I do love a good crossover. Ever since I was a kid and first laid eyes on a copy of The Uncanny X-Men and The New Teen Titans comic book crossover, I was hooked on the idea of mashing two worlds together. Mork from Ork showing up on Happy Days? The lunatics from It’s Always Sunny appearing on Abbott Elementary? Deadpool and Wolverine pulling in an entire abandoned cinematic universe? Sign me up for any and all of these. Why enjoy just one wonderful thing when you can dip your chocolate into my peanut butter and we can have a Reese’s Cup? So when I first heard about my favorite VR game Demeo crossing over with everyone’s favorite tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons, I was deeply excited.
For newcomers that aren’t aware of the core game, Demeo is tabletop gaming simulator, where the game takes care of all of the rules and just lets the players focus on the good stuff. Players pick from a number of different characters, and find themselves in a basement huddled around a very elaborate board, with their pawns just entering at the edge of a darkened dungeon. Rooms and corridors stretch out in every direction, all obscured by the fog of boardgame war. Playing in teams of up to four, players must work together to try to escape the dungeons’ three levels and defeat a final boss – a task much more easily said than done.
While the ability to play on a flat monitor was added a few years back, the game is much more immersive in VR. Much like a real board game, you move by actually reaching over and picking up your pawn and moving it on the game board. Attacks are managed with an actual roll of a die, with some pretty good odds that you’ll succeed (80% Success, 10% Crit, 10% Fail). Each player gets two action points each turn, which can be used for movement, attacks, spells, or to resurrect other players. Spells are handled through a card-based system, with the player earning occasional cards through play, and able to purchase additional cards between dungeon levels with any loot found along the way.
Demeo’s simplified dungeon crawling works like a charm as a tabletop game that comes to life in VR. The game’s system already approximated a stripped down version of a D&D dungeon crawl. Demeo was built to be an interactive experience best enjoyed with friends, and the hit/miss/crit battle system could be easily adapted to create games in any number of universes. Dungeons & Dragons was simply the most obvious.
So how does Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked play? Well, in the moment to moment gameplay, it plays an awful lot like Demeo did. But the crossover with D&D manages to plug up some of Demeo’s most glaring flaws – its lack of characters and story continuity. Demeo is an awesome game, and it absolutely nailed the fun of dungeon crawling with a group of friends. But due to the boardgame-like nature of the original title, there was nothing in the way of advancement for your characters. The archer at the end of a Demeo run was exactly the same as the archer at the beginning of the run. There was no story structure around where you were or what you were doing. Demeo’s world began at the entrance to a dungeon and ended at the exit.
Battlemarked changes all of that. Both of the lengthy campaign modules available at launch have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Playing through them leads your characters through an actual Dungeons & Dragons narrative, complete with NPCs, a world map, and plenty of twists and turns. There are actual stories that play out here, complete with rewarding optional sidequests. Players understand the narrative threads that lead them from one dungeon to the next, and there is an advancement system of sorts that allows players to enhance their characters (to a point) as they play.
There is plenty of content here to be explored as a group. Each player can bring in one character from the six archetypes available (paladin, sorcerer, ranger, rogue, fighter, and bard), which are nicely balanced with a wide variety of abilities. Depending on your speed and how much you goof around, I would say that a dedicated group of four players could spend around five nights getting through each campaign.
In my group’s first night, we got through around three battles, which included two story-driven scenarios and one hilariously difficult sidequest. We took turns making tactical decisions, always with a liberal amount of input and criticism from the other players. Much like the core Demeo game, the board is riddled with elemental trigger points and traps, which can lead to some hilarious domino-like chain reactions, lending a bit of unpredictability (and therefore liveliness) to the proceedings.
Things speed up quite a bit – and become considerably easier – when playing Battlemarked solo. I completed a side save of the first campaign completely on my own, managing all four of the characters myself. This is an entirely different experience, which plays akin to a tactics RPG. Dungeon crawling on your own, you can easily construct cross-character strategies and deploy them, leading to a much quicker and more streamlined experience. When you are going to have your bard throw a poison flask into a group of characters and your sorcerer set them all on fire with a bolt of flame, there is no need for a protracted discussion. You just do it, wipe the dudes out, and move on. Likewise, there is no need to scream for help when you are downed – you just plop a different character on your dead guy, rez them, and move on with the game.
Judging by the way Resolution Games slathered Demeo with love, I’m guessing we’ll be seeing a lot more content and updates for Battlemarked. There are a few issues around the game’s progression that I would love to see addressed in Battlemarked’s future iterations, primarily focused on character progression.
Characters pick up levels through regular gameplay, gaining XP as they would in any RPG. Each level gained earns that character an advancement point, which can be cashed in at any time from your character sheet for bonuses and new abilities. The player is offered some choice in which abilities to pick up, and when that choice is made, the other options close off, which lends itself to a bit of thought about what your “build” will be.
The player can create one of each character archetype to play with and bring that character into both single and multiplayer games, carrying over any levels and powers gained between modes. That means that if I play solo with my rogue, when I hop back into my game with my buddies, my rogue will carry along any advancement and gained abilities I picked up while playing on my own. Neat, right? So the next time I play with the gang, I can bring my maxed out rogue to the party and we’ll have a slightly better chance against Battlemarked’s intimidating dungeon bosses.
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”.
Boo, hirlings! Boo, I say!
I’m sure this will be smoothed out in the near future, and it’s nowhere near a deal breaker. Outside of my quibbles, the mixture of Demeo and Dungeons & Dragons is a no-brainer, a match absolutely made in gamer heaven.
That said, it’s important when approaching Battlemarked to get your head on straight about what the game is. No, this is not playing Dungeons & Dragons in Demeo’s world. This is playing Demeo in Dungeons & Dragons’ world. Think of it the way you would think of playing Lord of the Rings Risk, or Gilmore Girls Monopoly (yes, this is a real product that exists). You have the core mechanics of the base game, with some adapted rules and enhancements that bring the game into the world of the partner franchise. Jump into Battlemarked with your eyes open to that reality, bring along a few buddies, and you are going to have a blast.
* The product in this article was sent to us by the developer/company.