Preview: Atlantica Online

A new MMORPG hits the scene and it's not "just another MMO", brings a whole new turn-based tactical gaming system to a real-time platform with great success.

Despite the boom in development of massively multiplayer online games, a few genres have eluded the gold rush, such as the fabled real-time strategy and turn-based tactical games. One of these two, however, has been conquered, in what can only be described as an ingenious multiplayer adaptation. Atlantica brings turn-based tactical gaming to an inherently real-time platform and has done so with remarkable success.

The basic premise of Atlantica is that you assemble an army of up to nine mercenaries and venture out into a rather MMORPG-inspired world filled with towns, dungeons, and monsters. The game starts out like any other MMORPG, with your hero moving around in real time among all the other heroes and monsters, but once you engage in combat it all changes. The game cuts away Final Fantasy-style into a tactical grid, where your army faces off against the enemy’s army, and you take turns executing attacks against each other.

The combat system is really at the heart of Atlantica, and of its success. Each army gets a three-by-three grid to distribute its units. A number of attacks can target multiple squares: for example, spearmen hit both the unit they attack and the unit directly behind it and vikings hit the two units on either side of the unit they attack. The enemies you face have roughly the same combat mechanics, with various horizontal, vertical, and even cross-shaped attacks that can hit multiple units, to supplement the standard one-target melee and ranged attacks.

However, all of this is limited by the basic rule of formation: you have to hit what’s in front before you can hit what’s behind. Although a few ranged attacks can ignore this limit, almost everyone has to attack the front-most unit in the column. This means, to protect a unit, it doesn’t matter which position a unit is in, so much as how many other units are in front of it. Being behind other units doesn’t hinder attacks though, so all your units are equally effective on the offense. Although you can move units from one position to another in a fight, including swapping positions with other units, you can’t swap with dead units, so this adds an extra layer of complexity because, when a unit dies, it ‘blocks’ a spot.

Dead units bring another element of strategy to Atlantica. Monsters, when they die, still need to be looted. You actually loot monsters mid-fight and it takes up one of your available actions. There’s good reason to pilfer the corpses before the fighting is done though. Firstly, they decay after a few rounds, so if you don’t grab them early in an extended fight, you’ll lose them and their loot. Also, certain monsters can revive their allies, but if you loot the corpses they can’t be brought back to life. When fighting an army of revivers, you’ll have to grab each body as you drop it or it’ll come right back up again.

The game is, of course, a multiplayer game, and this fact isn’t lost on the combat part of the game. Up to three players can join forces to fight monsters together. Likewise, monsters can team up on players too. While you’re engaged in a fight, another monster can wander over and join in, adding their army to the fray. Other monsters always walk around in pairs, forcing you two fight two armies at a time. Having a companion is a good idea in some of the more dangerous areas of the game.

But three players banding together doesn’t qualify as ‘massive’ in my books. I suppose the ‘massive’ element plays out in Atlantica with the guild and town system. Players join guilds, guilds earn guild points, and then bid those guild points to take over towns. Once you’ve taken over a town, you can tax everyone that does a transaction in that town, earning money for your guild. It takes the cooperation and coordination of a lot of players to earn enough guild points to take over a town though, so don’t expect to do it single-handedly.

The economy system is also rather robust and brings the massive nature of the game to life. The market system is linked through every town in the game, so wherever you go, one strong economy churns away. The tricky part is that the equipment in the game is based, in part, on randomly distributed items from boxes. See, the monsters drop boxes of a fixed type, such as “spirit boxes” that you’ll get at the beginning of the game. If you open a spirit box, you get a random spirit-level item: any weapon or armor, really. So you can either sell your spirit boxes, or open them and sell the items inside. Certain items, perhaps swords, are less common than other items and, thus, more valuable. Other items, maybe shoes, are really common and not very valuable at all. So you have to keep this in mind before you open the box yourself.

