What is Atlantica Online?

Atlantica Online.

A relatively new MMORPG published by nDoors for North America, Atlantica Online does things rather differently than other MMOs. First, the setting that is used as a backdrop for the game's storyline is going to be immediately familiar to some: it is a combination of different civilizations through different eras of time. The feudal Japanese, the vikings from Northern Europe, the colonizing and expansionist times of Southern Europe; all of these are represented in Atlantica's world. But what is really, truly interesting about it over its setting is its combat system.

Using a turn-based combat system that focuses on creating a party consisting of your main character and up to eight additional hired mercenaries, combat depends on a combination of party selection, use of the in-game abilities and your formation's layout.

The game features a large number of mercenaries divided into categories depending exclusively on each mercenary's weapon of choice. They are also divided by rank, denoting the relative 'strength' and rarity of each mercenary. While a player can have any amount of the same D-Rank mercenary, they can only have up to one of each higher class of mercenary. Each mercenary also has five upgrade levels, where their power and ability's strengths increase dramatically.

The seven weapon classes are divided as such: sword, staff, axe, spear, gun, bow and cannon. Each one has advantages and disadvantages, and each weapon has at least two different mercenary types in it. What's more, the mercenaries in each weapon class can be wildly different from each other. Take the sword category, which has four different kinds of mercenaries. The Swordsman (Gyebaek) is a tank, the only class that can use a shield early on in the game, having a very good defensive rating and having access to swords that deal a good amount of melee damage. In contrast is the Exorcist (Michael), a melee class that is more characterized by its ability to seal enemy magic casters, burn away enemy mana and buff your own party's casters instead. And in even further contrast is the newly-announced Sailor (Anne Bonny), a dual-wielding light, highly undefended mercenary whose speciality is dealing large amounts of damage to a single target with its two swords and using its poison ability to burn away AP from its target, denying it the ability to act the next turn.

Of course, with all these options there is the focus of building different parties and pitting them against each other in Player vs Player combat. What is the best build possible? What builds defeat other builds? What advantages do certain classes have over others? What will a certain mercenary do for your party, and will it do the job better than another mercenary? What do the top players of the game think in all these instances? What is the Atlantica metagame like?

And that's what this blog aims to accomplish: I plan to bring all these topics forward to the table, asking these questions and analyzing the mercenaries and their abilities as well as their viability in different kinds of builds. I will be interviewing winners of Weekly Championships and the leaders of the Free League Hall of Fame (mainly, for now, from the Mycenae server). I plan to examine the metagame in different servers -- what seems to be more favored in one server over another? Does the presence of a very high level user of a certain build on server A cause the metagame to revolve around countering it, and therefore make that server very different from server B?

All of those questions will be asked -- and hopefully answered! -- in this blog.

These are the following topics for next week's blog postings:

- Mercenary Analysis: Swordsman (Rank D)
- Mercenary Analysis: Beast Master (Rank C)
- Player Interview and Analysis: Zekkai (10/25/2008 1:00PM Weekly Champion)
- Player Interview and Analysis: Xargrr (#1 in Mycenae Free League rankings)

It's my goal and hope that you all stick around and read this blog and comment on what you think. It's also my hope that you all send me your suggestions for Analysis, your comments on the discussion and particularly your thoughts on what is discussed.

- Adrean