Once a promising blend of League of Legends and World of Warcraft, I'm gutted that this new roguelike only lasted a month

Barely a month out of Early Access, fantasy PvE roguelike game Evercore Heroes Ascension has announced it's switching off the lights for good this week. Developer Vela Games confirmed the news via Steam, bidding farewell to Lumerea once and for all. Vela says that, despite exploring the possibility of "removing servers and switching to peer-to-peer" to keep the game alive, it was ultimately untenable.

Evercore Heroes Ascension went through major reworks throughout development, at one point completely switching from its original MOBA-meets-MMO stylings to a true, blue co-op roguelike game. Though it garnered plenty of initial hype, even after its drastic overhaul, it struggled to capture players throughout early access.

Last month, its full 1.0 release arrived, though there was one big red flag of what was to come: Vela had removed matchmaking and the multiplayer altogether. What had been intended for years to be a wholly co-operative experience was reduced to a singleplayer entity, leaving you to your lonely delves. Of course, there are some absolute corkers out there that don't rely on multiplayer to succeed (Hades 2 immediately comes to mind). However, this absolutely wasn't the intended experience, and players were left miffed that they could no longer play with pals. At the time of writing, the game sits with 'Mostly Negative' reviews on Steam.

"We came into launch with strong momentum and a lot of excitement," Vela's statement reads, "but the early reviews and reception hit us harder than expected, and we were never able to recover from that. With a small team and limited resources, we pushed as long as we could, but it eventually became clear we couldn't keep the game sustainable."

The Evercore Heroes Ascension servers will close for good on Thursday October 30, 2025 at 4am PT / 7am ET / 11am GMT.

Though this is part-and-parcel of the game dev experience, Evercore Heroes Ascension's shutdown is a particularly tough pill for me to swallow. Nearly five years ago I sat down with ex-Riot dev Travis George to talk about what was then only known as Project-V. It was my first proper industry interview, and I was absolutely shitting myself. George responded to me being a nervous wreck with kindness and patience, as he set out the studio's bold new vision for a competitive PvE game that was neither a traditional MOBA nor MMO, with a firm focus on combating toxicity through its systems.

Since then, I got to get hands on with Evercore Heroes not long before the Ascension affix, and subsequent genre shift came along. I remained optimistic, as the Vela team ostensibly recognized that its initial scope was far to broad for a studio of its size and tightened its focus. But, alas, in the end, it wasn't enough.

Despite the outcome, Vela says: "We're proud of what we built, and we're grateful to everyone who played, shared feedback, stuck with us, and believed in what we were trying to do. The community may have been small, but it was passionate - and that meant a lot to us."

Though this may be the end for Evercore Heroes Ascension, there are still plenty of fabulous multiplayer games out there that you can delve into right now. If you've got that competitive itch, then check out our rundown of the best MOBAs around.

Did you ever try out Evercore Heroes Ascension? Let us know what you thought of the game over in our community Discord server.