A bold mix of LoL, XCOM and Warhammer 40k results in a game so unpopular it dies 3 times
The tactical game Atlas Reactor just never worked. The title was released for the PC in 2016, proved to be a flop almost immediately, but was revived again and again: the business model was changed again and again, in 2020 they even switched from PvP to PvE and gave the game a new name. But now it’s apparently finally over: The new variant “Atlas Rogue” didn’t work either. Gamigo gives up.
What was the idea of the game? Atlas Reactor was to be an innovative game that would bring ailing video game publisher Trion Worlds back to the top. They didn’t have a good run in 2016: the MMORPG ArcheAge was out, Rift and Defiance were getting old, you urgently needed a hit and tried something really crazy.
In a 2016 YouTube video, the minds behind the game introduced their game Atlas Reactor as a wild mix of genres (via youtube):
- The developers said the game concept draws inspiration from XCOM: Enemy Unknown, League of Legends and tabletop games like Warhammer 40k.
- The main design question was, “How do you make a turn-based game where you play more than you wait?”
Ultimately, turn-based team-of-4 battles emerged with gameplay like XCOM, but as pure PvP titles like LoL:
- Each of the heroes on a team could die any number of times. As in LoL, there were numerous heroes to choose from.
- The team that got 5 kills first won – or the team with the most kills after 20 rounds
- Players could give orders in one mode and watch their orders play out in the second mode. The modes broke down into further phases.
The business model changed umpteen times in search of success
In what ways did the game fail? The game failed in just every possible way.
The game practically never had a significant number of players on Steam, only when it was fresh in 2016 did it reach around 3,000 players in a few weeks, but even those were gone quickly.
Atlas Reactor started out as a title with a strange business model called “trial-until-you-buy”: players could only play a few rotating heroes for free, had to buy the whole game if they had all the freelancers to choose from wanted to have.
They quickly switched to a typical Free2Play model where you could buy heroes.
Got through a company bankruptcy and complete transformation from PvP to PvE
How many times did it die?
- The 1st run of Atlas Reactor finally ended with the sale of Trion Worlds in 2018. Atlas Reactor was a flop for Trion Worlds and could not stop the end of the company.
- The German company Gamigo is known for buying failing MMOs and letting them continue without bringing huge expansions. They took over Atlas Reactor and let the ailing PvP title run for a while too. But they stopped it after a year, because Atlas Reactor just didn’t work as a PvP game, they thought. Gamigo brought the game back as Atlas Rogue and wanted to establish it as a PvE title
- But after 2 years the lights go out here too – via the game’s Discord server it is announced that the servers will go offline on July 5th, 2022 and will remain offline. Ingame purchases will no longer be accepted.
Atlas Reactor was unpopular as a PvP game – Now it will be a pure PvE game
Gamers always demand innovation, but Atlas Reactor doesn’t reward brave gameplay
What was the game’s problem? You can now hear the complaints of the remaining players in the discord. They still like their game today and are sad and disappointed because Gamigo allegedly never listened to them and never implemented their suggestions to save the game.
Ultimately, however, Atlas Reactor was a game that few “really” picked up. It has similar difficulties as Artifact: the gameplay mechanics look so foreign and technical when watching that they are off-putting
The game’s “innovation” of dividing rounds into phases feels unfamiliar and counterintuitive. Ultimately, you had to really like the game to give it a chance.
Because the game didn’t create any hype from the start and the number of players was low, a death spiral started: The fewer people played it, the less people talked about it, the fewer tried it out again, the longer it took to find matches.
Now that it’s all over, one has to wonder why Atlas Reactor has lasted 6 years. Apparently there was a small, dedicated fan base that really liked it. You can feel sorry for them.
A fan of Atlas Reactor was the former MeinMMO author Jürgen Horn. He has a weakness for games that somehow seem doomed:
Atlas Reactor: First Impression – Impossible idea, interesting gameplay
Reference-mein-mmo.de