Atlas is a persistent, open-world game where you can live out your seafaring fancies as a pirate of yore. Whether it’s building a larger-than-life ship, commanding your own crew, or merely coasting around islands and digging for treasure, it looks like there’ll be no shortage of things to do when it launches on October 8.
If you fancied Sea of Thieves but wanted something with a more realistic art style and slightly more indiscriminate violence, then Atlas might be well up your alley. Erik Waananen, the Lead Designer at Grapeshot Games, noted that the game’s “persistent world” would set it apart from other pirate offerings on the market; players would be able to see the ships and states of others exactly as their creators intended. It’s being marketed as a multiplayer survival game, and if you’re not particularly careful, it sounds like you’re even going to be able to get scurvy if you’re not watching your vitamins.
From the footage shown on Inside Xbox, it looks like raiding, looting, and coming together with your mates will be high on your priority list when you’re gallivanting around the open sand-box of the game. The game will have keyboard and mouse support, and when the game launches, it will have full game parity for Xbox and PC players – all updates will be delivered at the same time, so there’s no need to wait no matter the platform that you’re enjoying this nautical adventure on.
Atlas looks like it’s going to benefit from Grapeshot’s approach to updating their service titles over time (like Ark: Survival Evolved), and Waananen says that the first patch to the game will deal with bug fixes before pivoting to ship and sailing updates. It definitely looks like the team will constantly be looking for ways that players can stay engaged, including new ship activities, new enemies, and they’re inviting player feedback from Xbox players so that Atlas can be the best seafaring shanty tale that it can be.
