Atlas Reactor

» see atlasreactorgame.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Trion Worlds announced Atlas Reactor at PAX Prime in 2015 and released it on 4 October 2016. It was a turn-based tactics game for two teams of four. Every turn opened with a decision mode of 20 seconds in which all eight players chose their actions at the same time. Then the turn resolved in four phases, with prep and dash ahead of blast and move, so a shot aimed at a square could land on nothing because its target had dashed away one phase earlier. A team won by reaching five kills first, or by leading after 20 turns.

Lead designer Will Cook named XCOM: Enemy Unknown and League of Legends among the inspirations. The question the team set itself, in Cook's words, was "How do you make a turn-based game where you're playing more than you're waiting?" Executive producer Peter Ju had a playable prototype running in Unity within two days. The finished game shipped with Discord built in, which the Trion Worlds article on Wikipedia records as a first for any game.

Critics liked it. Metacritic settled at 81. Ars Technica put it on its list of the best games of 2016, where Sam Machkovech, after many failed attempts to get hooked on MOBAs, reported being swept off "my skeptical feet". At PAX West that year it took the MMOGames.com award for best PvP.

~ the record ~

~ business model isn't religion ~

The closed beta was free-to-play. In May 2016 Trion switched to a paid model with price points from $30 to $100, and in August it added a free mode with a weekly rotation of characters. That was the shape at launch: play for free on the rotation, or buy the game to unlock every Freelancer plus the ranked queue. Cook called not having to think about free-to-play monetization "a godsend". On 17 January 2017, with Season 2, the game went fully free-to-play again. PCGamesN had already quoted Trion on the subject: "Business model isn't religion to us."

Its years overlap with my early thirties, and a match needed seven other people online at the same moment as me, each of them ready to think hard for 20 seconds at a time. I never installed it.

~ never grew big enough ~

Gamigo, a German publisher of online games, bought Trion Worlds on 22 October 2018, and the old company was disbanded four days later. On 17 April 2019 the Atlas Reactor site carried the closing notice. All real-money purchasing was turned off and the earn rates for XP and in-game currency were raised sharply. The servers were to run until 28 June 2019.

The notice quoted Mervin Lee Kwai, a former executive producer at Trion who was by then a vice president at Gamigo. "Despite the support of this great group of fans, Atlas Reactor never grew big enough to fund its continued development," the statement read. Anyone who had logged in between 1 January 2018 and 16 April 2019 was promised a small parting gift by email.

~ atlas rogues ~

The statement had ended on the hope of a chance to "revisit the innovative spirit of Atlas", and Gamigo did. Atlas Rogues, a co-op roguelite with the same city and the same turn system, entered early access on 18 November 2020. Massively Overpowered reported in May 2022 that it was being closed too, with servers running through 5 July 2022 and a notice that reused the sentence from 2019: the game could no longer sustain itself.

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