Ship of Heroes issued a new update today on their blog, outlining several new improvements.
Key callouts from the press release include:
Ship of Heroes is showing their latest round of improvements to the character creator in this newsletter, particularly the high variability of the faces that can be created in their game. A player can create anyone with their character creation tool.
SoH has three main character models – male, female and big guy – and all of them can be massively customized. One of the game's strong points is making your own unique avatar, and the devs are touting the idea that the entire game could be filled with unique characters, with no two alike. In this newsletter the devs show a wide variety of possible faces, including some non-human ones.
Compared to the SoH character creator Alpha from 2017, a lot has changed. All of the hair models have been replaced and significantly improved. The amazing avatar eyes have been retained. Non-human skin colors such as red, blue and green have been added, and each of the character models seems to have more than 40 preset faces. The faces can each be selected, and then individually modified. Some new features have been added, like lipstick for female characters.
One of the new features hinted at in this newsletter is the randomizer. 3-4 randomizer buttons are apparent in the newsletter pictures, and the devs hint at a short video in the immediate future showing the power of this tool. But perhaps the best feature of this whole CCT is that players will be able to use the randomizer for some parts of their character, and then stop and change what they see. This is an amazing level of customization not normally seen in an MMO.
The immediate comparison that comes to mind looking at these avatars is to City of Heroes, now resurging on unlicensed private servers that may have as many as 100,000 players. The SoH avatars are much more advanced and more detailed, as one would expect from a game combining the Unreal Engine's graphical power with an impressive level of artistic realism. The CoH character creator, while revolutionary for its day, did not even have clear faces or distinct fingers, which is sometimes lost in nostalgia for the great gameplay of CoH.
The next big event which will be open to supporters is some kind of advanced Beta of the SoH character creator, currently planned for later in 2019. The devs have said that the costumes shown today will be available in that Beta.
Combat beta testing is scheduled for the end of 2019 beginning with an invasion test.
