Goodbye, Atlas Reactor

When gamigo bought Trion, I was certain that this announcement would come – that we would be told Atlas Reactor was going to shut down, because it always seemed as if the game had not gotten the love and attention it deserves (in my humble opinion, at least). The servers are currently scheduled to go down on June 28, so we got plenty of time to still enjoy it before it’s gone.

I admit, as much as I loved Atlas Reactor, I haven’t played it in months. I rarely ever played with other players anyway, but that’s my personal “beef”. I get stressed when playing with others because there’s usually somebody there to point out every mistake you make in front of everybody and with the time counting down to lock in your actions… well, not my definition of fun. But I absolutely loved playing on my own, with an NPC team against NPCs. Also, in these PvE games, you did not have to choose your next move within 20 seconds, but you had as much time as you needed. I took that mode to try out strategies and see what works, and I got to know the different classes you could choose from.

Even though I basically never played the game as the developers had intended it to be played (PvE was in, but ranked was obviously for PvP only), I never felt excluded or like I was playing a “trial” version.

I searched through the blog to see what I’d previously written about Atlas Reactor and the last meaningful posts were back in 2016 when the game was in alpha and then launched. I did notice a certain similarity between one of the game’s freelancers and Guild Wars 2’s charr and that was apparently the first thing I pointed out about the game. The first impression review came a day later. Then I also wrote about the alpha coming back in March 2016, and pondered about whether it was worth purchasing into the beta or not in April. And in  August, I pointed out that Trion couldn’t make up their mind on how to monetize the game. In hindsight, I guess this could show us what went wrong with Atlas Reactor or maybe even Trion as a whole. They experimented and brought us a game that took a fresh angle with its turn-based 20 second turns in a PvP tactics game. It tries to be as open as possible to invite as many players as possible, but apparently still failed to attract enough (and make them spend enough money) to stay viable. It’s a shame, really.