Welcome To Ship Of Heroes. Come Aboard. There's Plenty Of Room! No, Seriously. There Really Is...

It's always an exciting day when a new MMORPG launches, isn't it? People take time off work or call in sick just to be part of that launch-day crowd. No-one wants to miss out on an event that might be something people talk about for years.

Of course, there are risks. The servers often buckle under the load. Even when the devs have been diligent with stress testing and allowances have been made for the crush, they always somehow seem to underestimate the demand.

Even if the servers stay up, there are bound to be queues. We've all seen the screenshots - #6,427 in line: estimated waiting time two hours and counting.  

If only there was a way to ensure anyone who wanted to play could get into the game quickly and easily, without having to go through all those hassles...

Guess what? There is! Here's how you do it...

Charge $60 for the (Non-existent.) box and demand fifteen dollars a month to keep on playing after the first thirty days! That ought to do it!

Ah, but is it enough? If your game is really good and has fantastic word of mouth and the streamers are all plugging it like crazy and you've picked out a spot in the market where there's no direct competition, maybe you'll still find yourself overwhelmed by hordes of frantic players throwing money at you.

So, just to be safe, why not go head-to-head with the free-to-play game that inspired the one you just spent years on? And why not make sure your AAA-priced version of that familiar title looks like "a relic of a bygone era", specifically "the early 00's". Make sure it's "worse than games released 2 decades ago" and be sure it plays "like a student project or an alpha build with a bunch of placeholders for real icons, graphics, sound effects, systems, and so on".  

Not my words, just a few choice quotes from the Steam reviews, where Ship of Heroes (Aww - you guessed...) is currently enjoying a rating of Mostly Negative from forty-eight reviews. 

And since everyone really loves AI these days, especially gamers, why not use it instead of actual actors for your NPC voice acting? That last allegation appears to have been disputed by the developers but the general impression is that the voice acting is "awful" no matter whether humans or machines are doing it, so it probably doesn't matter much either way. 

With all of that in place (And a lot more besides.) it's safe to assume your players won't run into any of those all-too-familiar launch day issues. Your servers will almost certainly be able to withstand the strain of the teens of people willing to stump up the cost of Baldurs Gate 3 for a chance to play "a buggy mess" for a month before having to get their credit cards out once more for the right to carry on.

If nothing else, you'll certainly be able to claim you had no queues at launch and everyone was able to log straight in. 

I was going to post something more high-minded about all this but Wilhelm got there before me so I took the low road. For a less snarky take on the situation I refer you to TAGN. I do have a few semi-serious observations of my own to make, though.

Ship of Heroes launched yesterday to a largely disinterested gaming public, most of whom had probably only heard of the game at all thanks to the recent flurry of (Negative.) press interest generated by open disbelief at the price point. If the plan was to raise the game's profile then I suppose they achieved it but I suspect they may be learning there is such a thing as bad publicity after all.

The game is available through Steam and only through Steam, so for once we have an MMORPG whose exact population is relatively easy to ascertain. The numbers are in and they are not pretty.

 The "All Time" (By which we mean two days.) peak stands at a tidy 100. As I type this, there are sixteen players online. 

Just for contrast, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, which entered Early Access on Steam last December at a box price of $39.99, has an all-time peak of just under 7,000 players with five hundred people playing right now. That sounds like it might be a viable business model. This does not.

Then again, who am I to say? I played both games, very briefly, in open testing and decided not to pay much more attention to either of them. I might have been the target market once but that seems a very long time ago now.

It would also be ridiculous of me to pretend to be surprised by how the Ship of Heroes launch is going. Apart from that irritating clique that seems to think everything is de facto better the more pointlessly exclusive you make it, there has been universal incomprehension at the business model Heroic Games has chosen. No-one expected it to pay off and it has exceeded even those expectations. Or fallen below them. However that goes.

I'm not even really surprised to hear the game is janky, buggy and crashes a lot, as many reviews on Steam complain. I reviewed one of the tests a couple of years ago and made many of the same observations then. It seems little has changed.

Perhaps surprisingly, I wasn't entirely negative back then. I ended my review by saying "For all its many flaws, I quite enjoyed it. If and when it reaches some kind of always-up, no-more-wipes state - open beta or Early Access, let's say - I might be willing to give it an extended run - if they fix the most egregious of the technical issues, that is." I was clearly not expecting to be asked to pay sixty dollars for what sounds like much the same build, let alone another fifteen a month in perpetuity. 

The thing is, I'd quite like a good super-hero game. I've been a fan of the genre since early childhood. I read the comics. I watch the TV shows and the movies. I even play one of the existing super-hero games, now and again. I ought to be an easy mark for something like this.

If Ship of Heroes had launched on Steam with an Early Access model with a modest buy-in I might have considered it. I considered Pantheon but thought the box price was a little steep. At $20 I'd have been there for launch. 

I still keep it in mind in case of a sale, though. It's on my Steam Wishlist for that very reason. I'd at least have done that much for SoH.

If SoH had arrived on Steam as a F2P title, instead of this you'd be reading my First Impressions piece by now. I'd certainly have been interested enough to download it and give it a session or two. 

Maybe I'd have been disappointed. Maybe I'd have made some negative comments. Still, I bet I'd have found a few good things to say, like I did with the tests. The goodwill would have been there.

No-one who isn't delusional is going to give much goodwill to a game that plays like a poorly-optimized, unpolished indie title but asks you to pay the price you'd expect to give for a triple-A critical darling. And then piles a monthly sub on top of that. If you're looking to create bad word of mouth, that's the way to go about it.

When you come in with a pricing structure like that, you have to expect to be compared to the  peer group that lives where you've gone: household names, famous I.P.s, celebrity game designers. You're competing with games that win awards and break sales records for their innovation and execution. You don't get your slack cut just because you're a plucky little indie everyone's rooting for. Not in that company.

