Ship of Heroes introduced a new travel power with their latest video: superspeed. Developers have been able to use flight for over two years in the game, but superspeed is one of the three travel powers that the dev team promised to have for launch, with teleportation still to come. Superspeed in SoH is actually faster than flight, but it is balanced by the need to go around obstacles, making it roughly equivalent.
In this video hero Snow Drift shows off her superspeed power by racing around Apotheosis City. During SoH’s recent login tests, over 200 supporters were able to jump into the city for an FPS measurement. During that event, one of the most requested upgrades was to add collision to the trains in the city. The devs listened, and you can see Snow Drift jump onto the top of a moving train.
The devs are allowing players to choose from five different FX options at the character’s feet, so that superspeed can be customized to the players characters concept. The four choices with FX are fire, electric sparks, ice, and darkness. It’s also possible to choose no FX at the feet. It’s pretty obvious from watching the video that superspeed is really fun.
The devs are announcing that in SoH, superspeed is a travel power and not an unbalanced attack power. So a player can race up to an enemy and attack, but if they do, superspeed turns off and cannot be restarted until the combat is over. There’s no racing back and forth, hitting the big boss 800 times while taking no damage in this game. But on the plus side, superspeed does not use much energy, so you can keep going indefinitely if you want to.
Apotheosis City is coming alive with more verticality, more stairs, outdoor restaurants and more urban realism in general. There is much less of that unrealistic architectural uniformity in this MMO than in most others. There is also a first look at something in the center of the Hazard Zone, which is still mostly bare soil at this moment, but has a substantial hint of a dangerous heart of darkness.
The devs at SoH like to point out that they record their videos in the same kind of client/ server arrangement using a packaged game version that a player would experience. This is not a special marketing piece produced in the Editor.
The devs are also taking some time to create some non-combat animations in response to requests from their community. Ordinary things like walking and sitting down are on display. SoH has three distinct character models for a player to choose from and incredible customization is possible from each three. They have male, female and big guy models, each with a unique Unreal Engine skeleton, there are subtle differences in the animations. Females walk like real females and male characters walk like males, increasing immersion. SoH is not simply morphing their male character into a female shape and leaving the animations intact.