15 years ago, Ship of Heroes may have lived long enough to die with dignity, but in today’s market, its chances of survival are slim to none.
Massively Multiplayer.
I must preface this by saying the following review may appear harsh, but it is not intentionally so.
Since I started this site in 2017, I have presented readers with nothing but the truth, even when it has been less than advantageous to do so.
However, as a follower of Christ, I must always speak the truth, even when it’s unpleasant to do so.
As a result, some reviews will be overwhelmingly negative, and such is the case with Ship of Heroes, arguably one of the worst MMORPGs I have ever played.
There are many things wrong with Ship of Heroes, and frankly, to list every one of them would take more time than I am willing to commit to a game that is likely to struggle to reach a triple-digit CCU at launch; however, I will highlight its most visible flaws so that readers may be fully informed of why Ship of Heroes is unlikely to succeed.
Many MMORPGs are “dated” compared to modern games. However, there is a reason for that: they have been running for 10 or even 20 years, and players have a vested interest in continuing to play them. Even then, many MMORPGs have undergone multiple engine updates, resulting in better performance and visuals.
Ship of Heroes offers none of that. It’s a new game, so players do not have any nostalgic feelings for it, and the concept of the sunken cost fallacy does not apply.
As a result, the game means nothing to them, and there is no reason to start playing it, especially when City of Heroes is back online and holds fond memories for many of the same players who may have considered playing Ship of Heroes.
Ship of Heroes’s character models are bad, and I tried to think of a better word to use, one that was perhaps more elegant, but really, bad is the best word to use.
Every character model looks like something you would find on a free 3D model site, and while the developers claim to have created them from scratch, that does little to improve their appearance, which would have been questionable in 2009, let alone 2024 and beyond.
Character models are not the only visually unimpressive aspect of Ship of Heroes, as animations, map assets, and, most importantly, textures are also very low quality.
Ship of Heroes would have been visually unimpressive in 2009, with titles such as Lord of the Rings Online being far prettier at launch (2007).
And it would have only gotten worse as you moved into the 2010s, with titles such as Star Wars the Old Republic (2011) and DC Universe Online (2011) making Ship of Heroes look nothing short of archaic.
While there is a place for titles to use early 2000s visuals (and I am a huge fan of games that pay homage to that era), the assets used are often of exceptionally high quality.
Frankly, Ship of Heroes just does not offer that, with even the best-quality assets being much lower quality than what can be freely found online at various asset repositories such as OpenGameArt.org.
Despite being one of the worst-looking games I have ever seen running on Unreal Engine 4, it somehow runs worse than the best-looking games using the same engine.
Combat animations often misfire and occasionally cause massive performance drops of 30 or more FPS.
I can only imagine how bad these same stutters would be when playing with a (hypothetical) large group of players.
Framerate instability aside, the camera often lags behind the player, and it’s rather nauseating. The choppy camera movements and unstable FPS gave me a headache and made me feel rather sick.
A game as visually unimpressive as Ship of Heroes needs top-of-the-line performance to compensate for its visual failings.
Unfortunately, Ship of Heroes is both ugly and poorly optimised, something I have seldom encountered to this degree in any project developed by a team of dedicated developers.
I must preface this by saying that the developers at Heroic Games Corporation appear to be huge fans of the superhero MMORPG genre and sincerely want to make a game as memorable to them and others as the City of Heroes.
Unfortunately, they are going about it in all the wrong ways.
Nostalgia doesn’t exist for spiritual sequels, and when making a game in a different time and for a different market, you must adapt to the market, even if that means accepting that very few people are as excited about your project as you are about the point you accept that moving on is the better option.
When the Kickstarter was cancelled after raising just over $35k of the $400k required, it was a good time to quit.
When the official game subreddit has only 310 followers after eight years, it is a good sign that very few people are interested in the game.
When you think people will willingly pay monthly to play a game that looks this bad, that is a good time to reconsider your career when even the biggest names in the genre have either moved to a free-to-play model or have made moves in that direction.
While the concept of no cash shop sounds good on paper, when you consider that subscription-only games are often far less active, and even the best Ship of Heroes skins are very low quality, you are essentially asking players, “Hey, why don’t you pay a monthly sub to play a dead game with ugly skins?”, when many other games allow players to expierance the entire game for free, with an optional cash shop top sustain it.
Timmy using his mommy’s credit card to buy a panda costume doesn’t affect me as a player; however, a developer expecting players to pay monthly for the privilege of playing a dying game does.
This is especially true when nothing the developers have demonstrated so far gives me even the slightest confidence that they will ever release any cosmetic item that is so amazing I was glad to have gotten for for “free” (excluding the monthly sub) instead of playing the game for free and deciding for myself if I wanted to purchase the skin or not, an ultimately far more consumer-friendly business model, and one that is adopted by some of the biggest names in gaming.
Ship of Heroes is a massively multiplayer online role playing game video game developed and published by Heroic Games Corporation, it was released on TBD and the retail price is yet to be disclosed by the publisher.
Ship of Heroes is available exclusively on PC.
The following peripherals are officially supported:
Ship of Heroes is unrated and contains:
While it’s not yet officially released, based on what has been shown and the playable build made available to content creators, Ship of Heroes is as good as dead.
Players would do well to avoid parting with their hard-earned money on a game that will likely die upon arrival.
