I haven’t played the Ship of Heroes beta in awhile, and I entirely missed the previous housing beta. I wasn’t going to make that same mistake twice; when I got the offer to join the superhero MMOs second housing beta, I signed right up and dove right in.
To recap a little, Ship of Heroes is a superhero MMO that invokes the classic superhero MMO, City of Heroes — except instead of being set in a city, it is set on a giant spaceship, within which is a city.
City of Heroes did have supergroup bases, but as I was never in a supergroup there, I never saw them. I have a lot of experience with DC Universe Online’s base building, though, as well as doing quite a lot of base building on Final Fantasy XIV and EverQuest 2.
After creating a new hero and logging into the game, a housing guide is standing right in front of you. I imagine she’ll be located elsewhere once the game is live, and is just stood there to make it easy to find her for the beta.
She directs you to the instanced housing area. Though the city is filled with skyscrapers (or, I guess, hull scrapers), all the housing in this beta was centered on one door. Right clicking the door pops up a menu of all the different base styles, along with a thumbnail of the floor plan. There’s a huge variety of bases, including the impressive Waterfall Lair seen above. The quest given by the housing guide gives you enough money for the very smallest base, the Tiny Base.
I rented it, closed the popup and clicked again to bring it back up, and saw that the Tiny Base thumbnail had a little “Enter Base” button.
Welcome to city living — a 500 sq ft studio efficiency apartment, all the space needed to fight evil.
A popup art fair has set up shop just outside the base, and they are happy to sell you all you could ever need to cram into your hovel. I had a 100,000 dust, the SoH currency (not sure if that was left over from the first beta I played, or if the housing guide had set me up), so I bought the things I thought I’d need. There seemed to be an unhealthy obsession with pooping. Hey, I don’t judge.
There were a lot of options for customizing the walls, floors, ceilings and lights in the base. I set up the colors to more or less match my hero’s color scheme. It was easy to do. Most items can be rotated and resized, within limits, to fit in the best with their surroundings. The default sizes were usually fine, but maybe a smaller or larger hero would appreciate furniture more scaled to their needs.
Bases are not purely decorative; you can put respawn pads, mission terminals and other useful things in your base — if you have the dust for it, anyway.
Compared to DCUO
Base building and costume customization is part of DCUO’s DNA. They even have an entire episode devoted to fighting in bases, and a recent episode actually took place partly within your league’s superbase.
Furniture and other base items drop all the time after missions or occasionally in open world fights. Quests often give some, and the auction house has anything else you might like. Like Ship of Heroes, bases can have functional items (and in fact is one of the main uses for player bases). These including activating special powers, respecing, buying consumables, auction house access, mail and so on.
DCUO doesn’t allow resizing items, though it will let you rotate them.
I’m calling Ship of Heroes and DCUO bases broadly comparable.
Compared to FFXIV and EQ2
Both fantasy MMOs, with housing, that I’ve played, allow amazing piecing together of incredibly complex bases from simple building blocks, as well as broad support for more complex finished pieces. FFXIV has a broad variety of base templates (though not as many as Ship of Heroes), while EQ2 has dozens of base templates, including entire zones on which you can build — really an incredibly variety of starting spots that you can go on to customize to your wishes.
EQ2 allows resizing and rotating items. I don’t believe if FFXIV allows for resizing. It might — I just don’t remember it being an option. Both EQ2 and FFXIV allow adding vendors and useful furniture items that can provide benefits to your character.
FFXIV in particular allows your imagination to run wild in what kind of base you can make. I’ve only spent a few minutes in Ship of Hero’s base building, but I have the feeling SoH bases will be more utilitarian. I do expect most enemy lair decoration will find its way into player bases, though, allowing players to recreate other places in the game.
Conclusion
Ship of Heroes’ housing is a lot like DCUO, though the base building is more restricted to one area. But SoH bases are also much easier to set up and decorate than DCUO bases, at least from what I’ve seen so far.
I have not had time to explore all the possibilities of player housing in Ship of Heroes, but it seems like there will be enough to satisfy most players.
You can watch my playthrough of the new housing content over here on my Twitch channel.
