As one of the original community-led “Plan Z” superhero MMORPGs that sprung up in the wake of City of Heroes’ original demise, Valiance Online has had the appearance of an intermittent development life. MMO players will recall that the game was at one point intended to launch in 2020, but 2020 didn’t go the way anyone planned, and instead, it ran a brief public open beta last summer, which we found entertaining but very much incomplete.
By fall, the team was apologizing for radio silence and the fact that the server was still down, but we haven’t heard much since apart from comms on Discord. According to posts and players there, development has been slow over the last season, probably exacerbated by the fact that Silverhelm says that “COVID issues really hit [the] team hard.” (The studio has previously told us it’s funded by a mix of crowdfunding through donations and the investment of a board of 14 contracted founders entitled to future game profits.) It also looks as if the game’s test server for backers has been offline for several months now.
“It’s playable (when we have the servers live) as a phase 1 alpha,” Silverhelm’s Skipjack posted a few weeks ago. “We had to remodel and rework a lot of the inner coding and with issues outside of Valiance work (COVID effects, family issues, etc.) hindering our schedules it’s been taking a lot longer than we wished to get it all figured and worked out. Plus patching batches, baking code changes and general works take unity a long time to process in general, so that hasn’t helped either on our back end.”
That said, this past week the team did post patch notes for its most recent internal update, including new biome art, Unity, sky shading, water shaders, world signs, sounds, the traffic system, and “the first iteration of dynamic aerial vehicle spline pathing.”
Rounding up the newest updates we've been working on when we've been able.
COVID issues really hit our team hard.https://t.co/ax68TFETDS
— Valiance Online (@ValianceOnline) March 3, 2021
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