…or so they would like you to believe. The GOVERNMENT says that we are in a GIANT SPACESHIP, a HUNDRED KILOMETERS LONG. How does that make any sense? DO YOUR RESEARCH! We, the ones the media disparagingly call “Round Earthers”, KNOW that we live on a spherical planet that circles a STAR. WAKE UP SHEEPLE!
It’s City of Heroes… except in space (if you believe their lies, anyway). And it’s just part of larger push to bring the MMOs of yesteryear into the present day.
Take what made City of Heroes great. The extensive character creation. The carefully sectioned off city, that characters worked through as they leveled. Nondescript office parks filled with all manner of evil goings-on. Lots of factions, some allied, but most not. Alien invasions. (Mostly) randomly generated dungeons. It’s all here in Ship of Heroes.
Add in fairly modern graphics — definitely better than most.
Heroic Games Corporation calls Ship of Heroes “A New MMORPG with the best Features of Space and Hero Games Combined”, but don’t believe them. It’s City of Heroes, and was always meant to bring that to mind.
The Setting
My boyfriend and I brainstormed shows where the characters thought they were on a planet, but were really on a spaceship. We came up with “Megazone 23”, “Macross” (maybe), “The Starlost”, “Knights of Sidonia”, and “13 Sentinels”. There’s probably a few more.
In “Ship of Heroes”, you start in the bottom level, “Apotheosis City”, of an immense spaceship. Each level you ascend can bring you to a simulation of an entirely different planet. Some might be pastoral. Some might be alien. Some might be in vacuum. The endless nature of the ship allows for as many curated environments as the developers can make happen. Occasionally, the ship will dock at an actual planet, or with another ship, and there will be events to mark that special occasion.
The Heroes
Heroes choose an archetype, which informs the sorts of powers they can choose. Archetypes can be Tank, Brawler (physical melee damage), Devastator (ranged damage), Healing, Support and Control. New heroes choose a power type from their archetype, then two powers from the power type and two powers from their secondary type, giving heroes thousands of potential power combinations.
During the recent Mission Beta, I tried a Brawler specializing in twin blades with a healing focus, and a Devastator hurling bolts of plasma, with a healing focus. Because you want healing.
The Travel Powers
Travel powers are almost as distinctive as the hero’s actual power. In comics, Batman glides through the sky and uses grappling hooks to ascend. Superman flies. Aquaman rides on the backs of seahorses. The Flash runs really fast. Compared to City of Heroes, though, there’s relatively few travel powers. Ship of Heroes currently only has flight (which is kind of slushy) and super speed (much nicer).
Factions
When the game launches, heroes will be able to align themselves with many of the shipboard departments by taking on their missions and rising in the ranks. The Mission Beta offered just one department, the Mage Guild, which offered missions to investigate a splinter faction called the Red Sigil. These evil wizards deal in contraband magic and were breaking the stranglehold the Mage Guild keeps on interplanetary magical trade.
The missions escalated until I was sent to a high tower where the two chief mages were caught conspiring with interdimensional beings, as one does. Along the way, I’d had the opportunity to totally flub a speech to younger mages. My failure was commented upon by the leader of the Mage Guild somewhat later. Nice touch 馃檪
“Ambassador”, the legendary hero who greets you as you arrive, advises heroes to choose a department and stick with it, though eventually, a hero can become allies to all departments.
Is Ship of Heroes F2P?
Ship of Heroes will launch as a subscription game, with an anticipated monthly fee of about $15, placing it in line with other subscription MMOs. The original City of Heroes is currently available on unofficial servers for free, while Champions Online and DCUO both have strong free options. Having a subscription-only superhero MMO will definitely set a high bar for Hero Games Co. to clear.
Can you really make any costume you can imagine in the character creator?
I have to be honest. While I was able to make some great looking costumes in the character creator, I couldn’t actually come close to duplicating any of them. I tried the Riddler, as I wanted to have a third option to go with the Champs and DCUO ones, but nope. I tried a few more. None of the heroes I could think of were possible.
On the plus side, characters will be more likely to be original. On the minus side, I think we’re going to see a lot of Hulks.
Who is the Ship of Heroes player?
Those who want to play Marvel heroes can play a bunch of them in Marvel’s Avengers, though that’s not really an MMO. DC and Marvel heroes cohabitate with player creations in DC Universe Online. Champions Online has the same sort of generic feel that City of Heroes had — an iconic hero that is the face of the good guys. Defender in Champions Online, Statesman in City of Heroes, and Ambassador in Ship of Heroes. (DCUO chooses an iconic hero or villain for you based on your alignment and source of powers, and doesn’t have a single game representative).
It’s not like superhero MMOs are a crowded market, but they are a niche market. Champions Online was originally Marvel Universe Online, and Microsoft, at the time, didn’t think that would be enough to make the game competitive. Marvel is a lot higher in the public consciousness now, however, and a license in that universe might be enough to get the attention of the general public.
