My review for Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked went live yesterday, and while I absolutely love the game, I did reserve some minor critiques for it's "Hirelings" system. Demeo is typically a four-player game, but can still be greatly enjoyable played alone. Hirelings are the mechanic Battlemarked currently uses to fills out your adventure party when you play solo. To build out a party of four, you choose one of your own custom characters, and then fill out the other three with "Hirelings" - which are standardized characters that don't level up.
From my review:
My primary issue is that, while playing solo, you can only bring one of your created characters into the game. Meaning that if I choose to bring my pet rogue into a solo campaign, the other three characters I play with are “hirelings”, meaning that they don’t pick up XP or advance. My pool of created characters sits stagnant on a server somewhere while I adventure around with look-alike chumps, who never advance and get zero benefit from my adventures. I absolutely understand the reasons for this decision - every player would instantly be dropping into multiplayer with a cadre of maxed out adventurers. But the other side of the coin is that I don’t want to solo the campaigns six times to build out my stable. There has to be a middle ground somewhere between “make everyone a God” and “stupid hirelings”.
Well, one day later, it seems as though this isn't going to be an issue much longer. Demeo dev Resolution Games today announced a two-step "Hirelings Redesign", which will now allow players to fill out their single player party with their own created characters.
From Resolutions Games' Dev Update:
Phase 1 - Singleplayer
The first phase of this change will affect the singleplayer portion of the game, as this is where the basis of a lot of the feedback has come from. What we plan to do is to give players the option of filling the party with customized heroes that then gather XP and can be leveled up.
Phase 2 - Multiplayer
Multiplayer is much more complex for this; players join, leave, rejoin, and doing that while also bringing your own heroes into the session becomes more complicated. It becomes a much larger task, both from a technical perspective, for user interface design, and overall experience for you.
This phase will be a later update so that we can properly estimate and account for potential issues with this system.
I usually avoid press and user reviews while writing a review of a game so that I don't get unduly influenced by the experiences of others; I was surprised to see that my dislike of Hirelings mechanic was so universally shared. That said, Resolution has long been a very responsive game developer, prioritizing feedback from players to deliver quick solutions to issues, so the fact that they are moving on this almost immediately doesn't surprise me a bit.
From the blog post, it seems as though Phase 1 will be ready fairly quickly, while Phase 2 will need to cook for a while due to the greater complexity of the issue. No worries at all on that from my end, I'm very happy to patiently await these updates. It's just nice to know that Resolution Games is continuing it's tradition of responsiveness and care. Three cheers for the end - or at least the "redesign" - of Hirelings!
