seems fast enough until someone on a schooner cruises past you as though you were standing still.

When that happened I got a shock, not because of the relative differences in our speeds, which I expected, but because the guy on the boat yelled at me as he went by. Loudly. In real words that came out of my speakers. I had no idea voice chat was on by default. In the hours I'd been playing not one person had ever said anything out loud.

It was like one of those moments when you're walking along, minding your own business, and some yahoo yells at you out of the window of a speeding car. Exactly like that. Just as annoying. Just as disturbing. Fortunately at the speed he was going he was out of range before I could work out what he was saying. I'm sure it wasn't anything good.

The main reason I'm sure about that, other than his tone, is that I was playing a female character, alone on a raft in the middle of the ocean, wearing nothing but some skimpy underwear and a hankie on my head. I'd not gotten around to crafting any clothes before I left, having lost so many sets already and having gotten used to wandering about in my vest and shorts with no-one paying me the slightest interest.

Somehow I don't think he was yelling "Is there anything I can do to help, Miss?"

The unwanted attention made me aware for the first time almost since I began playing Atlas of how  my character actually looked. As well as the state of undress, my hair had grown out. Yes, really. When I made a quip about it two posts back I was entirely unaware it was a thing that could happen.

I have a number of screenshots now in which my character's hair is different lengths. The buzz cut has grown out and she now has wild curls down to the middle of her back. It also changes color, particularly when it gets wet.

Not only does her hair grow but she's getting older. I've been playing for six hours but my character, who was 20 when I started, is now 22. It tells you your age next to your paper doll. How the passage of two full years squares with the day-night cycle beats me, unless the Atlas planet has a year that lasts about a week. Also, what happens if you've played the same character for 60 hours rather than six? Do they die of old age?

I might have been worrying about that had I not been dying of heatstroke. There's no shade on a raft and I'd lit a fire when I set out because it was too cold. With all the distractions I hadn't noticed the sun was blazing down and I was in mortal danger of burning up.

I doused the fire but it was still way too hot. Luckily, by this stage I'd crossed the zone line and I could see land ahead. It didn't look like the same coastline where I'd made landfall last time but as well as heatstroke I was also now suffering from dehydration. The one thing I'd neglected before setting off was to craft and fill several waterskins.

It looked like it was going to be touch and go whether I'd get to shore before I died. I desperately wanted to get my raft securely anchored first but in the end I was in such a panic I just ran into a wharf, leapt off and swam ashore in search of fresh water.

The red mist descends. Slowly.

Jumping into the sea fixed my overheating issue but you can't drink seawater and survive. I ran around the inshore area looking for a river or a lake or a puddle but there was nothing. I did discover something as I choked to death: it takes a lot longer to die of thirst in Atlas than you'd expect. At one point I'd been on the verge of expiring for so long I was contemplating attacking a bear to get it over with.

Eventually the red mist closed in and I choked my last. This was the moment of truth. Would I find myself banished back to Freeport, in which case I'd be closing down the game for good, or would I be offered the choice of waking up in bed on my raft a few hundred feet away?

It was the bed! Praise be! I hit the respawn button and reappeared on my raft. Still no corpse, mind you. I guess I should have gone to look for it to see if it was still there, waiting to be looted, but I'd put everything of value in my locker anyway and I forgot.

Eeeickythump (great username!) left an extremely helpful comment on the last post that offers a workaround to losing everything when you die. So far I haven't seen so many people roaming about that I'd expect my dropped gear to get picked up by a passing stranger so it seems highly practical.

According to the in-game stats there were 71 people online with me when I logged out last night. Even if that means 71 in the zone I was in rather than the whole server it's hardly the advertised 40,000, is it? I have seen plenty of other players but only in the kind of numbers you see in the average not-too-busy MMO.

Six hours in I have enjoyed Atlas hugely so far but there are several reasons why I believe my interest won't be sustained. I probably have one more post about the game to conclude this series of First Impressions, after which I don't expect to be playing or writing about it for a while. I'm working the rest of this week so that post will probably have to wait until the weekend.

There's something to look forward to...or not.

Another Raft: Atlas First Impressions, Take Two.

It all started so well. As soon as I hit Publish on yesterday's post I logged back into Atlas. This time I'd get out of Freeport and sail the wild ocean wide. I'd see such wonders, make my fortune, forge my legend. At the dam' least I'd make a frickin' raft and get it over the zone line.

