More details emerge about Studio Wildcard’s Atlas as next week’s launch looms

Even with a slight delay, the launch of Studio Wildcard’s Atlas has come out of nowhere this holiday season and sent many MMO gamers scrambling to find out more about this pirate sandbox. Fortunately, the studio is chatting the game up pretty heavily this week, and PC Gamer UK even has it as its December cover story.

So what is some of the new information revealed from these articles? We know that Atlas boasts an improved version of the Unreal Engine compared to ARK, friendly fire is a concern among any crew, and players will have to engage in a minigame to fix up their ships en route. You’ll be able to engage in a lot of crazy activities, too, like taming dragons, jumping from ship to ship on horses, and even age (cosmetically). Furthermore, players will be able to use the Atlas dev kit to add anything they want on private servers, from aircraft carriers to steampunk airships.

The studio is making a lot of crazy promises about Atlas’ potential, saying, “If this game works, there hopefully won’t be a need for another survival game, because it should, in theory, be able to do over time just about anything you could ever want from a first-person grounded survival game.”