Trouble is stirring in the Neverwinter Wood — when isn’t it, really — and my faithful companion Patrick and I have once again answered the call to adventure in Demeo x DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: Battlemarked, which releases today for Steam (PC + Mac, supports PCVR), PlayStation 5 (supports PS VR2) and Meta Quest.
What follows isn’t a full review, as Patrick and I have elected to play through the first campaign, Embers of Chaos, together on Quest and while Demeo solves a lot of problems for getting together a tabletop game, including offering cross-platform play so that one one person can be on Quest, another playing on their PS5, yet another on their PCVR, and the final playing on playing on a Mac, what it doesn’t solve is the problem of co-ordinating two grown men’s schedules when full time jobs are involved.
That caveat in place, what we’ve encountered so far in Battlemarked (because I’m not writing Demeo x DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: Battlemarked every time, except where I just did) is a pretty spectacular merger of Demeo and DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. Battlemarked. (Ah! They got me!)
Okay, sorry, Deadpool is still in my head. I swear my review persona will calm down soon.
We’ve loved the previous two Demeo games, and Patrick had taken to using Demeo to keep playing with his old TTRPG party thanks to the cross-play. The series has always had a bit of a “D&D with the serial numbers filed off” thing going on, which makes the merger a fairly smooth one.
This Is Demeo (Gameplay)
To be sure, the heart of this game is the Demeo system: one to four players play through the encounters moving their miniatures around a virtual tabletop filled with enemies, hazards, and treasure chests. Drop your character on top of an enemy and they use their basic attack. In VR: turn your non-dominant hand over and your card deck appears with options to use items, spells, feats, and ranged attacks. Drop a card on a target and the effects play out. Once you’ve played it once you’ll pretty much have picked it up forever the Demeo system is that intuitive on VR.
I’ve not played it on PC/Console, so I’m not sure how much fun it is when it’s all abstracted out. There is something VERY fun about picking up the miniatures and moving them about. In the two-player Quest game Patrick and I played we could also see ghostly outlines of each other holding our cards and playing them when it was the other’s turn.
My only real issue with the actual gameplay is that hand tracking isn’t perfect. The game really requires you to move about and resize the play space, which is done with your controllers or hands. Grip (or make a fist) and move your hand to drag your perspective. Resize by gripping (or making a fist) with both hands and moving them closer or further apart. It’s smooth with a controller, but the system picks up a lot of unintended signals when it’s just your hands.
Which is unfortunate as it feels GREAT to pick up your miniature with your actual fingers and drop it on the board. Practically magic. Still: the Resolution Games team has put a lot of work into making the controller based interactions feel so close to using your hands that once I gave up on hand tracking I didn’t feel like I was having a less immersive experience.
This Is DUNGEONS & DRAGONS (The World)
While much of the mechanics, aside from skill checks, are pure Demeo the world of the game is totally D&D.
Before I start going off about Neverwinter and Elves, we have to talk about the sandboxes that the team has made. It’s like they’ve taken the art from D&D 5th edition and brought it into a 3D modeling program. The second set piece in the game is this awesome treetop tavern, filled with miniatures that are staged to give the whole thing the feeling that you’ve walked into the middle of a lively night out.
While it’s always been possible to zoom in on a Demeo board, Battlemarked takes it even further allowing you to enlarge the game board until humanoid miniatures are about the size of a Barbie doll. The details hold up, down being able to tell who is drinking wine and who is drinking mead. The work is so good, and has such the fun not-quite-cartoon style of D&D miniatures, that I found myself wishing we could go full room-scale and use the tavern as a VR hangout.
Honestly we marveled at the design for a few minutes.
Along with the combat encounters there’s plenty of story going on. This is conveyed through dialogues with characters who are themselves represented by miniatures, fully voiced by actors and supported by captions that appear over the character’s head so you know who is speaking. The devs have chosen to have each player get their own instance of the dialog, so that while everyone hears and sees each encounter, you move the dialog along at your own pace. Ultimately it’s a logical choice, but it breaks a bit of the verisimilitude of the game when your friend has jumped ahead reading the captions while you’re letting the voice acting play out.
The Party (A Multiplayer Pro Tip)
The game is tuned for four players, and in single player mode you have ready access to hirelings so that you don’t have to go it alone. This is billboarded in the loadout screen before the quest begins. The hirelings are not AI, but other character miniatures you control, so that full tactical options are given to you in each encounter. The last thing one needs is a ranger shooting a firebomb right where you were about to move your paladin. Luckily, you don’t have to worry about that.
As it turns out, multiplayer also gives you access to hirelings, only at least when Patrick and I played that wasn’t entirely obvious. While it’s possible that we missed a moment in the loadout screen — we had some issues with game versions that meant the first 15 minutes of our play time was just trying to get into the same game session until we were both on the latest build — we didn’t discover the hirelings option until the second encounter.
That’s when I noticed there was a “+” button in the party lineup on my wrist and when I pushed it I was given the opportunity to bring in another character class type. Save yourself the trouble in the first encounter and do this immediately when you’re playing multiplayer. Hopefully this will be better billboarded in an update.
In a two player game each player controls one of the hirelings. We did not play three players and one hireling so I don’t know how that will work, although I suspect that the game host will be who gets to control them.
Getting BACK into an in progress campaign wasn’t entirely intuitive. We had to sleuth out that you need to go into your saved games first and then invite people into that game. Going into the host/join options does not give you a list of in progress games. Even if only one of your party members has left the building, as it were. It’s logical, if not entirely intuitive, but it didn’t take us too long to figure out. A minute at most.
The Adventure Continues
All in all: I’m pretty stoked to get back to our game. Hopefully the TTRPG gods will let Patrick and I find the time to do so. The only other barrier to our schedules is that every game seems to be demolishing the Quest 3 battery these days. So after the better part of two hours my headset was ready to call it quits. (Patrick kept his plugged in and didn’t face that problem.)
While I’m not expecting a Balder’s Gate 3 level D&D story out of the two campaigns on offer, I’m loving what I’ve already seen and this exact scenario — D&D and Demeo getting together, not this particular crisis involving Neverwinter and elves — Resolution Games and Wizards of the Coast getting together has been something I’ve wanted to see from the first time I played Demeo.
It’s here now and it’s fun as hell.
Demeo x DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: Battlemarked is available today for Steam (PC + Mac, with support for PCVR), PlayStation 5 (with support for PS VR2) and Meta Quest or $29.99 USD.
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