Ship of Heroes, the highly anticipated superhero MMORPG, has announced its arrival on Steam. The game’s Steam store page now features a gameplay trailer and screenshots, with some of the latter never seen before, even by past Beta participants.
Ship of Heroes was initially planned to be hosted without using a platform, like World of Warcraft or Black Desert Online. However, during its Betas, several players reported taking hours to download the game, and hours more for every patch. The developers needed a better downloader/patcher and decided to look into building or licensing a new patcher. After reviewing options, they chose Steam, which has the best patcher available and has performed flawlessly in two housing Betas. Typical patch times have gone down from hours to minutes.
Steam also provides other benefits, such as access to the largest single hub of videogame players in the world, with 132 million active players each month and 33 million peak concurrent users. This exposure will help Ship of Heroes build the “Massively” part of the game. The developers think Steam is more than worth the cost, given the size of the platform and value of the launcher.
The developers are also working to upgrade and expand their server system, as they’ve held a number of Betas on internal development servers in prior years, with surprisingly good results. Every new player starts in the character creator (CCT), which could become a bottleneck at launch. They’re planning a new event in the near future to stress-test this new server structure before launch day.
Ship of Heroes is expected to launch at the end of 2023, with very significant advancements and expansions from what players have experienced before. The developers are still looking into Steam Fest events, which are free demo events for upcoming soon-to-be-released videogames, and whether they can automate SoH account creation with Steam.
In addition, the developers are migrating their system from the current development servers to Linux servers for superior stability and affordability. They plan to preserve characters, accounts, and “stuff” earned in prior Betas, so players can see familiar avatars in the next event. They have also ensured 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 they ever want to.
The game’s Steam store page encourages players to wishlist Ship of Heroes on Steam to help the developers gauge the server capacity they will need for launch to prevent waiting queues. Players who want to be notified of events and updates through Steam can also follow the game’s Steam store page.