The Street Fighting Powerset Combat Video

Mar 16, 2020

This is our fourth developer video – we’re showing you what we see internally as we build a new powerset. This isn’t the first internal video of this powerset; it’s roughly number 12. At this point, we think Street Fighting is ready to share with our community so that we can get feedback. Street Fighting is mostly a single-target powerset, and it’s our second unarmed melee set.

There’s also an area knockback power.

In Ship of Heroes, all of the melee powersets come in two versions: one for Brawlers with more damage, and one for Tankers with more resistance and defense, plus two explicit taunt powers that a player can select if needed. Powers are something a player chooses to have, or leaves behind. Normally each character will not have all of the powers from a powerset; the player will pick some and give up others to fit their playstyle. Every Street Fighting Brawler or Tanker will in fact be different in many ways from the others, unless their players actively try to match. Each is a unique, individual hero.

Street Fighting is up close and personal. Melee fighters can take damage as well as dish it out.

When we think about powersets, we always think about playstyles. Street Fighting is a great powerset for that player who wants to hit bosses hard, and who’s less concerned with clearing large crowds of mooks. Quick attacks deliver both high dps and a very useful debuff to enemy accuracy and damage, allowing a brawler to hang in the fight longer and mop the floor with an enemy sooner. One of our devs is convinced that Street Fighting paired with a stealth power – in SoH, stealth is a power, not an archetype or powerset – would create the ultimate Stalker. Another dev says that Street Fighting is a superb Tanker powerset, since the high damage and taunt powers will allow a Tanker to hold aggro on a boss even if he’s teamed with some powerful damage dealers.

Smashing Fist is a superpower with flair.

Note the Throw Dust power shown above debuffs and interrupts the enemy. You can see the debuff show up, and then stack twice, under the Promethean’s portrait health bar in the video. Our hero also has a couple of infusions operating during the fight. He doesn’t need them in this video, but we’re testing to make sure everything still works correctly after our upgrade to Unreal 4.24. Little things like this are not that hard to do, but in an MMO, there are a lot of aspects to create and then to quality check.

Knee Strike does heavy damage, and can one-shot standard enemies.

So far we’ve shown four ranged damage powersets, two healing and buffing powersets, two tanker primary sets, and four melee powersets in videos, all in-game and working. With the variations involved, they contain more than 130 superpowers – and we have four more powersets queued up prior to the invasion test. We also have our first two Controller powersets in development, and at least one will be revealed later in the year.

Street Fighting includes an element of dirty fighting. Throwing dust in the enemy’s eyes lowers both their damage and their accuracy.

This is the fourth of six melee powersets we’ve shown to the community so far. With a major event coming up in just a few months, it’s time to start planning which kind of character you want to try out during the invasion test; you may want to go back over some of our older videos and newsletters for ideas. The invasion test will be our next combat Beta – we did our first combat Alpha in 2017 – in which a large group of heroes, hopefully organized into multiple teams, resists and pushes back against a much larger Nagdellian army.

On a more personal note, please take care of yourselves during the coronavirus pandemic. Our team members are mostly hunkered down in our homes, working on SoH. Please be cautious.

“Yeah, most of my fights end up like this. It’s good to be a Brawler.”

Technical Notes

 

1. This is our 37th video in the chronicle of developing Ship of Heroes. We like these videos, and we think they are a good sign, because none of our early videos needs to be disowned. We have a plan to launch successfully, and to attract an ever-larger audience. 

2. This video is in two parts. First we scroll over the powers one by one, showing the name and tooltip description for anyone who wants to pause the video. Then you get to see some uninterrupted combat with the powerset. 

3. This video was recorded by one of our devs in the editor, as is our norm for internal videos. But the server version works too, and this video illustrates exactly the way a player experiences the game. 

4. For those who were wondering, yes you can use more than one powertray, and you can move them around. We usually just show one because they take up space on the screen.

Throw Dust uses a custom SoH FX; you can’t buy it in a store