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Absolver has the strap-line ‘Online Melee Action’ but, er, what does that really mean in practice?

Absolver is a very serious – and highly-anticipated – online fighting game, that launches later this month.

Players are keen to get their hands on what promises to be a very detailed and technical fighter, with a variety of combat styles and a huge plethora of techniques and tactics, but up until this point, we’ve not been entirely sure how it all works.

Enter publisher Devolver Digital and developer Sloclap, with the skinny on exactly how Absolver’s online features will function. Here are the details from today’s press release (with some added headings, because it’s a lot of babble about ‘prospects’ and ‘schools’ and ‘decks’, so we’ve tried to split it out and make it easier to consume).

The general Absolver experience

Prospects will enter the plains of Adal alone and encounter both AI-controlled opponents and live players through Absolver’s shared online experience structure. Players will roam the world as their own independent ‘server’ as the game seamlessly introduces other Prospects into their game experience.

Absolver’s basic  online elements

Once players encounter one another they will have a choice to engage in friendly sparring, more aggressive PvP combat, or cooperative PvE play with up to three players at once. Through online co-operative play each Prospect will be able to learn new moves from one another, progress on their path to Absolution, and gain experience points that can be spent on one of six attributes to improve their skills.

More advanced online play

Absolver also features unique fighting school mechanic where more advanced players can create their own school of combat that other players may join. The school creator effectively becomes a mentor to these students and this relationship allows for the mentor’s students to use their Combat Deck and the more robust catalog of more advanced moves that comes with it.

The post-release plan

Sloclap has announced the first in many free content updates to the game to continue to expand the world of Absolver and cater to the wishes of the community. Through extensive testing and a closed beta, early players have requested features like 3 versus 3 mode, ranked matches, and a spectator mode to watch the action and jump in when it is your turn to battle. These three features will be some of the first implemented in a series of free content updates alongside new Combat Styles and moves for players’ Combat Decks.

So there we are, then. Absolver launches on August 29th, 2017, for PC and PS4. We’ll see how well that online experience – with a mix of co-operative PvE and two types of PvP, reminiscent of shooters like Destiny or The Division – pans out with a fighting game.

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