Where Ship of Heroes goes from here is hard to guess. You'd think it would be game over, so to speak, but I can quote you the names of half a dozen MMORPGs that have been trundling along with single-figure populations for years. You wouldn't recognize any of the names because they're super-obscure but they're out there. 

Even some of the better-known ones have numbers similar to Ship of Heroes. Go check how Anarchy Online is doing on Steam these days. Or Rose Online. Although, both of those can be played outside the Steam infrastructure, so it may not be a fair comparison. Also, they've been around for decades. They didn't just launch yesterday.

It is possible Ship of Heroes will drift along the bottom of the genre, played by few and forgotten by all. I kind of hope so because as I said, there is potential there, somewhere. It's hard to imagine it will ever be realized but I guess it's possible.

Even if the bugs are squashed and the jank eliminated and the proposed DLC (Free with cost of purchase for two years, if that's all you were waiting to hear before slapping your cash on the table...) ever materialize, there's still the uncomfortable fact that this is a game no-one was really asking for. 

The whole point of Ship of Heroes and the other two would-be wearers of the City of Heroes cape was that they would be a new home for all those players who couldn't play the game they loved any more, thanks to NCSoft doing what NCSoft does and shutting it down. 

Except CoH resurfaced, the same as it ever was, and through some hitherto unsuspected super-power, managed to convince its former corporate overlords not only to let it stick around but to hand it its legal papers, allowing the Homecoming server to provide a genuine, enduring home for all those players who thought they'd never go home again.

And who needs a ship when you've got a home? Especially an overpriced cruise ship, sailing round in ever-decreasing circles.

 

[All screenshots from the Steam Store Page and I have to say they make the game look a lot better than the reviews suggest...] 

Train Keeps On Rolling

Is it any wonder the games industry as whole is having problems selling new games, when you consider the efforts that have been made over the last couple of decades and more to persuade people to keep playing the ones they already have? MMORPGs were just the advance guard for the self-destructive process, which can also be seen in television, movies, books and just about every form of popular entertainment there is.

The shift to a "Live Service" model for what sometimes feels like every game of the last five (Or is it ten?) years is starting to feel like one of those Roadrunner cartoons - Wile E Coyote frenziedly rolling a huge boulder up a hill in furtherance of some clever plan that hindsight will tell him was always destined to fail, just not in time to prevent it rolling back down and crushing him flat.

I was thinking about this this morning when I found myself spending nearly two hours "playing" EverQuest II, a twenty year-old game I bought when it came out and have never uninstalled. And that a day after I spent a similar amount of time "playing" EverQuest Online Adventures, a game that might be new to me but came out even before EQII.

It's not just live games that go on forever. The other day was I writing about all those Prime Gaming giveaways I was going to claim, all of them games that have been around for years. Further evidence that nothing ever goes away any more, especially since half of them have to be claimed through Good Old Games, a service whose raison d'etre is to stop old games from ever going out of circulation.

EQOA is a prime example of the depth of the problem. It's a live service game that's not even live. The genuine, live version did manage to do the near-impossible and close down for good a decade ago, thereby theoretically creating an opportunity for another game to pick up its dispossessed players - and what happened? A bunch of those same players went and rebuilt the damn thing so they didn't have to stop!

It's sometimes said that irony died the day Henry Kissinger collected the Nobel Peace Prize but irony dies every day now. This month, a new MMORPG by the name of Ship of Heroes will launch. It's been slightly delayed because Steam wasn't ready, but it's coming. Too late, most likely, but it's coming all the same.

Ship of Heroes was conceived as a lifeboat for City of Heroes players after that game closed down. CoH was so beloved, apparently, that its demise triggered the creation of several would-be successors, all racing to be the Hero of Heroes. 

Unfortunately for all of them, and in no small part because it seems to take figuratively forever to make an MMO these days, at least outside of China or South Korea, long before any of the new games were ready, the old one popped back up like the baddie in a slasher flick. Not dead after all, just stunned!

With the old City of Heroes not just back in emulator form but officially endorsed by the rights-holder and therefore stable enough for even the most risk-averse ex-player, there didn't seem to be much point in the others carrying on. One of them, inevitably my favorite of the three, Valiance, gave up the chase. 

The other two did not. City of Titans continues in development and Ship of Heroes is almost ready to set sail, most likely straight into the sunset if some of the speculation I've read comes true. No-one seems to give the game much of a chance. It's hard enough, competing with still-running games from years ago let alone zombie games that won't stay dead.

None of which is new, of course, but as the years roll on, the cumulative pressure from more and more of the games we used to play, and to a great extent still do, builds and builds. It's a phenomenon that's starting to be talked about and not always positively. There was a time when anniversaries with zeroes on the end generated a spontaneous round of respectful applause but there's such a thing as outstaying your welcome and signs of impatience are starting to show in some of the responses.

As I said earlier, it's not just games, either. Following music news these days can be a mildly surreal experience. When I began to get back into the swing of things in the early twenty-teens after a decade or so away (Playing games. Mostly the same ones I'm still playing.) the trend was all about bands getting back together. It started in the nineties and kept gathering speed until now they're no more likely to stay disbanded after a split than super-villains are to stay dead.

Of late, though, it's not enough for the stars of yesteryear to reform for a quick comeback and maybe a nostalgia tour or a Vegas residency. They will insist on writing and recording new material. It's an ongoing project. The bands come back and carry on like they'd never been away. 

And since it generally turns out that their aging fans aren't all that fussed about the new songs, the current fashion for a while has been to celebrate the anniversaries of the records the fans do want to hear - the old ones. Every day it seems like I'm reading about some band re-issuing an album on the tenth or twentieth or fortieth anniversary of its original release or playing a special gig at some prestigious venue, where they'll perform the thing in full. Some even go so far as to do whole tours just playing the one album with all the tracks in the right order. It's all eras now.

