Jan Klose, Founder and Creative Director of Deck13, explains:
Thankfully, the developer’s Deck13 (Lords of the Fallen, The Surge 1 & 2) has rectified this with a detailed dev diary released today. It also contains more gameplay and lots of information about Atlas Fallen.
Some things I wanted to keep (from previous games), such as the fast pace and action, and some things I wanted to increase. We have super cool agility in the game world. Much of the game revolves around agility, verticality, and exploration, as we want to use it for exploration as well as combat. We have a big world where you can find different things everywhere. That’s what we really want, encouraging players to use all their mobility and movement to explore and find cool stuff. It’s a really deep, layered world.
Atlas Fallen is about sand and sand magic. Part of this is an enemy called Sand Spirit, which is made of sand and some strange bone structures, with different ways of moving and transforming.
They are very aggressive, so the player must figure out how best to attack each enemy. There are many different ways to attack enemies with different weapons and skills you can use, and you can play very aggressively, but there are also many that allow you to run around enemies and block them with sand shields. Enemies include a variety of smaller, more passive enemies as well as very large ones. The bigger the enemy, the bigger the reward, which can be used for crafting.
There are these so-called essence stones. This is basically a skill that can be implemented, replaced, and built to set up. There are so many different types of these that you can get through combat, exploration, and quest rewards. Sometimes you’ll find crafting recipes that change how you play, increase your speed, or increase your defense stats. But there’s also a plethora of active skills to use in combat, with things like bigger punches and ranged attacks that let you really customize your playstyle to how you want to experience the game.