If you’re tuning into Ship of Heroes for the raiding scene, Heroic Games aims to support your playstyle, as it’s made abundantly clear in this week’s dev blog for the Kickstarted superhero MMORPG.
“Joining raids should be fun,” the studio says. “Different raids should be accessible throughout the game, not just as end-game content, and they should reward gameplay skills and organizational leadership skills. But raiding is also a social activity, and many of us don’t want to be stressed when we socialize. How do we balance these ideas? We let players decide whether they want to lead a raid and earn extra rewards for accepting the challenges of leadership. If not, you can join a raid and just follow your team leader, blast enemies, heal friends, and chat at times while you do it. Because sometimes you feel like leading, and sometimes you don’t.”
The dev blog further explains that raids in the launch version of the game will be effectively level-agnostic, as most of them – excepting the hardest-tier of raids – will sidekick-up lowbie players, with difficulty scaling to the number of people who happen to be present, with a maximum of 101 players (and maybe more).
“The minimum number of heroes that can fight a Winter Raid is 30, at least for now. The current maximum is 101, with up to 10 teams, and those numbers might grow even larger in the future. Leading 100 fellow players is quite challenging, so raid leaders get extra powers, plus team leaders to help organize and control the raid. And a level 1 player can both join and contribute to the success of this raid. The era of the big raid has returned – and we did not have to sacrifice graphics to get it.”
The devs are also looking toward design that ensures “good performance leads to winning faster” but also that “one mistake won’t wipe the raid.” Moreover, raiding won’t be forced upon players or used to gate progression. Honestly, the whole blog post is worth a read-through, even if you’re not a superhero fan; I can’t remember the last time an MMO developer was this candid and player-friendly about raid design.
