RPS has a news item about how Robot Entertainment is making big changes to Orcs Must Die: Unchained.
Sigh.
In a nutshell, they’ve figured out that their silly PvP MOBA model is not what people want, so they’re rejiggering things to behave more like OMD/2. Well, duh.
These guys must have their own Scrooge McDuck / 3D Realms money vault, because I can’t imagine how their microtransactions are paying for the game’s development, which seems to have its version 1.0 clock set to geologic time.
Also, there’s a level design problem. I haven’t read the patch notes, but merely omitting PvP and making tactical/mechanical changes to traps and weapons — yeah, this isn’t going to do it. OMD2 had larger levels than OMD1, but it was still built from the ground up as a two-player co-op game. OMDU (unless they start completely over) is a multiplayer project with sprawling real estate. Just changing player/trap/enemy behaviors isn’t going to fix the strategic and tactical problems you’ll have when trying to play OMD/2 in those giant rooms. A big issue right now is having to run through miles of hallways to get to hotspots (and the portals and speed-up treadmills don’t help much). This is going to conflict with the single-player re-do, because single-player tower defense games must account for every inch of geography.
The only way to manage this without completely starting over is to (a) make the player much faster and much more powerful, and (b) make traps much cheaper, much easier to acquire, and far more effective. Even then, the levels will have to be revised.
Since the game was designed with microtransaction creep bolted in from the get-go, I don’t see how anything less than a complete overhaul will salvage the product or make it profitable.
Okay, I’ve read the patch notes.
https://forums.orcsmustdie.com/discussion/11657/patch-notes-release-1-6/p1
It’s hard to tell, but I think they’re breaking up some of the big levels and creating new smaller ones. This is good.
As for traps and player changes: I see some positive things here, but they’re still trying to balance gameplay so that (1) the traps are iffy, (2) the player’s magic/ballistic power is iffy, resulting in the player having to run around and shoot things to make up for the traps’ shortcomings — and vice versa.
This is well-intentioned and potentially fun, but you can see how they screwed this “balance” up in the OMD2 DLC’s. I’m seeing the same pattern here. I realize that OMD is not strictly a tower defense game, but players will always try to get their traps to do most of the work. They will ALWAYS try to create a self-sustaining mechanical system with as little player intervention as possible. I don’t understand why Robot can’t grasp this concept.
There’s still too much accessorizing and frippery — too many chests, tiers, daily this and weekly that — it’s too complicated and fussy. Get rid of this crap and make a proper OMD game.
You may not think their microtransactions are paying for much, but then “Clash of Clans”, which is a fucking phone game, had a SuperBowl ad…
The maps in OMDU really lack spots where you can make decent killboxes like we were used to in OMD1 and OMD2. That can actually be easily fixed but that whole PVP aspect they were ramming down our throats killed all balance. The player is soo weak he feels like he isn’t doing much at all and to top that off, the traps are either too weak or too expensive to help much either.
In OMD traps were traps. In OMD2 they started scaling the power of the traps. In OMDU the went crazy with trap scaling because they want you to level them like an MMO. So now your beginner traps barely dent anything.
They have come a long way in fixing this but its no where near the feel of the first 2 games.
So playing last night the first few maps had more of a feel for the first 2 games than any other build of OMDU has had. They are really pushing the classic gameplay also as there was no mention whatsoever of PVP in the tutorial I played.
I think if they continue in this direction it will be ok. I do like the variations of traps and the damage scaling will actually work well and give some extra variety.