Ship of Heroes demo is live!

[PeregrineFalcon]

One of the CoH spiritual successors, Ship of Heroes, actually has a free demo that just went live today on Steam.

 

I'll let you know if it's any good!  😁

 

Supposedly it's even going to be launching early next year as a subscription only MMO.

[PeregrineFalcon]

And by "free demo" I mean YOU can log onto Steam and give Ship of Heroes a try, if you want to.

 

It was ok. I liked the graphic style and the flight animations. The controls were a little sluggish.

 

I'll definitely check it out when it finally launches.

[Techwright]

Tried it.  I tried out a melee, probably closest in comparison to a CoH street fighter/invulnerability brute.  I finally gave up halfway through the first mission (due to various problems named in the "cons" section.)

 

Pros:

• they got the hands right.  No mittens or claws.
• NPC opponents do not stand around to watch you fight their comrades.  They come into the fight. (NPCs at more distant spots in the room seem not to notice, though).
• three-color options in costuming

 

Cons: too many to list, but they included:

• really bad clipping of costume elements.
• many costume components use only 1 or 2 colors despite the 3-color option.
• unexpected color changes on character
• Hips so wide you could drive a semi-truck between the legs (and no hip slider on the body builder)
• Feet constantly snaring in combat areas, even when no opponents are around. 
• Weird targeting, where the target arrow is more likely to target your character than the opponent.
• Weird melee range, where the melee character has to punch often beyond his arms reach to hit target.
• NPC targets that won't take damage, or at least for extended periods of time.
• Powers/abilities clearly labeled as "Passive" yet you have to actively click them for them to operate
• Fighting is not fluid (though some power deliveries are much faster than CoH)
• Really bad load times.  Crashed the first time, and I've got a system that plays 97% of all recommended settings on the "Can You Run It?" website.  Optimization appears to be an afterthought.

On the fence:

• Several Secondary Powersets feel like weird choices to pair with the primaries.  I'm not sure if they truly are, or if I've just not gotten far enough into the game to see the merits of them.
• Voice work:  Voice "acting" sounds odd.  Possibly computer generated, but some of the dramatic pauses and such, I wasn't sure.  Still, it's more than what CoH has, so...

 

Thoughts:

• Not ready for prime-time.  This is pre-alpha at very best, and that's probably stretching it.
• They've gotten further than I expected they ever would.  Kudos for that.
• While calling itself a superhero game, it's actually extremely magic "top heavy".  For example, the first villain group you face off against are cyborgs...created by magic  (say what now?)  Personal opinion: the world is overflowing with magic games.  We don't really need another, especially when "magic" subverts the other "origin types".  I'd much rather see another game where the types are in balance, or as close to it as reasonably possible.

 

 

[PeregrineFalcon]

I agree with you on all counts.

 

They're calling it a demo, but it's clearly a beta. Or, as you called it, an alpha.

 

Still, if they can address the bugs, and add more content, it might end up being a good game.

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

9 hours ago, Techwright said:

For example, the first villain group you face off against are cyborgs...created by magic  (say what now?)  Personal opinion: the world is overflowing with magic games

Technomagic? Golemborgs? 

 

Voice work (per the Steam trailer) is clearly from a speech reader, and an older model - but not bad for one that's rendering on the fly. Sounds a little like Balabolka.

You can get better quality TTS than this these days: but not for free, and they tend to create out finished files that you can post on websites or social media rather than work as a plugin to another app. 

 

After 5-6 years of amateur development - with a pandemic on the way - this is still not a bad bit of work and it's got plenty of imagination in terms of setting and design. But it's going to need some serious polish before it's ready to have the Steam community unleashed on it.

 

...and a Mac client.

Edited October 10, 2023 by ThaOGDreamWeaver

[PeregrineFalcon]

A Mac client!  🤣

 

I'm pretty sure they've already said that it's not getting a Mac client. See, not everyone wants to cater to the 4.8%.  😁

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

Heh. Wine lets you run more or less anything as Mac native these days, including CoH.

There's now also an official Porting Kit (which is... well, still basically Wine plus some better instruction manuals).

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10123/

 

Something graphics-heavy works better with a couple tweaks so that it can use the Metal onboard GPU allocation. But there's not the barrier to build that there used to be, and there's a whole audience out there ready to goof off at work enjoy relaxing gaming time.

 

And besides... it's set on a spaceship/generation ship, and all decent spacecraft are Mac-compatible.

Even alien ones.

 

Edited October 10, 2023 by ThaOGDreamWeaver

[WanderingAries]

8 hours ago, ThaOGDreamWeaver said:

Heh. Wine lets you run more or less anything as Mac native these days, including CoH.

There's now also an official Porting Kit (which is... well, still basically Wine plus some better instruction manuals).

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10123/

 

Something graphics-heavy works better with a couple tweaks so that it can use the Metal onboard GPU allocation. But there's not the barrier to build that there used to be, and there's a whole audience out there ready to goof off at work enjoy relaxing gaming time.

 

And besides... it's set on a spaceship/generation ship, and all decent spacecraft are Mac-compatible.

Even alien ones.

 

 

Obligatory:
"Do you believe all that B.S. you just said?" 😛  /jk

[Kyksie]

I guess they deserve a bit of respect... out of the half dozen 'spiritual successors', they're the only one with an actual product so far. Personally when I first saw Ship of Heroes Kickstarter I though it was a half-baked take-the-money-and-run scam.

Edited April 1 by Kyksie

[LegionAlpha]

I forgot that title was still around.

[Thraxen]

Way better than the city of titans demo. 

[tidge]

Without playing the game: I feel like the best thing Ship of Heroes did was to simply explain why the zones have limits. The early development on a different spiritual successor seemed way too obsessed with having game zones without limits and/or insane amounts of open-world geometric detail.

[Jeneki]

https://shipofheroes.com/release-window-announced/

 

Official word is Q2 2025 now. Best of luck to them.

[biostem]

6 minutes ago, Jeneki said:

Best of luck to them

I don't know if it's just me, but after watching the trailer, the character models and animations are falling squarely in the  "uncanny valley".  I mean them no ill will, but I'm going to have to pass on this one...