I guess the gaming equivalent would be all these "classic" servers, many of which seem to do extremely well. World of Warcraft Classic, by some estimates, eclipses the current "Retail" version. As for Runescape, a game sometimes said to be played by even more people than WoW, I don't know the exact numbers but from the way it's reported, it almost feels like Old School Runescape is the main version.

When I said at the top that all of this started whirling around inside my brain as I was playing EQII, you might have wondered why I put quotation marks around "playing". It's because I'm not at all convinced that's what I was doing or that it's what any of us are doing in MMORPGs any more. The whole genre was always somewhat antithetic to the concept of play but what I did this morning had nothing playful about it whatsoever.

At best, I was preparing to play. That's often the way and I know it's not just me because I keep reading blog posts where someone goes into detail about all the things they've had to do to get ready to tackle some content or other - a raid or an expansion or a quest or whatever - and how long it's taking and how much work it is.

I've spent most of this year trying to get my Necromancer in EQII ready to take the lead in this year's expansion when it lands and she's not there yet. This morning I checked all her spells, decided I could improve on nearly all of them, got my Warlock out, who's also my Sage and therefore my spell-crafter, had him make a bunch of upgrades, swapped them over to the Necro by way of the shared bank, scribed them all and then took her out to test them on some current-content solo mobs to see how much of a difference it had made.

That took me a couple of hours and the verdict was "not enough". So now I'm going to have to test the same content with my Berserker to see how far behind him the Necro is so I can judge how much more work I need to do to catch her up. 

I don't think that describes "playing a game". In the most positive light, it sounds more like a hobby such as gardening, where you have to prepare the ground and plant the seeds so you can potentially enjoy the results months later.  As for the dailies we all religiously do so as not to waste whatever rewards they offer, those are much closer to doing regular household chores than "playing". 

And yet we all go on doing it. In those games we've had installed for years. And when we've had enough for a while and search around for something else as a change of pace, chances are we end up in another game we used to play or maybe one we haven't tried yet but that's been around for just as long or even longer.

It's not to suggest we don't also buy and try new games. We definitely do because novelty is its own reward. But how many of those games do we then stick with for any length of time? 

The old-fashioned ones with a beginning a middle and most importantly an end, yes, those we buy, play and finish. But not so many of them as we used to because why would we need to? Three games on my Steam Wishlist are on deep discount this week and I got as far as putting them all in my basket before I realized I wouldn't have the time to play any of them because I already don't have time to play the old, online games I'm maintaining and the old, free games I'm claiming. So I put them back.

There are all these old games still there and running and getting new content and demanding all that time and investment because the older they get the more complicated it becomes to play them and no-one dares stop because if you fall off the bus you'll have one hell of a job climbing back on.

And anyway, why would you buy a new game when so many developers are so keen to give you some for free? Probably they're old games you enjoyed years ago but that won't run on your PC any more except look! Now they do! Wouldn't you rather play one of those again than something new you might not even enjoy?

Anyway, you get the point, I'm sure. Is it any wonder developers are finding it hard to get traction with their new games? Is it any wonder they're desperate to cut costs or to keep people playing the games they already made, if those games have somehow managed to pick up an audience? No wonder the finance guys want to farm it all out to AI. Closest thing they can get to getting out of gaming altogether, which I bet would be their first choice.

There was a grebo band in the eighties by the name of Pop Will Eat Itself. They saw the future coming, obviously. They split up in 1996 but it goes without saying that they're back together now. 

The Fiery Paw or How I Spent My Saturday

I was planning to include a bit more about Bard and the help the AI gave me in coming up with a name for my character in Ship of Heroes but the write-up ran long and I had to cut that section. Every silver cloud has a grey lining or something like that, so since I had both the time and the inclination I thought I might spin up a whole post about it. Aren't you glad I had nothing better to do yesterday?

Let's start with the full text of my question and Bard's reply :

I'd like a list of ten names for a female superhero with fire-related powers and a feline appearance.

Here is a list of ten names for a female superhero with fire-related powers and a feline appearance:

1. Felidae
2. Pyre
3. Ember
4. Feline Flame
5. Flameclaw
6. Cataclysm
7. Firetail
8. Inferno
9. Ashes
10. Phoenix

These names are all evocative of the superhero's feline appearance and fire powers. They are also strong and memorable, which is important for a superhero.

Here is a brief explanation of each name:

• Felidae is the scientific name for the cat family, so this name is a perfect fit for a feline superhero.
• Pyre is a funeral fire, which is associated with both fire and death. This name could be a reference to the superhero's dangerous powers or to her ability to defeat her enemies.
• Ember is a small piece of glowing coal, which is a symbol of both fire and new beginnings. This name could be a reference to the superhero's fiery powers or to her potential to make the world a better place.
• Feline Flame is a simple but effective name that combines the superhero's two main characteristics.
• Flameclaw is another simple but effective name that highlights the superhero's sharp claws and fiery powers.
• Cataclysm is a natural disaster that causes widespread damage. This name could be a reference to the superhero's destructive powers or to her ability to prevent disasters from happening.
• Firetail is a reference to the long, bushy tails of some cats. This name could also be a reference to the superhero's fiery powers.
• Inferno is a large and intense fire. This name is a good fit for a superhero with powerful fire powers.
• Ashes are the remains of something that has been burned. This name could be a reference to the superhero's fiery powers or to her ability to rise from the ashes of defeat.
• Phoenix is a mythical bird that is reborn from its own ashes. This name could be a reference to the superhero's ability to overcome any challenge.

I hope this list helps you to choose the perfect name for your female superhero!

Felidae

I've noticed that Bard has a tendency to offer more information than you ask for. It's like the keen kid in class who puts up a hand to every question, jiggling in place and calling out "Miss! Miss!" I'm still working my way through Young Sheldon and the similarities between the eleven-year old Sheldon Cooper and Bard are hard to avoid.