And I did, too. First I went to the guy at the end of the dock who sells the rafts. It's a peculiar fudge of a deal. Instead of money he wants what are clearly the necessary materials to craft the thing. When you give him those a window pops up, asking you to name your raft. A raft of that name then appears at the end of the row already bobbing up and down in front of you. Why you can't just craft it yourself , who knows?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. When we left her, Buzzcut Bette, the scourge of the Southwest Shoreline, had lost everything, not least her own corpse. Before she was ready to set sail for the horizon she'd need to start all over again.

It's always easier second time around. In what felt like a matter of minutes I had her fully dressed, with a waterskin and a campfire in her bags. Atlas is an odd mixture of the realistic and the ridiculous. Resources come from predictable sources - meat and hides from animals, wood from trees, flint from rocks (Yes, I finally worked that one out) but somehow you can carry a fully-functional campfire in your backpack and, as I later discovered, set light to it on the wooden boards of a flat raft without the obvious consequences.

Soon, I had all the hides, wood and sundries on my list. I didn't have the recommended stores of meat and I was short the wherewithal to make a bed but other than that I felt pretty well set. I was also becoming increasingly paranoid about a second death leading to another do-over. Night was beginning to fall. Best get on with it.

Campfire nights. Or freeze to death. Your choice.

Atlas seems to be one of those games that, having fronted-ended an encyclopedia of instructions into an opening-scene info-dump, feels perfectly justified in never explaining anything ever again. Fortunately I've sailed imaginary boats before. I figured if I hopped across the bobbing raftway to the one at the end, sporting the name I'd given it, some kind of control panel would pop up.

And it nearly did. I had to work the camera angle a little and hit the ubiqutous "E" key but standing facing the one feature a raft has other than planking, namely the mast, I managed to open a radial menu.

Atlas likes radial menus. I don't. Fortunately, for once these are huge and not at all fiddly. What they are not, however, is intuitive. I looked at the thing for a while. I even pressed a couple of segments, cautiously, to see what they did. Whatever it was wasn't obvious.

I was getting paranoid again. It was dark and I was worried I might wreck my raft, or scuttle it, or otherwise do something I'd regret. I decided to ask a friend and since I don't have any friends playing Atlas I asked Google instead.

If anyone reading this is thinking of trying Atlas I can do no better than suggest they watch Zueljin Gaming's fifteen-minute Beginner's Guide on YouTube. It is, as one of the comments has it, "a beginners guide that's actually helpful". I flipped through to the part where he explains how to sail a raft and it was so clearly and cheerfully explained I went back to the begining and watched the whole thing. And learned stuff I hadn't worked out for myself.

I'd be just as happy with WASD.

Confident in my newfound knowledge I let down my sail, turned my raft to catch the prevailing wind and off I went. At some considerable speed. So fast, in fact, that I began to worry about runing into rocks and smashing the whole thing to matchwood.

That didn't happen. I managed to skirt the only rocky promontory between me and the horizon by a sliver and then it was ho! for the open sea!

There turned out to be a lot of open sea. After a while I started rifling through my packs to pass the time. I'd read someone, somewhere, talking about having a campfire on his raft so I thought I'd give it a go. I set my campfire up, lit it and waited for the sail to burst into flames.

Nothing happened. I was pretty sure it wouldn't or I would never have taken the risk but if I'd been wrong I'd at least have gotten a funny story out of it.

With a roaring fire and the journey still ongoing I taught myself how to roast a chicken. There's a whole controversial and complicated nutritional system in Atlas that I'd been ignoring until I watched the video but now I understood roughly how it worked I figured I probably ought to do something about keeping myself healthy.

Fire on board ship. The thing a sailor fears most. Or not.

I'd just had time to cook and eat my chicken when the zone line finally arrived. Free of Freeport and never going back! (That's ironic foreshadowing, in case you missed it).

The sun was coming up and the scenery was verging on the spectacular. I've always been a sucker for lens flare. Far in the distance I could just about make out some faint shimmer that might be land so I pulled the sail round and headed in thst direction.

