Arcadia: Guild of Heroes Demo

Role-playing games usually put you in the role of a young adventurer in the search for greatness, who either goes on alone to face the forces of evil, or joins up with other brave souls to put up a better fight when the time comes. However, what about the people who usually hand quests and missions to these adventurers? Well, here’s your chance to find out what goes on behind the scenes.

Arcadia: Guild of Heroes is a unique video game in which you get to play the role of the person who sends people on quests, rather than being the adventurer yourself. While many things might seem and feel very similar to an RPG, the end goal and the mechanics are actually quite different. In essence, it’s all about gold and treasure, because there’s no glory involved in making other people do your dirty work.

To begin with, it is worth noting that the campaign can be played over a limited number of years, such as twenty-five or fifty, or it can be set up to go on indefinitely. While this does not have any impact on the actual gameplay, it can come in handy to those who want to just have a quick adventure and are not comfortable with just saving their progress for some reason. Hence, everything starts with you choosing a name for your character and selecting a party of six warriors to hire.

Every character comes with a certain skill configuration and they are randomly generated at the start of each game, according to the developer. Hence, every adventure should be different, which is indeed nice. Luck, combat proficiency, dexterity and a variety of other stats come into play when it comes to the warriors. Depending on their skill, they also demand more money for their services, and you have to provide it to them or risk losing the contract.

The quests are of the usual RPG variety, which means that most of them involve investigating dungeons and killing evil creatures that roam the land. Every quest has certain indicators that provide you with insight on how likely it is for the adventurers to run into big trouble, or now much treasure are they expected to find. Special missions are given to you by various authorities from around the kingdom.

In the end, Arcadia: Guild of Heroes feels a lot like a football management simulator, but it’s good enough for that not to matter too much. Hence, if you are in for something a bit different and you do not mind watching others do the actual adventuring for you, then this may very well be the game for you.