Kickstarted Superhero MMO Ship of Heroes Showcases Animation and FX Overhaul

Ship of Heroes continues to make steady progress toward its release this season. Ahead of what we assume will be a final release date announcement soon, Heroic Games has shared a new dev blog — focusing on animations.

“In any MMO, one of the first decisions is determining the size of the animation budget,” the studio explains. “This budget isn’t monetary, though that’s a factor too — it’s about how much latency or lag the animations are allowed to cause. The larger this ‘budget,’ the easier it is to create stunning animations. However, when there are numerous moving characters on the screen, especially player-controlled heroes with unique animations, the budget gets divided into very small portions for each animation.”

The team revealed that overhauling animations and FX was a “major project over the past many months.” The goal was to address everything from player actions to NPC behaviors and idles, reducing lag and latency, ensuring the game is “playable without the latest expensive hardware,” and making sure that “every power has something cool or interesting about it.”

As far as we know, Ship of Heroes is still targeting a Q2 release, giving it a few more weeks to go. While the blog mentions a video that isn’t currently available, here’s the VFX video released a few months back: