Ark is getting real seas: pirate ships and Atlas’ ocean tech are coming to a summer DLC
Studio Wildcard said it will bring core ocean and ship systems from its troubled pirate survival project Atlas into Ark: Survival Ascended’s upcoming Tides of Fortune DLC, due this summer.
In an interview with PC Gamer, co-founders Jeremy Stieglitz and Jesse Rapczak explained that Atlas’ networked ocean physics and ship mechanics are being adapted for Ark. Studio Wildcard showed work-in-progress footage and stills of a prototype ship and ocean and said the team wants the systems to be useful for players and modders rather than the unforgiving loop Atlas became known for.
Stieglitz described Atlas as a project with “crazy cool ideas” but cautioned its combination of mechanics made the game excessively punishing. “Atlas is, like, crazy cool tech, but a lot of game design lessons about what not to do,” he said. The original Atlas world used stitched servers so players could sail between instances, and its systems required labor-intensive actions like carrying resources one at a time and building ships plank by plank. That design made loss of progress brutal.
For Tides of Fortune, the studio plans to keep the satisfying bits, the water, sailing feel, and physics, but make them more forgiving. “We hope to distill it into a more accessible form than Atlas ever had,” Stieglitz said. Rapczak added that Ark’s current water had been flat and uninteresting and that simulated ocean physics would be a major step up for the game and for modding possibilities.
Studio Wildcard also confirmed the ship shown in footage was an Atlas asset used to demonstrate the systems. Players will be able to build large vessels with customization options such as attachments and cannons, and to bring dinosaurs aboard. Crucially, the studio said obtaining and replacing ships in Ark will not be as resource- and time-intensive as it was in Atlas, and crafting a replacement after a sinking will not require starting over.
Ark: Survival Ascended has kept momentum since its relaunch, and our previous coverage noted the game passed Survival Evolved on Steam last year, a milestone you can read about here. Tides of Fortune will ship this summer for Ark: Survival Ascended, and Studio Wildcard framed the new content as a way to reuse Atlas’ strongest technical ideas while avoiding the features that made that game punishing to play.
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Atlas
Developed by Instinct Games, Grapeshot Games
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!
A massively multiplayer first-and-third-person fantasy pirate adventure. ATLAS will host up to 40,000 players exploring the same Globe simultaneously, with an unprecedented scale of cooperation and conflict! Stake your claim in this endless open world as you conquer territory, construct ships, search for buried treasure, assemble forts, plunder settlements and hire crew to join your powerful growing armada. Start small then expand your spheres of influence from a small island, up to an unstoppable pirate empire that spans across the oceans. Wage battle against enemy fleets as you singlehandedly can command large ships of war using the captaining system (or divide up to the responsibilities among your trusted lieutenants), or take control of any weapon directly with your own character. Dive deep into the briny water to explore permanent sunken wrecks and recover salvage, unearth the loot from procedurally-generated Treasure Maps and challenge zones, or complete challenging main questlines. Team up with other aspiring adventurers and sail into the vast ocean to discover new lands rich with region-specific elements, tame exotic natural and mythical creatures, raid forgotten tombs, confront powerful ancient gods and even build and administer your own colonies, cities, and civilizations to dominate the ATLAS in this ultimate quest for fortune and glory!
- Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Adventure
- Platforms: PC (Microsoft Windows), Xbox One
- Modes: Single player, Multiplayer, Co-operative, Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO)
- Release: 2018-12-22
- Publisher: Grapeshot Games
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Age Rating:
PEGI 16 / GRAC 15+ / ESRB M
- IGDB Rating: 53.3/100
