I drew today's comic back in the Summer of 2018 a few days deep into the Steam Summer sale. This was the first year that I set a predetermined limit on how much I would spend before a sale started because that shit gets out of control fast. The haul from that sale included Astroneer, Pit People, and Final Fantasy XV. Throughout that Summer, any time I wasn’t captured by occupation or internship was spent on those titles, as well as the now-defunct Atlas Reactor. Atlas Reactor was a free-to-play game that played like a MOBA mixed with the turn-based tactics of XCOM.
I was saddened but not surprised by the departure of the Reactor of Atlas. Anytime I enjoy something that is multiplayer-focused and/or free to play I acknowledge that at some point it will dissolve entirely, hopefully, to reemerge one day as a remaster or remake. Atlas was a gem and would have been better served up as a paid title with a campaign to introduce the player to each hero individually. Despite its success, I feel the same way about Overwatch, the new and old iterations both. If they introduced a campaign and co-op mode, I would devour them both. It wouldn’t offend me if they apportioned it out as a paid campaign while keeping adversarial multiplayer free à la Halo: Infinite. It seems entirely unlikely, especially since the best thing to come out of Blizzard in the past ten years is Diablo II: Resurrected, but it’s fun to imagine.