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evanb0 wrote:

I've come back to the game after a very long hiatus. Started playing just before Conquerors of the Atlas came out and I basically had to get used to actually playing the Atlas, because in my previous stint I didn't get to max level.

The Atlas, for the brief period I experienced it in its old incarnation, was a very exciting tug of war between the Shaper and the Elder. I felt it live and breathe as I did my maps, with the Elder grabbing some land here and there. Or the Shaper blocking the Elder's progression at certain chokepoints. Or again the Elder spreading like a plague when I fought the Shaper in those chokepoints. This was also signalled visually with beautiful, moving art on the Atlas itself as well as on the map tilesets. Stars and tentacles gave the whole thing an appropriately eldritch feel, in line with the general tone of the game. A whole feast of immersion in the fantasy, in short!

And it got me coming back again and again, trying to hunt for the next Shaper Memory in incremental steps.

The New Atlas has very little resemblance to that, as far as attention to detail goes. It does very little for immersion. The regions, once you meet an Exile, are coloured in pastel shades that have no place in this gritty world and look as if someone used the Fill function in MS Paint or spilled their watercolour on Zana's carefully traced glyphs. The zones are static, the stars and tentacles are gone, not replaced by anything specific to the Elderslayers (e.g. a pattern made up of symbols specific to the Elderslayer's class). The Shaper's voicelines are gone from each of his influenced maps, further reducing the immersion. Exile voicelines exist, but you only bump into them during fighting and they get lost in the commotion. Shaper voicelines at the beginning of a map were a declaration that set the mood.

That was all about the flavor side of things. Mechanically, I don't necessarily mind the RNG grind hunting for Exiles in specific zones, but the problem is that I can't tell from a glance in my Map Stash where to go next. I always have to switch between Atlas view and Stash view to remember which maps belong to which reason. In the Old Atlas this was not an issue because the maps had specific Shaper or Elder borders in the stash, so I could quickly chose between them. Maybe the RNG for Exile encounters could be tweaked a bit, but more importantly the hunt should be made more interactive and exciting. Right now it feels like a bare bones kind of system concept.

All of this does not make me want to come back to the New Atlas again and again.