One of our favorite new costumes created this year!
The biggest news of 2024 has been our announcement that Ship of Heroes will be launching in Q2 2025. All year, we've been preparing the game for launch by adding, improving, and polishing one area after another. So 2024 has been a year of tremendous progress.
Visual FX get a boost
Our attention turned to visual FX and animations first, so we spruced them up to make fights even cooler. The VFX are now more consistent for each powerset, so skilled heroes can tell what kind of powers you’re using at a glance. But our greatest achievement in 2024 with VFX was to individually review every combat effect in the game, one by one, to identify which ones de-served an upgrade. This herculean task has been completed.
That never grows old!
Comprehensive animation upgrade
We also reviewed every combat animation in the game! There are hundreds, and some are subtly different for men and women. After polishing and improving animations for all powers when they're used on the ground, we moved on to in-flight combat animations. Reaction animations were also expanded and improved. Finally, several major enemies like the Berserker got new animations appropriate for their special status.
Sometimes, playing SoH can feel like you’re in an action movie.
Raids upgraded
Speaking of big raids, we’ve made major improvements to our raid system. We made these changes based on the answers we received on the raid survey that hundreds of you completed in early 2024. We again thank those of you who took the time to tell us what you found most fun (and not fun) in raids.
We added a sophisticated raid GUI that makes it much easier to organize players into teams. Ship of Heroes enables both small and large raids, and our UI reflects this, accommodating up to 10 teams of up to 10 heroes each, plus a raid leader. Players can be moved from one team to another by the leader. Our sidekicking system temporarily boosts team members to nearly the level of the team or raid leader, so low-level heroes can make a big difference, even on high-level raids. And raids scale up or down with the number of players, so they're easy to form or join, and fun at any size.
The raid leader and team leaders in a raid get some special powers to assist them with managing the raid. They also get enhanced rewards to match the extra work they're doing to make raids fun for everyone else who joins up.
Individual raids have also seen many improvements, notably the Winter Raid and the Berserker Invasion. Work is ongoing on the New California Raid and the Mothership Raid, and we expect that these two will be added as free expansions after launch.
Now that’s what I call teamwork!
All NPC dialog is voiced
We've been testing voiced dialog for years now. Despite our limited budget, the result was generally well-received. Now we’ve not only extended voicing to almost all NPCs, but improved overall voice quality as well. So if you'd rather listen to a conversation than read blocks of text, keep the sound on, and enjoy!
For those who think, "What did that guy say just before the fight started?" We’ve also added a new tab to the chat box allowing you to see the NPC dialog that's relevant to you – including conversations your team leader has with mission contacts. Now you can read all of it at your leisure, if you want to.
Conversations are so much more realistic with distinctive voices.
Quality of life changes
Many small but important QoL changes have been made - too many to list them all. But here's a partial summary. We’ve added a mission difficulty slider in General Settings, so that you can modify the enemies you'll face. This is done dynamically, so you'll face big crowds and boss enemies with dangerous attacks more often at higher difficulties, not just the same enemies with x2 health and damage. And the reverse applies if you turn it down to easy. The option is there for a reason, after all.
Go ahead, crank the difficulty up to max… if you dare.
As discussed above, the chat has two new tabs, including one to read the dialog of the mission, in case your team moves on too fast for you to absorb it all. We also pulled most of the “drop” notices off of the screen and into a dedicated tab where you can check them at any time, with-out interrupting your concentration during combat.
“Am I hoarding a huge pile of loot? Nooo…”- A hero with bulging pockets
Maps can now zoom out far enough to show either the whole map or most of it, and the majority of GUI elements can be resized independently of each other.
Character Creator
We have continued to add to the character creator with a large Viking-themed costume set for all three body types. Twenty-five new auras are now available for all players to enjoy, in addition to the previous five.
The fiery aura looks pretty snazzy.
Auction House
A Beta version of the auction house is working, and it will receive further improvements before launch. But we expect to get a lot of feedback about the auction house after launch, and we'll take requests into account for prioritizing upgrades.
Now you too can have a mercantile empire!
Mystery Mission
We've added a unique, fairly easy, story-focused mission called Training Mishap that you'll be offered at the end of Character Creation. You can also get it in Apotheosis City later on. Exploring the malfunctioning training area can reveal early hints about a hidden enemy group from a future update, and expand on the lore for an existing enemy group. We won't give away anything too specific... but keep an eye out for hidden areas!
Thank you for continuing to support us this past year. You can look forward to more news from us in the next few months as we get Ship of Heroes ready to launch. We hope you're as excited as we are!
Technical Notes
1. We’ve made some improvements to the backend to reduce lag.
2. We’ve focused a lot on the network processes that communicate between the servers and the client. This extra layer isn't needed for single player and turn-based multiplayer games, but it's very important for true MMORPGs with lots of players.
3. We're also working on a more sophisticated setup for a test server. In short: it's complicated. But it's getting there.
4. We’re involved in a major effort to increase our depth of integration with Steam. Each time we do a major test or a public event, we learn more, and make improvements that will make your experience a little bit smoother.