It’s been a rocky year and a half for Atlas, the follow-up MMO to Studio Wildcard’s ARK Survival Evolved. Just a few weeks ago, we recapped the early access title’s history: It was announced as a mega-MMO that would hold 40,000 people, but its excruciatingly slow progress since its 2018 reveal had ensured peaks of only 3000 across the entire game in recent months.
Hopefully, that’s about to change, as this week Wildcard’s Grapeshot Games subunit announced new content, a new map, and new dev team members.
“Our first major change to the ATLAS will be a whole new World Map which is designed to intensify the fun at higher levels and make it a bit safer for lower level players. This is just the first step in the greater plan to shift gameplay from the land out on to the open seas! This new World Map drops in the first half of July for both PC and Xbox. Another piece of ATLAS’ grander plan is to focus on PVP play with an eye towards breaking out PVE play into something else. As part of this plan, we’ll be taking NA PVE offline and leaving the EU PVE server as the official PVE world for the time being. Bringing a new World Map online will require a complete reset of the system, something we don’t take lightly. We wouldn’t do it if we didn’t feel that it was vital to the new experience we want to create for you all.”
The studio says it now has “new goals for supporting the game and delivering regular (dare we say monthly!) content updates that will bring joy and piracy back to the open seas, with plans for Trade Winds, Farms, Warehouses, and more.” The game could certainly use it all, so we’ll be watching with anticipation. Worth noting here is that the game’s subreddit has dwindled significantly, but the folks still piping up have a small thread going speculating on how this new announcement fits into the old roadmap.
New World Map!https://t.co/3NMtUCRYtf#playATLAS pic.twitter.com/7sCjHxVBGR
— ATLAS (@sailtheatlas) June 15, 2020