I'll say one thing for Wildcard: they absolutely weren't kidding when they said this thing was going to be big. The timescales for crossing the distances in question are going to be immense. Presumably bigger boats go faster, but even so exploring the whole of this watery world is going to be a major timesink.

Opening the map is a daunting prospect. It works just fine and it looks splendid. The problem is scale. It makes you realize just how insignificant you are and how little the ocean cares about your existence.

I'm not much of a sailor either in real life or games. I just wanted to get to dry land and start exploring on foot. I knew there was a high likelihood I'd be eaten by a grue at first landfall but I was bouyed by the knowledge that I'd no longer have to start again from nothing. My raft would be my revival point and my corpse would be no harder to recover than in the good old days of EverQuest.

Great. At least I'll know the name of the place where I died.

That's what I thought. I wasn't reckoning with two things: ignorance and early access.

Let's take ignorance first. Yes, you can respawn on your raft. If, that is, you've thought to make a bed and place it there. It's your bed that acts as a respawn point, not the raft. I'd somehow missed that crucial factor in the thread I'd read on the subject of getting your body back.

I had not made my bed and yet, precisely because I had not made it, I did indeed have to lie in it. Isn't language fun? 

Having carefully manouevered my raft to the extreme shallows of the first island I came to, I waded ashore. Another raft was moored further out to sea. There were some rudimentary foundations laid for some kind of structure. The place was obviously claimed so I wandered inland to look for a better spot to set up home, whereupon I was promptly killed by a wolf.

It was a fair fight. He was level 5 and so was I. I got him to half health but I am absolutely not getting to grips with Atlas's hyper-kinetic combat so anything more aggressive than a chicken has a better than fifty-fifty chance of doing for me.

Which would have been fine had I respawned, as I expected, on my raft. Nope. Big nope. What's more, I didn't even have the option of respawning in the same zone. Having died bedless it was back to Freeport or start another character. And naturally my corpse stayed just where the wolf left it and my raft just where I'd moored it.

Maybe I could just steal one...

To say I was miffed would be putting it mildly. I stomped off to do some research into respawning and corpse revovery, which was when I learned that even had I made a bed and put it on my raft I might well have ended up back in Freeport anyway. There's a bug, the paramaters of which don't seem well-understood, that makes respawning on beds something of a lottery. This is Early Access, after all.

And so, as I write my Pathfinder, the peculiar title given to characters in Atlas, is back in Freeport in her skivvies, the whole "make a raft and sail away" thing ahead of her yet again. Rather than get on with it, I used the unexpected return to Freeport as an opportunity to experiment with the respawn system.

I died many times. I took all the available revival options, opening a cluster of tiny vistas on my vast fogged map. I read the aforementioned thread and contemplated my unfortunate situation.

I'm aware this is going to be a relatively hard game to learn, let alone master, especially since I'm alone and the general advice seems to be that you can't get much of anything done with fewer than four. I'm not convinced I'll ever get to grips with the combat. It's hugely more offputting than the ostensibly similar version in the alpha we don't talk about, where I have little or no real trouble managing the controls.

Once more unto the beach, dear friends.

It's not the dying I mind. I can hack dying, even dying a lot, just so long as my character keeps moving forward. There seems to be no penalty for dying other than inconvenience, anyway, although given the current degree of inconvenience, I'd take level-loss any day.

I 'm not much bothered by corpse runs, either. Been there, done that, got the body. Mostly.

What I'm not up for, though, is endless restarts. I need to know that I can at least pick myself up and dust myself off somewhere roughly adjacent to where I fell down, then head off to get my stuff back. I'm okay with having to prep. I belong to the bind generation, after all. I'm just not okay with Groundhog Day gaming.


I'm going to give it one more go. Get another raft. Make a bed this time. Sail to somewhere no-one else has claimed. See what happens. It does look pretty darned amazing out there...

If I die and end up back in Freeport, though, that's it. I'll be shelving Atlas until I see a patch note that says respawning is fixed. We should at least wake up safely, back in our beds, thinking it was all a dream, before the real nightmare - corpse recovery - begins.

Voting With Your Feet

I had it in mind this afternoon to post something about what looks disturbingly like ever-deteriorating professional standards in online gaming. The immediate prompt for this was the truly spectacular mishandling of the "Early Access" launch of Wildcard's Atlas but heaven knows there's no shortage of recent examples.

