Overview
Disney Heroes: Battle Mode is celebrating its 6th anniversary! It’s only been a few months since the last State of the Game Post, but so much has changed since then, and we have such exciting news to share for the rest of 2024!
What we’ve released so far this year
Changes to the Battle Pass
- As discussed in the November 2023 State of the Game Post, we wanted to improve rewards and make the Battle Pass a more integral part of the player experience.
- We have added new items, cosmetics, resources, and moved the release of a new hero to the Battle Pass, along with the introduction of Early Access!
- We’re really happy to see this feature’s engagement improve since the changes were introduced in February.
- We’re continuously reviewing the Battle Pass and look forward to improving it further, such as adding a few more tiers and fixing some bugs.
Changes to the Friendship Campaign
- Due to hero balancing issues, we saw that Friendship Campaigns became a big issue and difficult to progress through, so we made changes to the difficulty to help progression along.
- We know that these narratives are fun and engaging for everyone, so we wanted to make sure they weren’t blocked too heavily!
- Part of the changes included decreasing the max rarity of heroes, as well as allowing the full lineup of 5 heroes to be usable in every stage of the campaign.
Costumes and Mastery Skins
- Costumes finally returned! We hope you were all as excited as we were to first reveal this news, starting with Elsa back in December.
- Since then, we’ve released 4 new costumes featuring Mayor Bellwether, Kronk, Kim Possible, and Judy Hopps.
- We still have a few planned for the rest of the year, but due to some news we’re sharing below, we will slow down the cadence of these further into 2025 as they do take up a lot of our time.
- A whole new type of cosmetic, Mastery Skins also released earlier this year!
- We wanted to introduce more cosmetics in a faster cadence while keeping the Prize Wall relevant, so Mastery Skins took over for a little while.
- However, due to lukewarm reception of these skins, we are reviewing the Prize Wall once again and may place these cosmetics into a limited-time crate.
- If you have further feedback or ideas about these skins, please let us know! We hope that we can still provide a wide array of cosmetics for you to show off your DH style!
Official Discord Launch
- As you all know, we launched our Official Disney Heroes: Battle Mode Discord server earlier this year!
- It has been a bumpy ride as we navigate this new terrain, so thank you all so much for your patience.
- The Discord grew so rapidly, and we are so excited to share this space with you. It has been a great source of feedback for us from you, so please keep sharing your thoughts!
- We’re excited to keep growing this community and explore more unique ways to keep communication flowing between the dev team and players.
- As time goes on, we will look to continue efforts for Discord and further improve the experience. If you have any suggestions to improve the discord, please feel free to leave us a thread in the #feedback-suggestions channel!
- There may come a time this year where we move communications off the Discourse forum onto other avenues such as Discord and our website, so please stay tuned…
Hero Balancing
- As an effort to improve the gameplay experience, we went back and took on major rebalancing efforts at the start of the year!
- We noticed that power creep was getting out of hand, causing many issues throughout various features in the game, so we took action through batches of hero rebalancing, as voted for in the Hero Balance Roll Out Planning Poll this past December.
- Even though the hero pool is a healthier state now, we still have a lot to do!
- The worst offenders have been rebalanced, but there are still a lot more heroes we plan on balancing.
- As mentioned, this is a highly iterative process, and once we get all heroes to a healthy standard, we will take the time to go through heroes that do need refreshes to stay relevant in today’s gameplay.
Updates to Other Projects
Projects Still on Deck (Aiming for 2024 release)
- Yellow QoL
- New Non-War Guild Perks
- Server Merge
- Improving Game Performance Issues
- Market Refresh
- Auto-Campaign
On Pause (Until 2025 or later)
- Community Collaborative Hero Teasers
- Favorites System
- Campaign Stories
- Content Creator Program
- New Server 26
- Guild UI/UX Improvements
These projects are on pause as we focus on the initial items. The second list is delayed either due to other pressing issues that we wanted to address first or due to lengthy approval times that require us to re-evaluate feasibility of pursuing, such as the Content Creator Program. We hope to have more updates on these items in the near future through Patch Notes as they come out!
Coming Soon 2024
Web Store
- We are thrilled to announce the official Disney Heroes: Battle Mode Web Store! Dive in and discover incredible offers with great value including Stamina and Diamond deals for your journey.
- Despite limited offerings (for now!), they will feature incredible value. We’re excited to share a first-time purchase promo code to use at checkout, so keep your eyes peeled closer to the launch date!
- We’ll share an official launch date and link soon!
Referral Program
- As an effort to support Disney Sorcerer’s Arena (DSA) players, we’re creating a referral program not only open to DSA users, but also existing DH players!
- We hope to enhance the DH experience through this campaign to help foster the community and friendly competition.
- Both new and existing users will have access to exciting and valuable rewards, including special tiers for DSA players!
- We’re almost ready to share, so keep an eye out for it soon!
Hero Release Changes
- Starting next month in June, we will be returning to releasing a minimum of one hero per month!
- Part of efforts to reinvigorate gameplay, we will be ramping up hero releases for the latter half of the year, aiming to start releasing:
- Around 2-3 heroes per month by the end of the year
- We will continue to release at least one hero through the Battle Pass, both free and premium tracks, but with an increased hero release cadence, the Prize Wall will return as limited-time events to unlock new heroes!
- The third hero will help improve Contest Rank rewards, as we work on improvements to the hero rotation cycle
- We’re able to start increasing hero releases due to positive improvements with game performance related to the new Badge Recipe System that was released with Emerald+6!
- Due to the restructuring of the hero release schedule, the next Battle Pass will be delayed by about 2 weeks into June.
The Hero Release Changes are the biggest projects the team will be tackling for the rest of the year, and we hope you’re all so excited for what’s to come! Let us know your thoughts, feedback, and predictions! Thank you all again for your support and for celebrating DHBM’s 6th anniversary with us!
not to mention for the team to design & develop them to a high standard with the current capacity.
I’m just keeping PB on their toes!! Be a waste to really end the game but they’re hurting it!! We lost so many players. My guild is suffering!! I used to have a top 16 guild til they did these stamina and deal outrageous changes that benefits no players. Especially in guilds after the top 20. We can’t survive this way.