Another thing to keep in mind is the box gambling system. You can trade in any number of boxes and you might get some better boxes in return. Or you might simply lose your boxes. But the gambling system is a great way to upgrade lower-level boxes and get some pretty powerful items; I’ve traded in a spirit box (which you get at level 1) and gotten a Bran Castle box (which has level 50 equipment). This system also ensures a high value of spirit boxes, which means that low level players have something to sell that high level players want to buy.

The other trick to the equipment system is enchanting. Any two identical items can be enchanted together to produce a +1 version of the same item. So, two spirit swords can be merged into a spirit sword +1. Two spirit swords +1 can be merged into a spirit sword +2. Anyone with a basic understanding of binary mathematics will see how the bonuses cost exponentially more original items; a +6 spirit sword will cost you 64 basic spirit swords. It can be a tricky decision whether to merge weapons yourself or buy a weapon with a high plus from another player, and all this keeps the economy system very fun and interesting.

Boxes aren’t the only way to get equipment, however. There’s also a robust crafting system. At higher crafting levels, you can craft gear with plusses straight on them. I made a set of spirit armors that turned out to be +2, effectively quadrupling my production. Sadly, I haven’t seen this sort of bonus in the consumable crafting: you can craft arrows and bullets and cannonballs for your archers, gunners, and artillerymen, but I have yet to produce any extra arrows when I craft them, making them quite expensive to produce. At first I gawked at the market prices and paying 60g per arrow, until I realized that it would cost me 100g per arrow to craft them myself. Thankfully, arrows just add some bonus damage; they’re not required for archers to attack.

There are a few issues I have with the game, though. First of all, your main character is just like any other mercenary, except your other mercenaries evolve and your main character doesn’t. Also, you can never change your character’s class, so after you start as a sword-user, you can never switch to an axe-user or a staff-user. It strikes me, seeing as your hero is just like any other mercenary, a respec option is in order. That, and I think heroes should have some added powers, something to make them a little more interesting than a merc you’re stuck with forever.

Another thing that really frustrated me was an upper level cap on a number of items. A lot of consumables, ranging from revive potions to scrolls, have an upper level cap. When your main hero goes past that level, you can’t use the item anymore. I have a lot of issues with this. When I was in the middle of a really tough fight and my hero leveled up, all of a sudden I couldn’t use my scrolls anymore. But there’s a bigger issue at hand: your mercenaries get old and die and have to be replaced with new level 1 mercs. At this point you’ll be back at the start of the game, but your main hero will still be a high level, so although you’re killing lowbie monsters, you can’t use any of the lowbie life potions or scrolls. Finally, if you’re a power-gamer who does a lot of grinding before progressing through the main quest line, you can end up getting items you can’t actually use, like getting something with a level 30 level cap when you’re already level 31.

Mind you, most items can still be traded, and there’s probably a lower level player eager to use your items if you want to sell them. An even better idea is to embrace the game’s mentor system. After level 30, you can mentor players below 30. Mentoring doesn’t have any formal rewards for the mentee, but it does give the mentor “Mentor Points” and, when the mentee reaches level 30, 200,000 gold. Saving your lower level goods as gifts for mentees might be one way out of the level cap. That said, I definitely thing the upper level cap should be eliminated entirely from the game for non-tradeable items.

Despite these issues, the game is quite fun to play, and I highly recommend that everyone go check out the beta. Closed beta resumes on August 5th, and there will probably be an open beta after that. The system’s a bit confusing: you have to sign up with an affiliate, like fileplanet, for a beta key, then register on the Atlantica website. They hoped to get 10,000 new users near the end of the last phase of beta and only got about 4,000, which makes me wonder why they didn’t just give keys out on their own site rather than force users to search around. Anyhow, you can find out more information at Atlantica’s website: http://atlantica.ndoorsgames.com/

Editors Note:

Watch for more information, updates, and interviews about Atlantica Online exclusively here on GameSHOUT. There may also be some exciting surprises for those of you who are interested in getting involved in the closed beta, but you will need to stick-tuned right here for the news. Cya in there! -Mav