The Ship of Heroes team is back to follow up on their last development update, this time with a focus on voice acting improvements.
Last time, the team updated on work done, including the development of their raid UI, along with more mechanical things like polished up animations and story content. They announced the intention to add expanded and improved voiceovers to add more depth to their storytelling immersion. After tucking that into the most recent announcement, they said we’d get more on that later.
That time is now, as the new devblog breaks down some of their reasoning in having this approach, but includes a video of stills with some of the new voiceovers. This gives some idea of where they’re going, as they summed up in the blog:
“Our first set of voices for Ship of Heroes received mixed reviews when we rolled it out a few years ago. People loved the voice idea, but they wanted some improvements to be made in the voices themselves. Since that time, we’ve looked at quite a few options. Today we are announcing that we have replaced the old voices with much superior new voices, giving a real improvement in the quality of the story telling. We’ve also expanded the total number of spoken lines, and the number of individuals speaking, to improve immersion.”
The emphasis on nuances and voice tones improving immersion is key, and listening to the shared samples in various scenarios, there are definite clearer moods, though the team does plan to continue to improve the experience over time. Once combined with animations and the fuller experience, the demonstration should feel more solid. It’s a good start though.
Ship of Heroes will continue using the speech bubbles and the text on screen, both for those who find it more accessible and those who prefer to read at their own pace.
As for the idea of a voiced protagonist floating around, they addressed that too, saying “Adding player avatar voices is under consideration for after launch, but we will want to take the pulse of the community before we offer up this kind of upgrade”.
