Atlas is now live in Steam Early Access
It costs $30, but is on sale for $25 until January 2.
Update 3: The Atlas servers are now online, so you should be able to dive in.
Update 2: Atlas is now for sale on Steam Early Access. It costs $30 but is discounted to $25 until January 2. Servers don't appear to be up at the moment, but this post on the official site states they expect them to available in the next hour or so (though you might want to take that with a grain of salt, all things considered).
Update 1: Atlas will launch into Early Access at 12pm PST/3pm ET/9pm GMT today, developer Grapeshot Games has confirmed.
It follows several delays to the release of the pirate MMO, which major Twitch streamers have already had their hands on for several hours.
Original story:
A series of delays to the release of pirate MMO Atlas meant that tens of thousands of Twitch viewers watched their favourite streamers waiting for the game to go live yesterday. Now the wait is over: the major streamers have their hands on it, and it's currently the most-watched game on Twitch, pulling in more than 220,000 viewers (for comparison, 147,000 people are watching Fortnite right now).
However, regular players are still waiting for the Early Access version to go live. Yesterday Grapeshot Games, a new name for ARK: Survival Evolve developer Studio Wildcard, said on Twitter that it'd Early Access build should go live by noon PST today (3pm ET/8pm GMT). Following the release of the streamer build, the devs tweeted that they're working on the build now.
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We're going to be working on the Early Access release candidate now. Thanks guys! We hope you enjoy the streams. We'll be watching 👀December 22, 2018
If you fancy watching a stream of the game, you can pick one from here. I've watched a little bit and, predictably, it looks a lot like ARK, but with a pirate theme. That's clearly an oversimplification, and I'll be keeping an eye on a few streams today to get a better look at it. I'll also update this post when Atlas goes live.
The Steam page is here.
Samuel Horti is a long-time freelance writer for PC Gamer based in the UK, who loves RPGs and making long lists of games he'll never have time to play.