Ship of Heroes: Welcome to the Spaceship

Say hello to Ship of Heroes, a spiritual successor to City of Heroes that appeared out of nowhere – or should I say the depths of space – nearly a year ago.  And what a year it’s been. They have smashed through development goal after development goal, and now, 11 months after their official declaration of existence, they stand with quite an impressive display. I always have a question ‘will this game actually come to light’ when I enthuse over games in development, but I have to admit that with this one, I really think they’re going to produce something special.

It’s the year 2487. Humanity has seeded out into the universe, in gigantic generation ships called heroships. These heroships contain entire cities, and are designed with the intention of being nation-states in space. The universe is a dangerous place, however, and heroes are needed more than ever. With an ever expanding universe to explore comes not only new friends, but new enemies as well. Enter the player characters – super powered heroes who stand ready to defend humanity against whatever threats might come its way, whether it be crime on the city streets or alien invaders out to stop humanity’s expansion.

This offers an incredible range of possible adventures. The ship itself contains multiple settings; from the cityscape on the upper decks, to the science fiction themed engineering decks, even the more organic levels that contain wilderness where food is grown. They even intend to have wilderness hazard levels that have been completely overrun with invasive alien species. Aliens will invade, insurrections will occur, and there are always mercenaries and mobsters causing trouble in warehouses. Then we move outside the ship – we have potential asteroid fields, open space danger zones, and an infinite array of planets that can be created. The game will not be launching with all of these of course, but the dev team intends to launch with a solid core and expand from there.

But everyone has setting and lore, right? What makes Ship of Heroes stand out as something other than wishes and vaporware? I’m not even certain where to begin when describing their accomplishments to date. I want to call this development team unprecedented, because thus far, they have met every design milestone they’ve set, from powers reveals, gameplay videos to the hands on alpha test of their character creator. In fact, if you go back through their news, you can actually see the game improving as it moves along. Let’s take a look at the milestone schedule:

We’re in early October, and pretty much right on target. From the most recent bit of news to hit the Ship of Heroes page:

According to the community’s feedback so far, this has been an extremely successful Alpha test.  Everyone who has reported back likes the CCT, and it has performed perfectly on a very wide array of devices.  One of our testers has substantial IT experience and tested the CCT on multiple computers with operating systems spanning from Windows 7 all the way to Windows 10 without difficulties.  It looks like we are on track to our long-term schedule of a Beta launch for Ship of Heroes at the end of 2018.

Stay tuned for more news! I had my hand in the character creator alpha, and I’ve got some exciting things to share about it in the pipeline. If I’ve whet your appetite for more, you can check out the Ship of Heroes official page, forums, twitter, and facebook.

I know the character creator alpha test only served to whet my own appetite, and make me hungry to get my hands on the actual game.

 

 

About Pherephassa 213 Articles
Pherephassa has been creeping around the etherspace long enough to have remorted so often that not even she can recall her original form. She loves sandboxes, challenges, chain mail bikinis and dungeons so large they take weeks, months or even years to fully explore. Currently seeking an MMO home, she can often be found on the side of the road, begging game designers for death penalties and slow leveling curves.