With summer drawing to a close, Heroic Games is barreling ahead on Ship of Heroes’ character creation tool beta, which was originally aimed at summer but now will be out “later in 2019.” But before it’s live in the wild, the team has posted another dev blog letting players know exactly what to expect when it opens up, especially since the tool’s undergone quite a lot of revision since the game’s 2017 alpha.
“Since the last time we showed our progress, we’ve reduced our morph counts to a more reasonable level, and we even added a few new morphs in response to community feedback we received after the CCT Alpha,” the devs write. “We’ve also increased skin options and added new and improved hair models, including facial hair. One of the biggest changes of all is that players now have a series of randomizer buttons to enable them to play with the options more effectively. Now that it’s all in place, we’re ready for a CCT Beta test.”
The press release argues that Ship of Heroes’ toons are a cut above those from City of Heroes, the MMO for which SoH is one of several unofficial spiritual successors.
“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.”
After the character creator begins beta testing, expect the combat beta – that’s still slated for the end of 2019.