Looking at the list, all ten seem like perfectly good superhero names to me. In fact, they look like names that must already have been used somewhere, although with one exception I couldn't immediately place any of them. I imagine everyone reading this knows who Phoenix is but the only other ones I was sure I'd seen before were Pyre and Inferno and I couldn't recall exactly where that was.

Pyre

To find out, I ran all ten through Google, using just the name and the word "superhero" as the search term and to my considerable surprise it appears half of them have never been used by anyone, including the one I chose, Fireclaw. I would happily have bet money that one was too obvious not to have been picked up already. I guess it's mine now, since I'm in print with it.

The other Bard Originals are Feline Flame, Cataclysm, Firetail and Ashes. Again, I'm dumbfounded to find no-one apparently ever thought to use Firetail. There is a Pokemon of that name but Pokemon are not superheroes so it doesn't remotely count. There's an Ash but no Ashes and of course Cataclysm has been used many times as the name of an event involving superheroes but never for an actual superhero, at least according to Google.

Ember

With the exception of Phoenix, even the names that come up as already in use are pretty obscure. Felidae is an open source character, Pyre refers to three different, very minor Marvel characters, Ember is an equally obscure Wonder Woman villain, so technically not even a superhero, although that would be splitting hairs since they all change sides all the time. 

Inferno at least has the distinction of being a very minor character at both the majors. For DC she's an associate of the Legion of Super-Heroes while at Marvel he's one of Inhumans. I was mistaken in believing I'd heard the name in either context.

Props to Bard for both originality and canny cribbing, then. If it wasn't for the thudding faux pas of Phoenix right at the end, that would have been pretty much a perfect score.

Feline Flame

As for the descriptions, at first I thought they were fatuous and unecessary but as I come to look at them more closely I find they're more cogent and purposeful than I realised. If I was writing the back story of a character I planned to roleplay I might very well use some of Bard's ideas.

On this evidence, coming up with ideas for new
superheroes seems to be a thing Bard can do reasonably well. It's nice to find something! The obvious next step, of course, was to get one of the other AIs to show us what these superheroes might look like.

For that I went to NightCafe. I never go anywhere else for my AI Art needs these days. It's so convenient and offers so much choice. I have nearly five hundred credits saved so I thought I'd splash out and use one of the more capable models.

Flameclaw

I chose DreamShaper XL alpha2. It's only a credit a shot and I get five free credits a day so why not?

For the prompt I used each of the suggested names plus the exact wording from my query to Bard, in the following format "Felidae: a female superhero with fire-related powers and a feline appearance". I considered adding a style or a genre but I thought I'd just leave it and see what came out. The result was so good I did the whole lot with just the bare prompt and no further tweaking.

As you can see, the results were both impressive and consistent. As even the least-attentive comics fan can tell you, comic artists differ wildly in style, approach and ability. If you had ten artists draw the same character you might well only be able to it was supposed to be the same hero by the costume. 

Cataclysm

All of DreamShaper's illustrations could quite easily have been drawn by the same hand. There are some differences here and there but things like the shape of the mouth and jaw seem very coherent. Also exhibiting considerable thematic affinity are the costume designs, the color schemes and more concerningly, the skin tones. Even the one actual cat is white! That, along with the equally limited range of body shapes, makes for some interesting talking points about both the superhero comics industry and AI training methods.

The consistent color schemes are less problematic. It makes sense for the colors to be predominantly reds and oranges. Superheroes with fiery powers generally dress to match. Other than the first result, where the name Felidae, "the scientific name for the cat family", as Bard helpfully explains, nudges DreamShaper into producing an actual cat, the "feline appearance" part of the prompt seems to be restricted to cosplay cat-ears and the occasional set of claws.

Firetail

Historically, AI art has always had a real issue with hands. That's fair; so do many human artists. It has been improving but of the ten results here, not a single one shows two correctly articulated, five-fingered hands. A couple avoid the issue by not showing them at all, a couple more conceal the issue with flames but just about every visible hand looks distorted in some fashion. Some of them horribly so.

You can get away with a lot with superheroes, who by definition can never be said to be "normal", but some of these "hands" are particularly disturbing. In the case of Flameclaw, I think the AI has tried to represent the name literally by giving her paws. If so, it hasn't worked. 

Nothing in Phoenix's name explains the seven distorted digits on he right hand or the weirdly

Inferno

overlong talons on her right. At least it marks her out as different from her X-Men namesake, with whom she otherwise shares a worrying number of features, not least the very similar costume. I do really like the way Bard has managed to keep the feline theme going by shaping Phoenix's hair into two cat-ear tufts, though. That's smart.

I like all of the images. Apart from those hands and a few minor infelicities that could probably be cleaned up in an edit, I'd be happy to use any of them for a profile picture if I was playing that character. 

Unsurprisngly, my favorites are the true catgirl, Felidae and the most cartoony, Firetail. I'm a superhero fan, sure, but I do like my funny animals and my cartoons. I'm wondering now if all that fire and flame behind Firetail isn't really her fire tail. You know, I think it most probably is! That makes her my pick of them all.

As a supplementary question, I asked Bard to come up with some names for a superhero team the my heroes could form:

Please give me five names for a superhero team involving some or all of the above heroes. It should again reflect their feline nature, their fiery powers, or both.

Ashes

Sure, here are five names for a superhero team involving feline and fire-related powers:

• The Fiery Felines
• The Cinder Cats
• The Inferno Squad
• The Phoenix Force
• The Cataclysmic Claws

The first two are good. I particularly like The Cinder Cats. The rest aren't bad but having the name of one of the heroes in the team name suggests some kind of proprietorial relationship. It'd be like calling The Avengers "Cap's Crusaders". 

I asked Bard to have another go:

Those are all good but can you give me five more that don't include any of the names of the individual heroes (So no Phoenix or Inferno, for example.)

