A casual gamers' thoughts on Atlantica Online

Lagomorphia

I consider myself a casual gamer. I just don't have time to make a career out of gaming. There are many technical reviews of Atlantica Online out there so I don't feel the need to repeat information.

I have been playing Atlantica Online since closed beta 1, so you know I've been around the block. I have found the game very enjoyable and solid. The graphics are very nice with enough variety to keep things interesting. I do wish there were more customization choices on character creation though.

The gameplay itself is strangely addictive. The quests follow a specific storyline and take you through the various locations of the game, even letting you autorun to your target. I must admit I'm a big fan of the autorun feature! As a casual gamer I'm not inclined to spend my day memorizing map locations.

The big selling point of Atlantica Online is that it's turn based strategy. You also have a group of mercenaries that fight by your side. I find that the battles are interesting and seem to go by at a nice pace. Since you are fighting more than one opponent at a time with your team of mercenaries with you there is a lot to do.

I usually don't find crafting enjoyable in games but Atlantica Online actually makes it fun. You can craft armor, weapons and consumables from the items you pick up in battles. As you craft your items you can sell them to other players by listing them on the market. The market is almost like a game in itself. It's interesting to see what others are doing by watching the prices of items.

PvP is mostly done via the Free Leagues. This is a system of PvP matches that let you fight other players to advance your standing in the League.

The community seems really friendly. You gain benefits by belonging to a guild, as well as teaching others crafting skills, so there is a feeling of being involved with the other players.

All in all I'd say Atlantica Online has a lot to offer. You can get as involved as you want. If you want to stay a casual player you can still have a lot of fun.

 

oldbone

As a fellow casual gamer, I agree with your observations! 

I do get in trouble sometimes, though, when my kids light the house on fire (or some other equally disastrous event) and I come back to find otter have ambushed my party and decimated my front line! 

komkotisce

Originally posted by oldbone


As a fellow casual gamer, I agree with your observations! 
I do get in trouble sometimes, though, when my kids light the house on fire (or some other equally disastrous event) and I come back to find otter have ambushed my party and decimated my front line! 

 

Auto battle works best in this situation though offcourse in an emergency as yours, there will be no time to activate the auto battle license and finish 1 battle to gain 5 autobattle points, but its worth mentioning.

In any other case, i love the community of this game. There are a lot of friendly players ingame that would love to help out plus the help request feature that gives adv experience book.

Sourajit

Originally posted by Lagomorphia


I consider myself a casual gamer. I just don't have time to make a career out of gaming. There are many technical reviews of Atlantica Online out there so I don't feel the need to repeat information.
I have been playing Atlantica Online since closed beta 1, so you know I've been around the block. I have found the game very enjoyable and solid. The graphics are very nice with enough variety to keep things interesting. I do wish there were more customization choices on character creation though.
The gameplay itself is strangely addictive. The quests follow a specific storyline and take you through the various locations of the game, even letting you autorun to your target. I must admit I'm a big fan of the autorun feature! As a casual gamer I'm not inclined to spend my day memorizing map locations.
The big selling point of Atlantica Online is that it's turn based strategy. You also have a group of mercenaries that fight by your side. I find that the battles are interesting and seem to go by at a nice pace. Since you are fighting more than one opponent at a time with your team of mercenaries with you there is a lot to do.
I usually don't find crafting enjoyable in games but Atlantica Online actually makes it fun. You can craft armor, weapons and consumables from the items you pick up in battles. As you craft your items you can sell them to other players by listing them on the market. The market is almost like a game in itself. It's interesting to see what others are doing by watching the prices of items.
PvP is mostly done via the Free Leagues. This is a system of PvP matches that let you fight other players to advance your standing in the League.
The community seems really friendly. You gain benefits by belonging to a guild, as well as teaching others crafting skills, so there is a feeling of being involved with the other players.
All in all I'd say Atlantica Online has a lot to offer. You can get as involved as you want. If you want to stay a casual player you can still have a lot of fun.
 

Atlantic Online – A Critical Analysis.

I have been playing this game for a while now. Here is where I break down and critically analyze the game.

Graphics

Well not really remarkable but then again if you are using a low PC and you are not into good graphic options the game is quite alright. There are shadow textures and the strategy battle mode is kind of silly and it takes away the surrounding graphical resolution as all the battles are just a loading of 2 monster types similar yet different in Mdef and Pdef randomly numbered in a set from 6-8.

Community

It is pretty much as the free to play community of other free to play games. It is nothing much special. Every now and then you will find people using racism or slang and the chat filter kind of makes it more prominent. Some of the players have even found out a way to overwrite the filter by calling people “nab” than noob.

The community section is for accessing players and no matter how many times I have added people from the beginner’s column, I have found they are either placed there to be used by players or just kept online to fill the list. I have actually found a few players from the beginner’s column who leveled after being added into the guild.

In this section you will find crafters and I think it is more of a gameplay support system than a real mass of online game playing players.

Gameplay

Almost majority of the gameplay is solo stuff without much team gaming found. Team gaming forms the essence of the Mmo gaming and it completely lacks in it. Every now and then you will find over-leveled players spamming peer chat and trying to get a party to do some solo quest. By over – leveled players I mean players who have leveled but do not have good skills or armors or weapons to do the solo quest or continue with it. The most irritating portion of the game is the inventory system and the opening of the boxes kind of locks you. This is again an item shop dependent portion so we can well make out where the game is trying to make the money out of cash shop.