I've never played a Fallout game in my life but even I feel let down by the bug-ridden, barely half-finished mess that is - by most, if not all, accounts -  Fallout 76. I get a contact low just reading about it.

In a game I do play, Guild Wars 2, this weekend saw an astonishing error of the kind that gets people fired - or at least moved to a non-customer-facing department, where they can't do as much damage to the company's reputation. I'll try to keep this simple for the benefit of those who don't follow World vs World.

The North American WvW league comprises four tiers, made up of twelve "worlds". Before consolidation due to falling population there were originally twenty-four worlds and eight tiers. Those twenty-four were resolved into a dozen "hosts" and a dozen "guests".

Host/guest status is determined by activity and can change. A "World", meaning one of the three named teams in a match, can be a single Host or a Host plus one, two or even three Guests. The idea - seldom achieved - is to come up with teams of equal size.

This is known as "World Linking". A "link" lasts two months, changing on the final Friday of every even-numbered month. The new linkings are based on how activity is deemed to have changed over that period.

Because the last Friday in December falls bang in the middle of the holiday period, ANet decided, as they did last year, to bring the re-linkings forward by a week. Whether due to taking it at a rush or because of staffing issues related to the holidays, this attempt to clear the decks went disastrously wrong.

On Saturday morning I got up to find Mrs Bhagpuss already in WvW, doing her dailies. I asked her who we were linked with and she showed me on screen. Yaks Bend was linked with Maguuma. And Dragonbrand. And Ferguson's Crossing.

I could scarcely credit what I was seeing. Granted, Yaks Bend has been wallowing in Tier 4 of late, kept from the very bottom of the table only by the raddled shell of the ineptly revived and callously abandoned Sanctum of Rall, but even with most of our "fight" guilds having left the server over a leadership dispute and our current leadership in hibernation in a concerted effort to drive our activity metrics down (a process too arcane to explain), we have been unable to shift our rating below Very High or Full.

There was no way on Earth or Tyria we should have received three links, let alone two of the strongest available, Mag and DB. I booted up my PC and checked the full re-linking. It was bizarre. Where we had too many links other servers, nominally less active than us, had none at all. Either someone was having a Wintersday ho ho ho at our expense or there'd been a major screw-up.

On the forums I found a lively discussion, to put it euphemistically. Many players had expressed confusion or outrage before someone with a cooler head thought to re-post the official links that had been announced at reset.

Suffice it to say Yaks Bend was not supposed to get an early Wintersday present. Somehow we'd been joined not only with our with intended partners, Ferguson's Crossing, but we'd also acquired the links meant for Crystal Desert and Gates of Madness as well, while those two unlucky servers were left to fight on alone.

The whole sorry shambles was rendered even more embarrassing by the long-suffering community rep Gaile Gray, a long way out of her depth trying to understand the intricacies of an unfamiliar game mode, letting her patience slip and coming perilously close to blaming the messengers. It wasn't pretty and still isn't.

The upshot is that nothing can be (or at least will be) done until the next reset on Friday, December 28. Few people care about match results in WvW any more but people do like to be able to play, especially over a holiday period when they have free time. Queues of 200/50/50/50 on all four borderlands at one extreme and not enough to fill a squad on all four maps put together at the other really isn't conducive to festive fun.

This is just one minor tale from an ever-lengthening catalogue of disasters afflicting online gaming. While it's certainly true that there were always bugs in every update and that the always-on nature of MMORPGs meant players got to see the rips in the tapestry more often than players of offline games ever had, I really don't think things used to be as bad as this.

Atlas, the precipitately-announced, astoundingly over-ambitious survival MMO from ARK developers Wildcard, managed to stagger into Early Access last night. It currently has an Overwhelmingly Negative rating on Steam, based on more than five thousand reviews.

It's cheap and I was going to buy it although the 100GB download was putting me off a tad. I read a few dozen of the reviews and, obviously, now I'm going to wait. Anyone would.

It's all very well, a game being rough and ready in Early Access - we expect that. I wouldn't expect it to be feature complete, either. I would, however, expect to be able to log in. Given that I would just have paid $30, I would also expect to have bought something other than a re-skin of an existing game.

