Heroes of Newerth Makes Its "Retail" Launch

Heroes of Newerth, which was developed in the imprint of the Defense of the Ancients modification for Warcraft III, has finally launched after some 10 months in beta testing, where tons of players pounded S2 Games' more than 400 worldwide servers with constant play sessions.

The final version of the game has 60 hero characters (though a 61st is due out next week) and an overhauled interface that has been highly streamlined. As a matter of fact, in the final game, there's only one transitional load time--when you actually start a match. In all other cases, the game has no transitions whatsoever and its many different pull-down and stat-tracking screens are opened from a single menu and can be seamlessly accessed while either in-game or while watching a replay. Replays are hugely important to S2 Games, since Heroes of Newerth is a seriously hardcore competitive game where, let's just say, skills are very important to much of the player population.

Fortunately, the game stores data for replays of every single match ever played in the game's entire history, and you can download any replay to your own computer to watch, rewind, fast-forward, or jump through at your leisure. You can even pull replays from other players by either browsing your friends list or visiting the in-menu ladder (which globally tracks the rankings of the game's entire player community) and pulling up the stats of any given player. While viewing player stats, you can not only see that player's general standing and individual statistics (number of kills, and so on), but you can also pull up replays of every single game that player has ever played and then download them to your computer.

Currently, the game allows for friends lists and clan support. Full support for in-game leagues is "definitely planned" for the future according to S2 (the game is already being supported in competitive leagues by several hardcore professional gaming organizations in Asia). S2 has ambitious plans to eventually structure in-game leagues and hold large-scale tournaments. We're also told that much of that framework is already in place. In the meantime, the company has already assumed complete control of the game's network code and performance. It runs the game on its own proprietary network software, which now allows for solo matchmaking (and will support team matchmaking at a later date), and on its own proprietary servers throughout the world.

Heroes of Newerth is being sold at a one-time cost of $30 with no future subscription fees, though we're told that the game is intended to run "as a service" in the future and that all future updates have already been "priced in" to that $30 price tag. More information is available at the Heroes of Newerth Web site.