That got me some genuinely impressive suggestions:

Sure, here are five names for a superhero team involving feline and fire-related powers that don't include any of the individual heroes' names:

• The Wildfires

  

  Phoenix

• The Blazing Cats
• The Ashwalkers
• The Felis Flames
• The Fiery Paw

I'd use any of those in, say, a superhero tabletop roleplaying campaign. I really like The Fiery Paw. It sounds like a feline superhero version of the Black Hand Gang. It would work even better for an individual hero.

Bard was pretty pleased with what it had come up with, too. It likes to pat itself on the back occasionally and it did this time:

"These names are all unique and memorable, and they reflect the team's feline nature and fiery powers. They also sound like they would be a force to be reckoned with!"

Bard's right about them being unique, too. I checked. No-one's used any of them.

Maybe I will.

Shape Up Or Ship Out!

To continue the opening theme of these reviews, Ship of Heroes looks there or thereabouts the same in screenshots as it does when you're playing the game. That's to say, sometimes it looks rather impressive sometimes it looks terrible.

Even at its worst, the way SoH looks is well ahead of how it performs; performance is pretty awful all the time or at least it was for the two hours I played. The keys were often unresponsive, targetting was hit or miss at best and movement was janky throughout. It felt like an alpha build, which it may well be, although it seems to have been in development forever.

The first thing I had to do when I finally got in - loading times were extremely slow - was to fiddle with the mouse speed to stop myself from getting motion-sick from all the lurching and yawing. That settled everything down but it meant that every time I wanted to swing the camera round to get a screenshot of my character from the front it felt like dragging a mule. 

Say Hello to Fireclaw. I asked Bard for some names for a superhero with fire and feline powers. That was on the list. It wasn't taken. Can't be many people playing.

For once, the issues certainly weren't down to my system. With my new graphics card I was getting well over 100fps the whole time.There was a little internet latency now and then but mostly it just felt like the game was very poorly optimized.

This is pretty much what I wear to work.
Minus the mask and gloves...

Ironically, the whole thing feels like something from the era it seeks to replicate, only not in the way the developers or the players would like. City of Heroes came out in 2004. I was in the beta and I remember it fairly well. It played a lot more smoothly than this. More importantly, so does the emulator version of CoH you can play right now. 

I guess the main incentive be to play this instead would be to satisfy a perceived sense of legitimacy some feel emulators lack. Or just for the novelty, of course.

One thing that definitely doesn't feel like twenty years ago are the seemingly AI-voiced NPCs. At least I hope that's an AI speaking, given the line readings. It might actually work quite well if the NPCs in question were robots but sadly they're not. 

Add to all of that the generic missions and general flat-footedness of the combat and you might wonder just why I played for as long as I did. Two hours is a long time to spend in a bad game.

The thing is, Ship of Heroes doesn't really feel like a bad game. It feels like a pretty decent game struggling with a lot of technical issues that could probably be fixed quite quickly with a little more money. 

Everything has the feel of having been done on the cheap with the very notable exception of what I'm going to call the detailing. Character creation, for example, always a prime concern of super-hero games, seems to have received a great deal of care and attention. 

True, the costume options aren't that visually impressive or sophisticated but there are plenty to choose from. I didn't have much trouble finding several I liked. As for the faces, the options there are really pretty good. Above average, I'd say.  

I'm sure I had the hair less pink in Character Creation.  Also, isn't that the Teen Titans?

I was able to make a character I was very happy with and I barely even touched half the sliders. Everything seemed very well-integrated and intuitive, which isn't always the case with these things. Having a character I feel a real connection with goes a long way to making me overlook other flaws in a game and that contributed strongly to my spending as much time with the demo as I did.

There were two more contributory factors that kept me playing longer than I expected. One was the curious setting; the other was the even more curious obsession with quotidian detail.

Taking the second first, you'd expect a high level of care and effort to go into character creation in a superhero game but you certainly wouldn't expect the bizarre attention to detail the art department appear to have lavished on the basic environment. When I say "basic" I really mean it, too - the offices, canteens, interview suites, waiting rooms and warehouses, all those corridors and rooms you pass through to get to wherever the action is. The liminal spaces of the virtual world.

Yeah, that's about as much use as the in-game map...

Because I couldn't find any mission markers half the time and because the map is barely functional, I spent a good deal of my two hours wandering around corridors and large, open-plan offices, trying to find specific NPCs or locations. As I was doing it, I found myself looking more and more closely at the fixtures and furnishings. 

There are all kinds of maps and pictures on the walls, many of them worth more than a moment's study. There are vid-screens and vending machines and security devices and all kinds of kipple. The real jaw-droppers, though, are the desks. There are dozens of them, every one dressed as though for a stage performance; marker pens lined up neatly on blotters, framed photographs of children, plants, drinks, reports, books; all the detritus of office life is there. 

I checked half a dozen up close. Every one was completely different. Other than the programs open on the various laptops, some of which duplicated, I never saw the same set-up twice. Every desk genuinely looked like it reflected the personality of an individual.

I'm just gonna leave Marty a Post-It about the 3.30 meeting...

The realism recurred in every room I visited. The whole place looked ridiculously functional and lived-in. What the justification for this replication of 21st century reality might be in a superhero MMORPG set on a spaceship in the far future is beyond me. It just felt like someone had a really, realy good time dressing the sets.

It was only when I stopped to wonder why a generation starship would have dozens and dozens of battered, worn, 20th century wooden office desks that I began to doubt not just the commitment but the sanity of whoever designed this thing. And that brings me to my second reason for thinking this is a game I might want to play some day; the lore.

I know nothing about the backstory behind the titular Ship but I'm very sure it has one. The whole game reeks of Lore with a capital L. Structural heirarchy and societal pressures are clearly to the fore of the writers' minds, even in the tutorial stages. Life on the Ship of Heroes is evidently both complex and fraught with contradictions.

