Dev Update: Hirelings Redesign

We’re just over a week since the launch of Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked. In that time we’ve delivered two patches to improve the game’s stability and remove some of the bugs that were reported by the community and continue to fix issues that are found. You can see all of the November patch notes here.

Following feedback from players, we’re making some changes to the design of the hirelings, so this Dev Diary will outline what we will be doing both in the short- and long-term for this feature.

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.

Phase 1 will be prioritized for release as quickly as possible. There’s some work to do on this, but it is the part that is least prone to errors of the two phases and why we have chosen to split this into two steps. It will let us gather feedback from you on how balancing feels during play, and from there we can start work on Phase 2!

As always, thank you for your continued patience, support, and passion. If you celebrate Thanksgiving, we hope you are having a great one; if not, we still hope you’re having a great time.

Thank you,

—Battlemarked Team