The Ship of Heroes combat alpha has kicked off. To show off where the game is in its current early phase of development, the team took up to three supporters on a tour of Apotheosis City to view a vertical slice of the game.
From the Ship of Heroes team on why this video is significant:
- This Alpha comes almost exactly one year after the devs first published a sneak peek at combat in early 2017, with a single character fighting a small group of Nagdellian raiders. SoH has advanced a great deal since then, showing team combat, healing, tanking, buff and debuff, five offensive powersets, and three enemy groups. The fight concludes with a boss battle against a giant mech lasting just over one minute.
- The devs tell us they are making improvements, bug fixes, and expansions almost every day. They’re also listening to their community; for example, some supporters on the SoH forums requested X- and Y- axis inversion as an option, and it has already been added to the Alpha. In fact, one supporter was playing with his mouse controls inverted during the video.
- The devs at Ship of Heroes plan to continue repeating this successful Alpha test with new groups of supporters for some time. Dozens of people will get the chance to play the game, and give immediate feedback to a few of the senior developers. It’s an unheard-of level of transparency for a pre-launch MMORPG. We’re told the devs also plan to livestream at least one Alpha run.
- The devs at Ship of Heroes usually record their videos in-game using a client-server arrangement to provide the same appearance that a player will experience, and they did it again in this video. Each of the six participants downloaded a client, and then logged into an SoH server and played the game. Participants for these tests were located all over the US and in Europe.
- The three enemy groups in this video all pursue different combat strategies and possess different powers. For example, the Nagdellians use ranged weapon attacks and can beam in reinforcements during the fight. The Yekus can ignore taunt, and identify and attack the team’s healer, draining her energy. The Promethean boss at the end can hit a large area with a powerful AOE attack, and can also target individuals with a nearly-lethal strike.
Learn more on the Ship of Heroes site.