When Wildcard said that Atlas was "made from the same DNA, so there’s a lot of stuff in there from ‘Ark’ like the building mechanics and unlocking new things you can do" I don't think many prospective purchasers thought they meant it quite as literally as turns out to be the case. A Steam reviewer called Jeff explains:

It's a reskin of Ark that is somehow WORSE than Ark. If you look in the games install folder, there are folders literally called ScorchedEarth and Abberation just reusing assets from Ark. And on top of that, if you have a controller plugged in, scroll down to the bottom of the options on the main menu. If you scroll down 1 more past that, there's another invisible menu option. Hit A or X or whatever on your controller, and it opens up THE ARK MENU. It even shows options to choose which Ark DLC you want to play, edit map options, etc. The best part is that under that option, you can see the choices for all of the types of Ark worlds, and theres one addition to that list! Ocean. That's right, this game was built as a DLC of Ark. It functions through Ark's menus, and in that menu it is classified just like Ark's released DLCs.

I could go on. There are, as I said at the top, no shortage of examples. As online gamers we seem to have drifted to a point where developers feel they can throw anything into the water in the expectation of a feeding frenzy and time after time we prove them right.

If we're lucky, over time, the rattletrap wreck we bought might get fixed up until it runs. When that happens, as it did with No Man's Sky, somehow we feel we've done alright. Everything is forgiven and, what's even more disturbing, forgotten.

Azuriel at In An Age has provided two first-rate posts on the subject, particularly focusing on the way anyone with the temerity to complain finds themselves on the end of egregious accusations of "entitlement". Both posts lead into excellent discussions in the comments. Wilhelm has a great rant on the same topic, with particular attention to the concept of gaming as a service.

At this point we might begin to wonder how we got ourselves into this parlous state but I suspect we all know the answer to that. We created a demand for unfinished, barely-working games by consistently paying for them and trying to play them even when they didn't work.

I'm as guilty as anyone. I not only paid for Landmark long before it was anything much more than a barely-functional tech demo, I paid more for it than I have ever paid for any other video game, before or since. What's more I enjoyed it and even now I would say I got my money's-worth and then some.

As I type this, I'm logged into GW2, where I've been playing World vs World happily despite the entire structure having been catastrophically broken by what would seem to be sheer incompetence and lack of care by the people in charge. And I'm going to play it some more, too, and enjoy doing it.

I don't have anything clever to add to the discussion at this point. I'm not even convinced that I would prefer to go back to the days when games were sold as a finished product and by and large worked. Even now I might well prefer to have Early Access to a shaky build immediately rather than wait anything up to a couple of years for a fairly stable version.

That said, there has to be some kind of floor to this process. We can argue about whether something is "good enough" yet to take money for and whether we're fools or saints for putting up with shoddy products and terrible service but the games do have to work well enough to provide some minimal level of entertainment, don't they? Or at least allow you to log in.

If we fall below that minimum standard we might as well just send the developers our bank details and invite them to help themselves.

Hmm, strike that. Probably best not to give them ideas...

Atlas Obscura

A couple of unrelated news items caught my attention at MassivelyOP yesterday. One was a report that Daybreak had laid off another sixty or seventy people. The other was the announcement of a major new MMO, launching before Christmas.

News of layoffs at any MMO studio isn't generally much of a surprise - worrying, maybe, but hardly unusual. I'm tempted to say the most surprising thing about this one was finding out Daybreak still had seventy people left to let go.

John Smedley flared up on Twitter with some choice quotes that look likely to come back to haunt him one day. I imagine he thought so too when he'd calmed down because they've both disappeared from his timeline, although you can read them in the linked M:OP post.

It's one thing to criticize the running of a studio and the care it takes of its employees but that criticism takes on an entirely different tone when it comes from the person directly responsible for arranging the transfer of said studio to its current owners in the first place.

The background to the story seems murky, as is usually the case in affairs of this kind. My dog in the fight is really the health and future fortunes of the current stable of games but as a longtime fan of SOE/DBG's style of MMORPG I'm also interested in what Daybreak might do next.

The good news, in so far as we know anything, is that the existing games seem to be unaffected by the latest round of redundancies. M:OP clarified the original report with some qualified reassurance: "It sounds as if the core MMORPGs are safe".