I don’t believe simply being a new MMO in the spirit of City of Heroes will be enough to draw people in. But, we’ll see.
State of the Beta
The character creation is top notch, and it’s clear most of the effort has been in this area. The city itself is generic and very low polygon. The lighting confusingly switches from day to night and back as you travel. Mission interiors are sometimes handmade, but also many times randomly generated. Or if not, then constructed from a very small set of building blocks. This might have been fine and somewhat new back in the day, but won’t fly when compared to the handmade experiences in Marvel Avengers or DCUO.
Enemies in instances have disproportionally huge names over their heads. The enemies are largely generic, with just a couple of different types per mission. Enemy AI is nearly non-existent; they just straight run toward you and can be easily convinced to get stuck on objects. A warehouse mission even advised the player to partially close a particular door, forcing the enemies to get stuck and become unable to swarm you. I found an alien of some sort standing in a ditch. Occasionally meteors would rain on its head and it would die. While I watched, several copies just spawned together, eventually being killed by meteors from who knows where?
The missions themselves are fine, with great characterization and dialog. But, those PS2-era graphics are going to make this game difficult to love.
Last thoughts on the beta, for now
I had fun playing the beta — I did. But while I was playing, I was thinking of ways I could convince my DCUO static group to switch to this game.
First, I’d want SoH to be more unique. The game is (supposedly) set on a spaceship — WHY does it look like a generic city, filled with generic asset store landmarks? If it’s in space, make space an important part of the gameplay. Space stations circling planets you can see through the dome windows. Traveling in starships. Plenty examples in the comics — Captain Marvel travels in a spaceship with her team all the time. The SoH city seems fine for flying around in, but why would the average citizen be content with driving around in cars and traffic jams? Is this really the best way to move around a spaceship?
I loved City of Heroes, but I’m fine with DCUO at the moment. I can already fly around a city at superspeed 馃檪 Both the main cities of Metropolis and Gotham in DCUO look more interesting and visually distinct from each other than the bland cityscape of Apotheosis. Plus, it has adventure in space — the hero base, Watchtower, is a satellite orbiting Earth. The new House of Legends is in another dimension. That you can see out the windows, even.
Ship of Heroes has to convince me to move. It hasn’t done it yet. But I’m hoping it does. The world can always use a good superhero MMO 馃檪
Thanks for doing this series of comparisons. It’s really helpful as well as being interesting in itself. As a lifelong fan of superhero comics I’ve always found the mmorpg interpretation to be severely lacking. I played the CoH beta and didn’t buy the game when it launched. I tried Champions early on and didn’t get into double figures. I like DCUO well enough both as an mmo and as a video game but it doesn’t do a lot more than pay lip service to the source material, which I love, having been a DC fan since before I could read.
The core problem is that superhero comics (and by extension tv shows and movies) are first and foremost soap operas. Most of the stickiness in the genre comes from the characters and their personal interactions, not from the fighting. Even the most lackluster superhero has an origin , a cast of friends and family and co-workers, a nemesis, a rogues gallery, a whole backstory that just gets desner and more convoluted the longer they go on. Much more so than fantasy characters, in fact, who tend to be found mostly away from home on quests or journeys, not at home in their appartments trying to achieve some kind of work-life balance with a regular job and having to save the world every other month.
I don’t know how any mmorpg is ever going to come close to replicating those soap opera tropes but for once I would say that a strong, central narrative is absolutely imperative, and yet it seems to be the thing superhero mmos are the leadt interested in providing. Mostly it feels like the developers think some powers, some costumes and a lot of repeatable missions is what the whole thing’s about. It could be so much more than that but somehow I don’t think it will be and certainly not from any of the games we have now or we’re likely to get any time soon.
As far as the nemesis thing, you’ll remember Champions Online has you design your own nemesis who follows you through the game, so there’s that.
One of the best things a MMO can do, when it’s really working, is to step back and let players write their own stories. EverQuest was amazing for that. City of Heroes was another — it was so minimal that it was nearly a blank page for your own story. As MMOs progressed, they trusted the player less and less to create their own story, and more and more, you were a minion in someone else’s story. I felt like that in the short time I played WoW, a game that was focused so very much on executing perfectly and quickly, and very little on telling your own story.
I used to write comics based on my MMO stories; I shared one of them the other day on the Champions post. Lord of the Rings Online and EQ2, two other games that really inspired me to tell my own story.
I didn’t touch on PvP with Ship of Heroes, but they are explicitly designing the game to be an arena for massive superhero battles in the air above the city. The challenge for the developers will be to give players something to fight for. I expect this will tie into the departments each player chooses to work for.
Awesome post, Tipa! You really dug into this one. I love it. Getting Spode himself to move on from any game that isn’t DCUO or Diablo will be a challenge. 馃槈
Well, I think we have some time to build a case for it 馃檪