If you’re following Ship of Heroes’ Twitter or official website for updates, you won’t find the latest news there, as Heroic Games has focused its attention on Steam. Last week, it dropped a recap on Steam, covering development of the superheroes-in-space MMORPG from March through May.
“In the last few months, we have built and tested a raid UI,” the indie studio says. “The raid UI ties in with our new multi-threaded chat system, so it is a pretty complex set of systems. Players are organized into color coded teams, each with one team leader, under one raid leader. The raid UI is designed for a maximum number of 101 heroes with a maximum of 10 teams. Side kicking is enabled, bringing lower level players to one level below the leader.”
The devs also say they’re “upgrading and expanding” voiceovers in the game, injecting capes for supporters, embarking on a “comprehensive review and upgrade” of the game’s animations (with 80% completed now), and roughing out the content planned for launch, including a new mission arc.
A follow-up blog post on the official site today offers the results of the studio’s survey on raid preferences; Ship of Heroes’ playerbase apparently overwhelmingly likes raids, with nearly half thinking raids should run 6 to 12 players and a majority preferring raids in the 1- to 2-hour range. (I do have to wonder whether the fact that this is a City of Heroes-inspired game – a game where a basic group size is eight – skews these results!) The studio isn’t giving a full breakdown of its stats or questions here, nor do we know exactly how many players responded, but Heroic Games stresses that its responses were from Ship of Heroes fans, not the broader MMORPG community, and so the feedback is being used for this game specifically.
“After listening to your feedback, we’re implementing many ways to fight and get stronger in groups. Both easier Story Arcs and harder Challenge Missions can be soloed, or battled in a team of up to ten, with more and stronger enemies the more friends you bring in. We’re planning to add multiple options to raise or lower the difficulty as well. Experience and treasure rewards increase with team size, difficulty settings, and the mission’s default complexity. What Ship of Heroes calls raids will be larger than a single ten-man team. Smaller raids may aim for 20 players, while bigger ones could have 50 or even 100. There’s clearly an unmet demand for big co-op raids within a community of friendly, non-toxic players. Our raids scale somewhat to number of players, as well. So, if 33 people want to play together in a normally 50-man raid on Tuesday night, no one will be left out! And later on, truly skilled heroes may find ways to complete some raids with smaller groups than we have in mind, just for bragging rights.”
