When you think of the top-rated action RPGs on Steam – Elden Ring, Monster Hunter World, Path of Exile, God of War, and so on – you may not think of Atlyss, a single player RPG (with available multiplayer) that entered early access in November 2024. But since launch, the furry-coded game has amassed over 14,000 97% positive Steam reviews, putting it comfortably in the upper echelon of Steam's genre rankings. That rating was very briefly dinged last month following an amusing controversy over perceived nerfs to the game's famously curvy character models, which has ultimately come to nothing – or, really, better character models.
This being an intersection of things I find journalistically irresistible – paradoxically huge niches and absurd non-troversies – I obviously had to find out what happened. This all started in late May when Atlyss creator Kiseff rolled out a test change to the game's beta branch. As an admin in the Atlyss Discord server recounted, this was "an experimental procedure" introducing a "slight reduction of the max sliders" on some character creation settings, most notably capping some body width sliders.
In other words, you suddenly couldn't make your characters quite as round or endowed. As a reminder, Atlyss is not an "adult" game. Its Steam content warning reads: "The game contains sexualized clothing and character designs (however, nothing explicit), blood and cartoon violence. Dialog may contain occasional swearing and mild sexual innuendo. In-game chat is included in online play, which can provide varied experiences."
Nevertheless, in a demonstration of some of the appeal here, one of the top-rated Atlyss Steam user reviews reads: "My player model is cute and my ass is fat. You should be playing right now."
There are, in fairness, a lot of other reviews saying the gameplay is genuinely great even if you're not into furry characters, and frankly, you don't get Steam traction like this without reason. Steam user Bucky Seifert, a real scholar of our time, said it best, I think: "You'll come for the thicc furry shortstacks but stay for the combat and cracked movement."
But as you can probably imagine, for a certain crowd this slider change was an anvil suddenly heaped upon the (previously unburdened) camel's back. Some of the reviews from this time of slider unrest reckon "character creation was significantly and intently hamstrung by a recent update."
Another player argues "the dev has made the really unfortunate decision to strip away the thing so many of us had bought the game for: The ability to make your characters the kinds of body shapes you can't in any other game." And you know what? I can kind of understand that disappointment.
Based on social media posts collected in the Atlyss subreddit, the whole thing was blown out of proportion in some circles, which, I know, you really wouldn't expect from the internet. (And for goodness' sake, if you're going to browse the Atlyss subreddit, do so cautiously). Unrest ensued, "resulting in a large influx of back-and-forth of the Atlyss community, positive and negative review dynamite sticks alike," as that Discord post rather democratically put it.
Kiseff released a statement "regarding all this" pretty quickly, assuring players that "I am still working on the models. They are not final. That's it. I won't write a manifesto about that. I will fix this."
The whole thing was a communication issue, they said, not a design decision. "I made bad choices in the midst of all this and I did share a private build for a moment on my support discord to sort some things out," Kiseff added. "I removed all the test branches for the time being."
Fast forward to this month, Atlyss' latest update, between new skills and environments and subclass developments, has not only preserved the character models some players had fallen in love with, it's added a new environment to the character creation screen and "all of the player models have been refined to look more rounder / softer and less jagged." I do love a happy ending.
"I will stay by my word and be committed to continue providing communication and transparency at the best of my ability here each month," Kiseff says in the latest update. "Again, I do apologize for taking as long as I am. There is a silver lining to all of this and I'm certain things will turn in a good direction soon."
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