Heroic Games announced the successful start of Alpha testing for the combat systems of Ship of Heroes, by enabling mixed teams of developers and supporters to fight three enemy groups in Apotheosis City.
“We’ve taken several teams through the combat Alpha, and we’ve been delighted to find that the players loved the gameplay,” Casey McGeever, CEO of Heroic Games, explained. “They have also given us a list of improvements they’d like to see, and we’re hoping to expand that list with feedback from our forums.”
Heroic Games reports that the combat Alpha uses all of the elements they’ve been showing to the world for the last 14 months, including their signature heroes, the Apotheosis City environment, their offensive powers and powersets, enemies, UI, AI, and several other gameplay features, all of which are integrated into the Alpha version of the game.
“I’ve been following Ship of Heroes on my channel for a while and I was so hyped to be among the first to go on a Combat Alpha Run,” Brandon Cooper, gaming video blogger “Positive Gamer” said. “”As a previous City of Heroes player I am beyond excited to let you know that I finally felt at home again. Even in this development stage of the game it felt so good to flex my super hero muscles once again! There are many super hero MMO’s on the horizon, but I’ll be playing Ship of Heroes.”
This is the second Alpha test for Ship of Heroes, following the successful demo of their character creation tool (CCT) last September and October. The devs report that they are working on an upgraded version of the CCT, which they plan to preview later in 2018, incorporating ideas from their supporters. The same process will be employed with the combat mechanics shown in the current Alpha. “We are developing Ship of Heroes with continuous feedback from the community, and getting feedback has been a key goal of this Alpha,” McGeever said. “We now have real supporters, not just devs, using the signature characters we made in our CCT, in our city. We’re running a client/server arrangement with players from two continents, no lag, and high FPS, fighting and winning and getting dust and loot. That’s not just an Alpha, that’s a very advanced and successful Alpha.”
The enemies shown in the Alpha highlights footage were all introduced earlier in the game’s development, but now they have new and interesting powers. Each enemy group favors different tactics, and needs to be fought differently in order to win.
“We’ll be conducting additional Alpha tests during 2018. We want to try some kind of raid test, and we also want to return to the CCT for another round of feedback and improvements. We want to see about larger tests, with more participants, to help us assess the practical numbers of characters we can have in an instance of Apotheosis City during normal gameplay,” McGeever added. “We’ve made a lot of progress so far, in just under two years, and we hope that this continues to be the case. A Beta is scheduled for the end of 2018, but that does depend on the results of the intermediate Alphas.”
The Ship of Heroes team, which includes both volunteers and professional game developers, has a very good record of expanding SoH on a reliable schedule. A growing body of gameplay videos can now be viewed on the MMORPG’s YouTube channel. To get the latest news and influence the development of Ship of Heroes, register on their official forums.
