Ship of Heroes recently wrapped up its character creator beta where they held a number of events including Q&A sessions with the developers. Sadly, I couldn’t attend those sessions because of a difference in timezones, so I’m looking forward to hearing what was said during them. But, I did get some time to play around with the character creator and run around the city.
Right now, Ship of Heroes is the most complete of all the City of Heroes spiritual successors. Its character creator and the city feel like there’s actually a game there. It doesn’t seem far fetched at all when they say that they hope to release the game by the end of 2020.
The character creator is familiar and comfortable for anyone who has played City of Heroes or in fact any MMO ever. The powers are exactly what you’d expect to find with a few surprises mixed in. I never thought I’d see a powerset based on luck in an MMO, but here we are. I browsed through all of the power options but eventually picked luck and dark powers. Luck I picked because yes, I am enamored with the idea of the powerset and dark I picked purely for the sake of getting a screenshot where you can really see the power in action. That screenshot can be found further down this page.
From there I set out to create a character I’ve made on the City of Heroes Homecoming servers, a very sweet succubus. This was easily what I ended up spending the majority of my time in the beta working on. I have a friend who shall remain nameless who was well known for taking hours to create a character in City of Heroes. Well, that was me in the Ship of Heroes beta. As you can see from the screenshots there are a lot of different sliders to play with that allow you to customize your character down to the size of their legs to how far apart their eyes are.
Speaking of eyes, they were without a doubt my favorite thing in the Ship of Heroes character creator. Most of the eye color options were a mix of more than one color. This made the eyes feel amazingly realistic. They also had a slider that allowed your character to squint. I didn’t keep the squint on my character but I did experiment with it for the sake of a screenshot. Looking at it now…she looks like a total badass, you would not want to come across her in a dark alley.
Once I had settled on her face and hair I moved on to her body. I experimented with the various arm and leg sliders, which includes a foot slider. Eventually though, because I was trying to make someone with pretty normal dimensions I reset the sliders back to their starting point. There are a few different sliders that have an impact on the look of your bust, including a cleavage slider. There is also a slider for your butt. Yes, you can make someone who is truly and properly curvy if you want. I did find it difficult to get her very skinny though and this stood out to me even more when I put her costume on her.
Right now there aren’t a lot of options when it comes to making a costume. But it is still early days so this shouldn’t be taken as a concern about the final product in any way. Where the character creator did stumble for me is the colors. In the screenshots of my hero in her costume she is wearing the blackest black but it actually looks more like a darkish shade of grey. In fact, all of the colors seem somewhat muted. Though when you log in and are running around the city, those blacks really stand out. I’d actually say they’re a bit too black and if I were to recreate her again in the future I’d tone that down a bit. Hopefully, that discrepancy between what you see in the character creator and what you get in the city gets fixed.
Once I finished creating her, several hours later it was time to log the succubus in and see the city on the ship of heroes. Because I was logged in early in the morning my time in the middle of the week I pretty much had the city to myself. Anyone in Europe who would have been playing was instead in work and anyone in North America would be in bed. But that was ok, it gave me a chance to experience the city in a way that few ever will. I had a blast running around and reading all of the hero-themed street signs, finding random NPCs, and trying to catch one of their futuristic cars driving past for a screenshot. This was the best I could do, they’re speedy little things that really sneak up on you.
Finally, before I had to stop playing and do some work I got to play with superspeed and its different trails. Let me tell you, getting a screenshot of yourself super speeding through an unfamiliar city is so, so hard. As you can see I actually ended up running off the road into a park. But! I got the screenshot! Superspeed is FAST. Before you know it you’re running yourself into a zone border wall. I loved the different effects you could pick for superspeed. Though I was sad to see that they clipped into the ground when you’re running uphill.
I have been following the development of Ship of Heroes since it was first announced so finally getting the chance to dive in was an incredibly fun and satisfying experience. I can’t wait for the next Ship of Heroes beta which the developers say will be coming before the end of the year.
