Play the Demo!
Play the Ship of Heroes Demo for Free
The demo includes the character creator + the first Sword Blossom arc, an arc that has never been shown
Play on Steam during October Next Fest
October 9 1:00 EST to October 16 1:00 EST
The demo can be played by new and returning players, even if they already have Ship of Heroes in their Steam library.
”Burn it all in my name! Ahahahaha!” – Dr. Cornish
This demo will show a very small portion of the current game, as was the case in prior Betas. For this event, we’ll be disabling most other content in the game to focus on the character creator and the first Sword Blossom story arc. Returning players are free to keep using existing characters or create new ones. Each account has 10 character slots for trying out different archetypes and builds.
Our character creator has been expanded and streamlined. You can spend hours in there perfecting your character’s looks, or speed through using pre-styled faces and our very popular randomizer options.
This fight is even more chaotic on a big team!
The first Sword Blossom story arc focuses on the Engineering department aboard the FHS Justice and their quiet struggle against the Promethean menace and the evil Dr. Cornish. The arc contains seven missions, culminating in an intense battle to protect the FHS Justice and its inhabitants from assimilation.
Fighting Cornish alone is a bad idea!
Steam Next Fest is all about getting right to the action, so new heroes will start outside of Sword Blossom’s office. But her missions will also take you out of Engineering to roam Apotheosis City. Returning players will first need to navigate to her office, southeast of the city, near the lake.
“You’d be surprised how many of our personnel get lost looking for the giant door with a guard…” – Sword Blossom
“I used so many healing infusions that my spine started glowing. They’re great!”
During Next Fest, we may organize some team-ups with the devs and perhaps some live streams where you can ask us questions live. To stay updated on those, be sure to check the schedule of events daily on the demo page. There, you will also find visual guides, tips, videos, instructions on reporting bugs and giving feedback, and a contact form in case you need help.
“I just have to hold out a little longer…”
Have fun, and let us know on our forum what you like best about the mission arc and the game!
SoH servers when a new patch generates more heat than intended
Technical Notes
1. Long time followers of SoH will notice that the volume of costume pieces has probably doubled or tripled since the last Beta. Numerous careful checks have been made to ensure that all of the pieces work without issues… Which means you will likely find the one exception.. 😊 Murphy’s law is a powerful opponent.
2. The diversity and capabilities of the Prometheans have been upgraded very significantly, and Dr. Cornish, their evil leader, will be featured prominently in future arcs. There is information about the Prometheans and other parts of the story on the demo page.
3. Players will have access to the CCT and to the Sword Blossom arc; you can easily create more than one character and play through it multiple times if you wish to. But for the rest of the mission content, you’ll have to play when SoH launches.
4. Steam doesn’t allow players with Ship of Heroes in their Steam library, like those who participated in the housing Betas in 2022, to access the demo version. This seems incredibly unfair to us, so we’ve enabled these players to access the same arc by logging into the full SoH game instead. They’ll have access to a version of the game with just the character creator and the first Sword Blossom story arc for the duration of Steam Next Fest.
5. We at SoH always try to be transparent. For us, this is a pre-launch test event. We’re not claiming that this is a fully polished game. We’ve been polishing it for some time, but there’s always more to do.
6. We do expect to push updates to the demo during the event, so our servers may be down occasionally while we update them.
7. One of the major systems we will be testing in this event is called multi-threaded chat. We’ve coded up a new chat system to handle large numbers of players. It’s already been evaluated with testing tools and some manual testing, but a big event like Steam Next Fest is one of the best ways to see how it handles large numbers of players chatting from all over the world. The same thing is true for our current server structure and automatic server scale-up features.
8. This is the first major public event we’ve done in years using Amazon Web Services. If there are problems, that will likely be on us, not on AWS. But we feel that there is no substitute for public testing and public events to get real player feedback. We certainly don’t want to test all of this new stuff for the first time on launch day!
9. In our internal testing, our devs often have 100+ FPS in-game. We’re interested to hear what real players experience, and how that compares to the numbers from other PC MMORPGs. Please let us know in the forums.
10. If you play the demo and see some stuff you like, please leave us a positive review on Steam. We’re going to continue to expand and polish the game, so we need to gather a larger community for launch day. Wishlisting and following us on Steam are free, and very helpful.
It’s morning in Apotheosis City.
Mission Instances
This video shows six members of our development team playing ordinary characters in Apotheosis City. They enter their mission map through the mission doors in a building on the northeast side of the Arch.
Remembering the Torch
This video records a network test that some of the devs from Ship of Heroes conducted using a rented server on March 11th, 2017. Optimizing network structure is an ongoing activity for most MMOs.