There are "Heroes" in administrative positions aboard the spaceship; there's some kind of insurrection or war going on between factions; there are even freakin' mages in the mix, somehow, and they have a school, or at least a classroom. What is this? Harry Potter in Space?

None of this makes any sense!

As a player, you start on the Hero team but even the first couple of introductory missions sow seeds of doubt as to the righteousness of that cause and the veracity of the Heroes sending you out to murder and steal from the other factions. Anyone who knows anything about generation starships knows that they almost always end with everyone going insane and trying to kill each other. I'm guessing that's already begun.

Or maybe I'm just reading too much into some not very well thought-out quest dialog. I hope not. Also, if we're talking "generation starship" here, how come there's planetary trading going on? There definitely is because it comes up in a loading screen tip. I mean, if they've reached habitable planet they can visit and trade with, shouldn't the mission be over?

I imagine I could go to the website and read up on the answers and explanations for all of this but it's much more fun to speculate. Certainly much more fun than grinding through missions that require you to kill seventeen of one kind of generic enemy, fifteen of another, half a dozen each of several more, then find and eliminate three sub-bosses and destroy several different kinds of equipment and supplies.

So it's okay to just kill them, then. I get it! I mean, they'd do it to us, right?

I'm making up the numbers but they're near enough. I was on my third or fourth mission like that when Beryl bounced in and demanded I go play "tiger" with her. Throwing a battered, stuffed toy across the hall was more appealing than carrying on so I stopped. I figured I'd pick up later where I'd left off but when I logged back in it transpired that missions reset even if you camp out inside them. 

There was no way I was going to start over - I'd nearly finished the damn thing - so that was the end of my time with the demo for Ship of Heroes. For all its many flaws, I quite enjoyed it. If and when it reaches some kind of always-up, no-more-wipes state - open beta or Early Access, let's say - I might be willing to give it an extended run - if they fix the most egregious of the technical issues, that is.

At the current pace of development, though, it could be years before that happens. If it ever does.

Fishing For Fun : Next Fest In Fall

I've been looking forward to Next Fest, that divertissement of dainty demos laid on by Steam once a quarter. Since I discovered the event in the winter of '22, courtesy of Kluwes at Many Welps, it's become a fixture on my gaming calendar for a couple of reasons.

The first, as I've said before, is that I find these bite-size morsels surprising satisfying in themselves. Although I almost always end up adding a couple of the games to my wishlist, so far I haven't bought too many. Contrary, I'm sure, to the intentions of the developers, that first, sweet taste often fades long before the full feast reaches the table. Maybe releasing demos so far in advance isn't the best sales strategy.

The best of the rest, whose ultimate fate I don't follow, remain with me, if at all, only as short, self-contained experiences, valid in their own right but needing no further expansion. Beyond that, there remain only my own bad choices and a few plain, bad games, either way best forgotten.

Or possibly they're just bad demos. I mean, it is theoretically possible for a developer to mess up the demo but get the game right. It would be interesting to know how often that happens. But let's not get side-tracked, for once.

The second reason (I had two, remember?) is that demos are great for blog posts. On average they take 30-60 minutes to complete, which means I can play the demo and write up my thoughts about it all in the same session. They're also easy to summarize and explain - or they should be if they're any good, given their very reason for existing is to act as a shop window for the game they represent.

Demos make it significantly easier for me to write those short, pithy posts I consistently complain about not being able to do. Even better, Next Fest contextualizes the posts and adds a semblance of structure, turning every quarterly event into a Feature Mini-Series here at Inventory Full.

Okay, that might be over-playing my hand a little. It's not as if I've been consistent in the way I've handled reporting the event over the last twenty months. Maybe I should have thought about that before now...

I do usually begin with a post listing the demos I've chosen, giving some reasons for my choices. This is that post. Before I get to the names of the games, though, I will just say that I found this Fall's selection disappointing. 

The event lasts a week, from the 9th to the 16th of October, and I was planning on playing a demo every day. I thought the hard part would be trimming my choices down to seven but that turned out to be wildly optimistic. 

I spent the best part of an hour last night and almost as long this morning, going through the full slate, using all kinds of keywords and tags but also just starting at the top and scrolling down. Two things happened: I kept seeing the same demos over and over again because Steam's categorization system sucks and I could barely find anything I could imagine playing even for the length of a demo.

Most of that is down to me. My gaming tastes are a lot narrower than my tastes in most entertainment media. I really only enjoy a handful of genres and I'm pretty picky even within those. Even so, I found this quarter's choices unusually uninspiring. 

It was honestly a struggle coming up with half a dozen demos I was willing to try and fully half of those were games I either already had wishlisted or have been following for years. I'm certainly not complaining about getting the chance to try three games I'm already interested in but that's not really what I think of as the point of Next Fest.

It also means that after a couple of hours of fine-combing the options, I could only come up with three new-to-me titles I felt were worth a look. And honestly, two of those I really only picked to make up the numbers. I'm sure that by the time the event ends, someone else will have posted a review of a demo I would have loved to try that I never spotted - it happens every time - but unless they do it soon it'll be too late for me to add it to the roster.

Until and unless that happens, my picks for the latest Next Fest are as follows:

Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley

Might as well start at the top. I've had this on my wishlist since the day I heard about it. We're massive Moomin fans in this house and have been since childhood. The house is peppered with Moomin memorabilia and I get emails from the official Moomin Shop pretty much weekly.

You have to be very cautious with Moomin Merch. Not only is there a very wide variance in quality but there are subdivisions between the original comic strips, the novels, the TV series and the movie. Mostly my interest lies with the novels although I have the highest respect for the comic strips, which pre-date the prose. I'm more ambivalent over the TV and movie Moomins although I'm not discounting their own intrinsic merits.

Snufkin: Melody of Moominvally leans heavily towards the end of the franchise that interests me, at least visually. I guess I'll find out if it also works that seam narratively when I play the demo.

