Ship of Heroes is Now on Steam!
“Only the Nagdellians would have a cavernous tin can of monstruous proportions for a Mothership!”
Please add Ship of Heroes to your wishlist for Steam to notify you when the game is released. Wishlisting us will help us gauge the server capacity we will need for launch to prevent waiting queues. If you also want to be notified of events and updates through Steam, follow us on our Steam store page. Please take a look at the store page and give us your feedback on the Ship of Heroes forum.
No one has seen the secret area under Apotheosis hospital…
Originally, we planned to host SoH without using a platform, like WoW or BDO. But during our Betas, several players reported needing hours to download the game, and hours more for every patch. We needed a better downloader/patcher. A patcher is a software tool that allows games to update the client only for the part of the game that has been updated. In 2021, after our mission Beta, we looked into building or licensing a new patcher. After reviewing the options, Steam stood out as having the best patcher available, and it has performed flawlessly in two housing Betas. Typical patch times are down from hours to minutes!
However, longtime fans will recognize the Nagdellian Berserker.
Watch out for hostile portals, or you could be ambushed when the Nagdellians warp in.
Steam also provides other advantages. 132 million active players each month. 33 million peak concurrent users. Access to the largest single hub of videogame players in the world. “Massively” is a key value of MMOs: it’s fun to interact with other players and see what they’re doing. Having access to this large audience helps Ship of Heroes get exposure to build the “Massively” part of the game. Between the size of the platform and value of the launcher, we think Steam is more than worth the cost.
Steam Statistics
“Ah yes, the ‘Food’ restaurant chain has made it to the New California Colony. I see why they’re not named ‘Imagination’.”
And there are benefits for testing in a production environment. We’ve known for a while that sometimes things work fine in the Unreal Engine Editor, our main development tool, but don’t work in the hosted game. Our devs now test Ship of Heroes through Steam, in the version players will be experiencing. This has been very effective at improving the game.
“The Red Sigil may be evil… but I can’t deny their sense of style.”
“Well this big room isn’t ominous at all…”
On a related note, we’re working to upgrade and expand our server system. As many of you know, we’ve held a number of Betas on internal development servers in prior years, with surprisingly good results. But we need to be ready for much larger crowds when the game launches for real. Every new player starts in the character creator (CCT), which could become a bottle neck at launch. We’re planning a new event in the near future to stress-test this new server structure before launch day.
“No explosion can hold me back! My damage resistance is augmented!”
“Try not to jump down the hole – You already jumped, didn’t you.” – Ambassador
Overall, a lot of things are coming together with Ship of Heroes. We’re still aiming for a game launch at the end of 2023, but whatever happens, you will see very significant advancement and expansion of what you have played before.
Enjoy the spring weather, and please remember to wishlist us on Steam.
“Guys, check out the beard I grew waiting for this game to be on Steam!” – One of our devs, who makes that face in real life, too
Technical Notes
1. If you are interested in the details of the Steam community, you can see it here. Data is in the last section.
2. We’re looking into Steam Fest events, which are free demo events for upcoming soon-to-be-released videogames. Expect more on this topic in an upcoming newsletter.
3. We’re also looking into whether we can automate SoH account creation with Steam, since players need to have a Ship of Heroes account, accessed through the login screen, in order to play.
4. All pictures and video shown were taken in-game and are unaltered.
5. In the past we have mostly utilized Windows servers for development, testing, and public events. We are in the process of switching over to Linux servers for these functions due to superior stability, and to make running SoH servers more affordable.
6. As we migrate our system from the current development servers, we plan to preserve your characters, accounts, and “stuff” you’ve earned in prior Betas, so you can see familiar avatars in the next event. This isn’t guaranteed to work, but we’ll retain as much data as we possibly can, ideally even after launch.
7. As a reminder, we’ve done basic preparations to ensure it will be possible to migrate Ship of Heroes from the final version of Unreal 4 to the new version of the Unreal 5 engine if we ever want to. But we’re focused on getting SoH reliably launched ASAP, and we intend to launch in Unreal 4.
Pro tip: Lava is not for swimming in. Not even if you’re a Tanker.
FPS Success in SoH
This newsletter is quite different from what we’ve published in the past. First off, this is part one of a series of four newsletters in which we’ll share some really good news. Second, we’re going to do something that is very rare for a game at our stage – we’re going to publish some of our current, internal FPS numbers, and we’re going to share what we think these numbers mean.
What Makes an Alpha?
For over a year we’ve been asked variations on the question of what counts as an Alpha or a Beta, and we’d like to share our thinking.
Upgrading to Engine Version 4.18
Periodically, the dev team at Heroic Games upgrades the engine version that we are using to develop Ship of Heroes.