Making Waves

Ark’s developers turn to piracy for their next big project: ATLAS.

- Philippa Warr

It is hard to fight a ghost ship while the person in charge of the cannon is playing Do-Re-Mi on the accordion badly. In addition to this wisdom, Studio Wild card’s enormous piratical project, Atlas, has also taught me how to make the ocean equivalent of a handbrake turn (slam the rudder in one direction while the sails are only half open), and that friendly fire is definitely enabled.

Atlas is an MMO themed around piracy. Think Ark meets EVE Online on the high seas. There’s a survival element, so you’ll need to keep yourself fed, watered, away from dread beasts, at a reasonable temperature and so on. If you’re playing versus other players you’ll also need to keep yourself safe from their guns and cutlasses. There is also a social, empire building element where players can band together to form companies (like Ark’s tribes).

The idea is that these companies will grow and vie for territory and resources. The ability for companies to set laws to govern behaviour in particular ways will arrive in a few months but, from launch, they will be able to set taxes in areas they control. Wild card wants Atlas’s systems to help encourage a mixture of co-op and competition, trade and warfare.

The full feature list is far longer but there’s crafting, there’s sailing, there’s fishing, there are sea shanties, there are boss-type monsters... The mini-boss Wild card showed me was a hydra which lived on a Mediterranean-looking island and huffed dreadful breath at its attackers. As you might assume, the challenge was to destroy the monster’s heads before they regrew, and to destroy the whole monster before it destroyed your crew.

SETTING SAIL