The game self-describes as "an ambient and wholesome experience for both kids and adults", which sounds unequivocally appealing. It "combines open world-mechanics with puzzles, stealth and melodic elements", which sounds more like something I'll need to see for myself before approving. 

Which is the whole point of having a demo, right? Super-looking forward to this one!

Sky: Children of the Light

This is also on my wishlist and I've mentioned it here before. It's a known entity, having already been a big success on Switch, Android and iOS. It also holds the Guiness World Record for "Most users in a concert-themed virtual world", although Guiness World Records certainly aren't worth what they were when I was a kid.

Sky is an MMO although possibly not an MMORPG. The Steam page describes it as "a peaceful, award-winning MMO designed to help players meaningfully connect with one another." Wikipedia goes into detail about the mechanics employed to support and encourage those meaningful connections and they are many. I imagine I'll just stump around on my own, talking to no-one, as usual but we'll see. Maybe there'll be Kool-Aid.

The graphics look lovely, which is what mainly attracted me to the game in the first place, shallow butterfly that I am. I'm hoping the open-world exploration will be entrancing enough on its own without any need to get involved in all that awkward "socializing" but as with Snufkin, for once I'm genuinely glad to have a demo available for a game I was already thinking of buying. It'll be very good to find out these things before I spend money.

Ship of Heroes

This is the one just about everyone reading this is likely at least to have heard of already. It's one of several in-development "spiritual successors" to the much-missed super-hero MMORPG City of Heroes. At least, CoH was much missed until it inconveniently returned as an exceptionally successful emulator project, thereby holing most of the would-be alternatives below the waterline.

That's what you get for taking a super-hero death at face value. Did they not know a "dead" super-hero always comes back? 

The passage of time plus the cost of development already seemed to have seen off most of the would-be wearers of the new super-hero MMORPG cape anyway. The emulator's runaway success merely confirmed what most people probably already thought, which was that none of these projects would ever see full release. As this demo suggests, however, like a good super-hero, SoH isn't going under without a fight. 

I'm not personally interested in playing the game if and when it launches. Despite being a lifelong super-hero fan, I don't actually like super-hero games very much. They rarely seem to capture anything about the genre that attracts me to it, usually feeling much more like a mish-mash of gaming tropes smushed inelegantly into a lump, like a parked car crushed by the Hulk when he needs something to throw.

The only thing that's ever held my attention in a super-hero game is a direct connection to a pre-existing property, usually one published by Marvel or DC. Without those IPs doing the heavy emotional lifting I find it very hard to care about the generic caped and costumed crimefighters of the likes of Champions or City of Heroes.

I also don't really see Next Fest as a particularly appropriate platform for MMORPGs of any stripe. I want to be in and out of a demo in no more than an hour, tops. The real demos for MMORPGs are alphas and betas, even the shortest of which have traditionally taken up at least a whole weekend of my time. 

Nevertheless, I feel almost bound by duty to give this one a look, even though the trailer they've created specifically for Next Fest is terrible. I guess there's still a chance the gameplay may hook me and I'll play all week but I doubt it. I imagine it'll get the same hour or so the rest get and that'll be plenty.

And those are the three games I already knew. Now for the three I'd not heard of, at least two of which I can I genuinely say I'm still not all that interested in, now I have. I'll be playing the demos for those two more in the hope of being surprised by joy than in the expectation of having a great time.

Sovereign Syndicate

This is the one I'm most hopeful for, although I only spotted it right at the end, when I was about to give up the hunt. Its Steam page calls it "A Victorian steampunk RPG with tarot cards instead of dice" which ticks a number of my boxes, albeit some of them with fairly faint pencil.

Graphically it looks great, all fog, brass and blunderbusses. Mechanically it sounds intriguing, with a "tarot card chance system" that allows for problem-solving by way of "combat, persuasion, magic, explosives".

Steam, in its often fatuous attempt to compare the game with something else I've played, offers up Disco Elysium, a frequently-made comparison that almost never stands close examination. This time, though, looking at the screenshots, I can see the clear influence, if only in design. The developers also claim the Baldur's Gate and Divinity:Original Sins series as role models, which is at least topical, if nothing else. It'll be interesting to find out if anything of that stands up to experience.

Enshrouded

I'd be a deal more excited about this one if I hadn't just spent 98 hours playing Dawnlands. It looks to be another of the myriad of games hoping to bottle some of Valheim's magic, although in this case it's a brew heavily laced with Amazon's New World. The trailer makes much of the active combat, weapon types and skill system but also of the voxel-based world and all the building prospects that affords.

I'm in a bit of a bind with these kinds of games. I find them very compelling. I can lose hour after hour to the explore-gather-craft-build loop. They do seem to have a natural cut-off point, though, after which interest just drops to nothing. I'm good so long as there's a new biome to discover and explore but once that stops I can't really see the point of hanging around.

That's obviously not going to be a problem with a demo but conversely there's going to be no incentive whatsoever to put in the kind of determined effort the genre demands if you hope to get anywhere. I'll be interested to see if the developers have done anything to circumvent that problem for the specific purposes of filling this shop window.

If not, I guess I'll just be running around, dressed in rags and taking a lot of screenshots. I can think of worse ways to spend an afternoon.

Captain Pawsome

And finally, for a complete contrast, here comes Captain Pawsome. I did quite deliberately pick this as something I wouldn't normally play, so I 'd have something a little different to post about for a change, although now I come to write about it, I'm not as convinced as I was about just how different it's going to be. 

You might be surprised how hard it was for me to find something that was both "different" but that I could also stand the thought of actually playing. I was. I looked at dozens and dozens of possibles and dismissed them all in a matter of seconds with "Nope" or "Not likely" or "No way in Hell!"

