Atlas Reactor Will Be Reborn As A "Rogue-Lite Co-Op" Game

If you were wondering about the apparent revival of Atlas Reactor last week, you weren't alone. We mused about it on Friday's F2P Cast and then, in proper F2P Cast fashion, we got some solid details as to what form it would take a few hours later.

Creative Director Will Cook posted on Reddit Friday afternoon to talk about Atlas Reactor's past, which had a direct bearing on its future. A year after its initial launch with Trion Worlds, some members of the dev team started working on "Alliance," a PvE co-op version of the game. That "wasn’t the right project for the time," and when Atlas Reactor shut down, it seemed like Alliance would be consigned to oblivion.

However, when gamigo was asking around for new game ideas, Lead Class Designer Colin Krausnick was one of the few remaining employees who still remembered Alliance and pitched it. gamigo bought in and brought back several people initially involved with the game, and Alliance was (re-)born as a "natural fit between the rogue-lite co-op games he loved and AR’s extensive list of characters and unlockable content."

Cook promised that there would be more information later this week regarding the new game, which will soon be entering early access. We hope those details will include whether it will still be free-to-play or not -- which, given its focus on PvE and Atlas Reactor's own flip-flopping on payment model, is hardly a given -- but we'll at least dish on the broad details of what it will become when that information becomes available.