Monsters

The game has a strategy oriented battle system and the monsters generally form of a mix of two separate monsters. Strangely every group will have 2 separate monsters one with a high Mdef and the other with a high Pdef so as you have to select proper mouseclick to make the most damage.

Game-Balance

This is the best portion of any game that I like to analyze.

The game has auto battle option and auto battle is again limited to license and auto battle points. I have seen the worse use of this system throughout the Atlantic playfield. Sometimes it is so bad that many free league toons are also into auto battle and their geek armor / rings or their geek skills won’t allow you to proceed further in division.

So here we see that the game is ready to gear up for item shop based free games that form a bulk of population in mmo list.

Sorry for all the folks out there trying to make Atlantica Online a success, here is my review after playing the game and picking up tits and bits form what exactly is going on.

Guild / Town System

There is not much here but a chat panel and a few town buildings for making town grow.

You can make the town grow but if your guild is not active it can be taken away by another guild with more guild points. So the urge to make the town grow is limited to the cash flow from the tax payments and nothing more. The numbers of towns are limited and as such it is more likely that you will be bided out eventually from a town as you will loose guild points every time you try to save it.

I lost my town through guild point bidding as my guild had many support members of the game who didn’t join when we had to do training centre to keep the town. Also support people go offline after a point of time in guild and then the only way is to dismiss them from guild.

Market and Economy

The economy is quite nice and I have found that your stuff usually sells at quite a steady rate. I think it is mostly support controlled but you can still have the pseudo feeling that this is player controlled.

Crafting

You can craft but it is really no point crafting if you see crafted products are not special and they sell for lower gold than the amount of gold needed to craft. There are some special products that can well only be crafted but the stats in them is not that much appealing to level up your craft skill which is a very costly and time consuming process.

Support people will always have greater crafting level as to them they need it to make the Market balance.

Mini Games

You have the training centre and the treasure map hunting or the developer challenge which are pretty good and can be fun for some time.

Errors

The game is dependent on time. Each turn takes 30secs. So if you lag you will miss turns either against monsters or against opponents in free league. The game has many battle speeds and I have found that the same toon and the same opponents difficulty level rises or falls in free leagues with different battle speeds and thus I think the game is a bit dependent on the internet speed when it comes to free league. The game still lags a lot in it’s near to release from the days of CB.

There are few glitches for the exploiters. If you want to have skill increase in any crafting you go to taj and dismantle Walachia stuff for flame shrda , you will get craft skills up.

At-last and not the least, I have played the game again till 60+ levels and I feel kind of bored going further. May be it is the lack of team gaming that makes it more of a multiplayer diablo mix with the market and the chat to connect players.

All said and done I think from free leagues to the community with artisans and beginners this is all made up support of this game. I do not want to waste my time here anymore in atlantica online. I deleted my character at level 70ish and I am sure not going to give this game another try, reasons being lack of actual players and support community trying to control every part of the game this way or that way including all the towns. If you want Matrix in a mmo world, go ahead waste time with this game for sure.



 

 

nywlanas

 AGAIN!

sourajit, you already have a thread about this. you stopped playing atlantica. i get it. thank you for getting your thoughts across.

 

Sourajit

Originally posted by nywlanas


 AGAIN!
sourajit, you already have a thread about this. you stopped playing atlantica. i get it. thank you for getting your thoughts across.
 

 

Is your Atlantica Forum not enough to go on and on making posts like Auto battle bots In Atlantica Online. Why do you mess around a player driven community in here ?

shadow_51

Originally posted by Lagomorphia

....
The big selling point of Atlantica Online is that it's turn based strategy. You also have a group of mercenaries that fight by your side. I find that the battles are interesting and seem to go by at a nice pace. Since you are fighting more than one opponent at a time with your team of mercenaries with you there is a lot to do.
....

I love turn based battle, this remeber me old games like Might & Magic.

kokoro-chin

I agree with you saying that the game is strangely addictive! I'm having fun doing the main quests and also the side ones as well! I haven't explored crafting much but I happen to enjoy enhancing the equipments I get and selling it in the market. It's kinda like my 'business' in the game.

I also LOVE the auto-run feature, to the point of abusing it. Like even if the NPC is just somewhere in the area, I still use the auto-run because I'm just that lazy. Anyway, you're right about the feature lessening the burden of memorizing maps and all. It helps people like me who really have no sense of direction, in-game or out.

oldbone

Thanks shadow_51, you reminded me of another great ancestor to Atlantica - King's Bounty. 

I think New World Computing made a sequel to KB this year, but I'm drawing upon my experiences with the OLD game - the one I played on my Apple IIe. 

Atlantica combat is a happy blend of FF1, King's Bounty, Disciples, and Ogre Battle... bravo Atlantica.

(please note, King's Bounty rates in my top 5 all time and the others are right up there... no, they don't pay me to say good things about their game... I'll be pointing out the many flaws over the next few months in my articles - but, what game is without flaw?  Let that game throw the first byte... ok, this is a long footnote.)