You're not going to believe this, but upcoming battle royale game Super People is all about, well, super powers. The one that really caught my attention in Super People's trailer at the PC Gaming Show today, was the monster truck-summoning ultimate of the game's Driver class—perhaps the one superpower I never knew I wanted.
Super People is a late challenger in the battle royale space, with developer Wonder People hoping to offer a combination of gameplay refinements and entirely new mechanics to provide a grounded, but still eventful and aggressive take on the formula.
Super People shares the most DNA with genre progenitor, PUBG: Battleground (Player Unknown's Battlegrounds: Battlegrounds), adopting a similar camera perspective, gear system, and focus on a more realistic, modern military aesthetic. Super People diverges from PUBG with a class system and accompanying abilities.
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Super People is more withholding than fellow hero-focused royale Apex Legends. Instead of that game's bevvy of mobility and area control options, Super People's soldiers have a selection of more mundane abilities: Nuclear gets molotov cocktails and a long-cooldown RPG, while the Driver can detect and summon standard vehicles over a short distance, while access to their more bombastic ultimate abilities is gated until late in a given match.
Late in the game, Nuclear gains access to a Fallout 3-style tactical nuke, while the Driver gains access to that aforementioned "monster truck," a purple and gold humvee he can summon at will that is highly resistant to damage. Other classes that stand out to me from pre-release materials include the Shotgun Master, who has access to a super jump ability and can temporarily empower their titular weapon with the power of a battle tank as their ultimate. Oh, and the Seeker, who has access to a Predator-style hunter vision for tracking down enemies.
Super People takes a page from MOBAs and sees players levelling up as a match goes on, with experience points primarily earned by defeating enemy players. The game also dynamically alters the size of the initial playable area based on the number of players in a lobby. Taken together, both of these mechanics encourage aggressive play and eventful matches with less downtime.
In an added twist, class selection is random at the beginning of a match, and can only be rerolled with in-game currency. I really like the idea here: disincentivizing having a "main" like other class-based shooters, and instead encouraging a certain virtuosity with the game's systems. With random selection, you're better off with a working knowledge of each class than a mastery of one. This may also lower the stakes of sandbox balancing somewhat—you don't want extreme outliers in either direction, OP or weak, but if any one class is more desirable than the others it's not going to devolve into mirror match lobbies
Super People's PC Gaming Show trailer presented a pre-rendered mockup of the game's style, showing off Nuclear and the Gatling Soldier's capabilities, as well as the Driver's sick ride. The trailer ends with the announcement of a developer live stream June 16, and the game's final beta coming this August.