This opinion appears to have been derived by MassivelyOP directly from sources among the DBG staffers actually laid off, although the linked article from Variety does include a boilerplate quote from a DBG spokesperson: "we remain focused on supporting our existing games and development of our future titles.”.

Conversely, one of the most striking elements in the M:OP edit, the reference to "a secret game with a top IP", doesn't appear at all in the Variety story.  Indeed, on a first reading, the Variety piece appears to contradict M:OP's precis, with Variety reporting the DBG spokesperson as confirming

"“Our Austin office is not closing.""

while Massively:OP reframes that as:

"those laid off may have been working on a secret game with a top IP (at the Austin studio – now confirmed publicly by Variety)."

I guess both could be correct, if the layoffs are at Austin but Austin stays open with whoever's left still working on...whatever it is they do there... but it's a confusing picture to say the least.

What really struck me - other than the fact that Variety even knows DBG exists - is how little we know about anything major studios are up to behind the scenes. Given that MMOs take years to produce, and especially given the recent trends towards turning their development into some kind of reality show, I find it genuinely surprising to learn that there are still so many secret projects out there.

The other news story I mentioned is a case in point. ARK developers Wildcard are launching a brand-new MMO next week. Yes, next week!

If you get your MMO news from Massively:OP, as I do, you'd be forgiven for thinking the first anyone knew about this was when the trailer was shown at the Twitch Game Awards a couple of days ago. (I didn't even hear about the Twitch Game Awards until they were over, despite having a Twitch account, but leaving that aside...)

Checking YouTube, however, I see that there are several videos up for Atlas, which is what the pirate-themed survival MMO is called, going back at least four months. As my own channel has often demonstrated, if you want to hide something from the general public, you can't do better than post it on YouTube.

The Steam page for Atlas also contradicts the M:OP piece, which describes the game as "first person MMO", while the actual description on the page linked by M:OP clearly states that Atlas is

 "a massively multiplayer first-and-third-person fantasy pirate adventure" (my emphasis).

All sources agree that the game will offer a vast open world capable of holding up to forty thousand players at once, which is Massively Multiple by anyone's criteria, I'd say. Wildcard describe it as an MMO "on the grandest scale" and with claims like this, who can argue?

"Physically sail in real-time across the vast oceans with the proprietary server network technology. Explorers will voyage to over 700 unique landmasses across 45,000 square kilometers, with thousands of Discovery Zones, and ten distinct world regions..."

I'm not sure whether the part about sailing in real-time is a threat or a promise. I don't see much future in a game that requires two weeks of your life just to get from one landmass to another. I'm guessing they just mean no instant travel.

Although the game is described as a "a survival MMO", as you might expect from the makers of ARK, the Steam page makes it sound far more like a full-on sandbox. It will even have some theme-park content featuring "challenging main questlines".

If it all sounds too good to be true - and it does - then temper your excitement in the knowledge that next week's "launch" is in fact the start of a proposed two year period of Early Access. How much of the mind-boggling feature set will be in place by Christmas 2020 I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Wildcard does have an impressive record with ARK, though. I've never played it but I've read a ton about it and for all the teething troubles and complaints, most of what I read was people enjoying themselves. ARK's overall rating on Steam is "mixed" but its recent rating, from almost seven thousand votes, is "very positive", which to me suggests an Early Access project that produced a solid, successful game.

The official early-access release trailer is impressive even though you can see it's very much a work in progress. This article at PCGamer fleshes out a lot of detail about how the game might play. I'm not particularly a fan of pirate settings and I positively dislike ship-to-ship combat, but even so I'm very tempted. 

The 100GB download and the fact that my GPU might not quite meet the minimum spec is about all that's putting me off. Certainly the $30 price tag sounds reasonable and the option of playing on either PvE or PvP servers is perfect.

What I'm really left wondering, though, is what else might be out there? Who knows which studio is working on what project? We base our expectations for the genre on what we can see but so much is hidden.

We don't even know what that "top IP" Daybreak were working on was, let alone whether the layoffs mean it's been cancelled or just changed development phase. Was it an internal or an external IP? Did the last hope for EQ3 just die, or was that the rumored Planetside 3 that crashed and burned? Or was it an IP on license that we'd never even imagined DBG might be working on and so will never miss?

All we can say for sure is is there's a lot more going on than we ever know about. Until we do. And I like it that way. Long may it continue!