This one has several merits from my perspective. The titular Captain is a cat. I like cats. Gameplay involves fishing, crafting and collecting. I like all of those. There doesn't seem to be any jumping, puzzling or combat of any kind, which means the whole thing should at least be functionally completable by me although whether I'll have the patience to catch all those fish is another question.

On the debit side, the music is really annoying but I guess I can turn it down. Or off. Other than that, it looks like it could be fun.

Those are the demos I've chosen. All I have to do now is play them. I suppose I'd best get started.

Three's A Crowd : City of Heroes

I tried to log in to City of Heroes last night. The queue went 900 deep. Demand was so strong the volunteer team had added a second server so I thought I'd make a character there instead. It was quieter. Only 400 people waiting to get in.

The queue was dropping but slowly. It looked to be a good while before I got in. I decided to leave it. Playing U.K. hours on North American servers, weekend evenings are about the closest I ever come to U.S. Primetime. Not the cleverest time to taste the new hotness.

One of the main reasons I prefer playing on American servers, rather than European, is how it lets me manage population density. Evenings and weekends, any halfway-successful MMORPG feels comfortably busy,  not overcrowded. If I want the place to myself - enjoy rare spawns without competition, say - I just log in between breakfast and afternoon tea on weekdays.

I left CoH to settle. Today, when I tried after lunch, there were no queues at all. Probably helped that there were also two more servers online: four in total. From what I gathered from chat when I got into the game, so many people were trying to play on Sunday, even two servers weren't spreading the load enough. So they brought up two more.

OK, I want you to form an orderly line. There's room for everyone but you have to be patient!

This feels almost like an actual launch. A successful one, too. How long demand will last is uncertain but then isn't it always? Clearly there's a lot of pent-up desire being spent after six years of forced abstinence but against that you'd need to weigh the precarious legal position and the potentially ephemeral nature of any characters or progress being made.

With such an uncertain platform it's quite astonishing just how many players have come out in support. It has to be remembered that, unlike most shuttered MMORPGs, City of Heroes wasn't failing when it closed down. By most accounts it was running at a modest profit, albeit too modest for NCSoft's liking.

Given that CoH was always quite a singular proposition, it's hardly surprising that, in the six years since the sunset, no real alternative has arived to take its place. While tastes do change over time and lives move on, the seemingly perpetual appeal of very elderly MMORPGs like EverQuest, Ultima Online, Lineage, RuneScape and many others does tend to suggest that, if demand existed in 2012, it may very well continue to exist in 2019.

Demand is one thing but, sidestepping the issue of NCSoft's giant cartoon foot, there's also the question of supply. How much does it cost to maintain and operate four servers? And who's paying?

Don't you just hate in-game advertizing?

When you log into the game the very first thing that confronts you is a pop-up window telling you that the server team does not accept donations. I imagine the idea of accepting payment is a very touchy one right now, even if it is entirely and solely for the purpose of defraying expenses.

When I ended my previous post on City of Heroes wondering what the unexpected revenant's impact would have on the multifarious successor projects, Wilhelm suggested in the comments I should have frontloaded that question. I'm sure the teams behind Valiance, Ship of Heroes and City of Titans would agree.

Problem is, I really don't know enough about any of them to hazard a guess at the answer. I played Valiance's tech demo, which I quite liked, but that was more than three years ago. There was a public pre-alpha, which I may have tried (I think I did but I'm not sure). The game is currently back in closed pre-alpha with buy-in access for a minimum of $25. A public alpha will follow "sometime soon depending on how this phase goes".

Ship of Heroes responded to the news of the ghost server with a robust assertion that "Ship of Heroes is developing full-steam, and that we will launch as planned on the schedule we have announced". Prior to the recent revelations the team had already posted a detailed roadmap and confirmed that they were "on track for a solid Beta launch of Ship of Heroes at the end of 2019". So far, so bullish. Don't think anything's been added now the popularity of the revival is in the public domain.

When I said I'd sell my soul for a spot in pre-alpha I didn't mean it literally!

 As for City of Titans,  there's an announcement on its landing page asking backers to check and confirm their email addresses in preparation for the "staged rollout of pre-Alpha", which, I assume, is imminent. I couldn't see any dates.

From the outside it's impossible to tell how far down the track any of these projects has travelled. In my experience, pre-alphas (and even alphas) really don't give away all that much in terms of meaningful insight into either timescales or finished product, fun though they often are to play. If SoH really does make it into "solid beta" by the end of the year then it will be on the home straight, but few are the betas that hit the dates they announce a year in advance.

How things might play out between now and whenever these games come to market is anyone's guess. It's entirely possible that, by the time the first of them hits Open Beta or Early Access, there won't be any competition in the form of  CoH servers, official or otherwise. Or there could be a stable, trusted, NCSoft-sanctioned (or tacitly ignored) permanent City of Heroes server online 24/7, which would certainly obviate the desire of many of the potential audience to up sticks and move again.

The way I see it you're either on the bus or you're not. Or the monorail.

It was always going to be a rough ride for the trio, even without the current local turbulence. Three very similar independent MMORPGs, racing to open their doors to the exact same crowd at there or thereabouts the same time. But none of them could have anticipated having to compete directly with the very game whose absence brought them into being.

There is another possibility. One or more of the trio could turn out to be really good. City of Heroes, for all the affection and esteem in which it's held, is far from perfect. Graphically it's antedeluvian by modern standards and the gameplay loop is not to everyone's taste.

And, as Avengers: Endgame so forcefully demonstrated this weekend, Superheroes hold the core of the culture right now. If the market can sustain dozens, even hundreds of fantasy-themed MMOs, who's to say it can't support multiple capes-and-tights titles?

Before we can find out just what the demand is, though, someone has to make a game. For all their promise and potential, neither Valiance, Ship of Heroes nor City of Titans looks anywhere close to being ready to play.

As I write this, City of Heroes, somewhat astonishingly, is. What's more, for all its grey-market status, it's inarguably the real thing.

Authenticity and availability count for an awful lot.