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Growing Atlantica Up

Adding content that keeps players busy on the way to the cap is crucial, but NDOORS knows it needs to give those already at the cap new challenges and adventures as well. In a very clever move, NDOORS has managed to grow Altantica in depth (up) in a way that also adds more breadth.

Since I first played Atlantica, leader characters (the player’s avatar) were just beefed up versions of the common mercenaries everyone has access to. Leaders used the same spells and gear as their mercenary counterparts, so a leader swordsman differed only from a mercenary swordsman in that he had slightly better attribute scores. All of that changed on February 18 with the introduction of leader-specific spells, which are gained via a quest at level 100. The spells are powerful, add new levels of strategy, and give more importance to the common spells already in place.

Also available to players level 100+ is a new leader class, the Maniac, and a new mercenary, the elementalist. The power saw-wielding Maniac can attack enemies in a row and uses Maniac’s Storm Blast magic to deliver heavy damage while lowering enemies’ might. The elementalist is a caster mercenary that uses an AoE skill called Freezing Atmosphere to damage all enemies and debuff their defense and accuracy.

Other new high level content includes the Lost Saqqaq Tribe quest for level 98+ plus players and the Jiuzhaigou Ghost Town quest series for players level 115+. New guild and raid content consists of Alcatraz Prison, the Valley of Oblivion, and the Sealed Tower of Darkness.

Parting Thoughts

I haven’t covered all of the details of the February 18 patch to Atlantica, but it should be clear that it contained enough content to qualify as an expansion for a lot of P2P games. Not only that, the development team did a terrific job of adding something for characters of all levels. The Musician class is a fun twist on ranged combat, and the Maniac rewards players for reaching level 100 with a new powerful leader class. The addition of leader-specific spells as a quest series at level 100 is a brilliant way to give high level players something to aim for. It feels akin to epic quest in EverQuest to me, but I have not tried the quests yet to see if they are as difficult as those in EQ. Finally, several new systems improve the already high quality of the game. The Will cost below level 30 for sending mail to “strangers” has all but eliminated gold spam via mail for me without limiting my ability to play the game. The Trading Post system making the world livelier and allows players who enjoy it to move commodities to raise a fortune.

Other developers would do well to look at the steps NDOORS has taken since its game launched to keep it fresh and exciting while growing it at a manageable rate. If you haven’t tried Atlantica yet, do it soon. It costs you nothing to try, and you might just be surprised at how good a F2P game can be.

Have you tried Atlantica? Email your thoughts or post them in our forums!

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