• Monthly Archives: November 2014

    Closed beta key giveaway in Thursdays OMDU EU stream
    Dean
    30 Nov 2014
    7604

    There is no better way to spend the holidays than playing some
    Orcs Must Die! Unchained. If you havn’t managed to get your closed beta access yet, then never fear! Over the next few weeks REF has a number of opportunities for you to get hold of a prized key.

    First up, on Thursday’s EU OMDU stream REF will be invading FaTeReLLa’s stream to dish out codes galore! Be sure to tune in at 8pm GMT / 9pm CET on Thursday 4th December and we’ll be in the chat room. We also have some codes for 20x card packs for existing players too. So if you’re looking for beta access or are an existing player you’ll surely be wanting to tune in. The stream will be taking place on the EU twitch channel, right here:

    http://www.twitch.tv/orcsmustdieeu

    We hope to see you there. We will also be detailing other ways that you can get hold of some keys if you don’t happen to score one in the chat.

    Tencent Games to publish Orcs Must Die! Unchained in China
    Dean
    29 Nov 2014
    7598

    Robot Entertainment have announced a new partnership to extend Orcs Must Die! Unchained’s reach into China. In addition to GameForge publishing the title in the EU, Tencent Games will be working to make the game big in China. Of course, with every new announcement comes a new shiny trailer. This time, in Chinese, of course.

    Tencent will be marketing the game as a Tower Defense Online Battle Arena, another categorisation for the already diversely categorised game. Steven Ma, Senior VP of Tencent Games commented in he press release:

    “We believe the innovative gameplay of Orcs Must Die! Unchained will open a new category in our portfolio of Western titles for the expanding Chinese online gaming market—and as the leader for gaming in China, our focus is on bringing players the very best games and best experiences. The combination of Robot Entertainment’s proven creative abilities and Tencent’s operating experience will be a win-win deal for our two companies and for gamers across Greater China.”

     

    Robot’s CEO, Patrick Hudson went on to say:

    “China is a massive and growing market, and we are thrilled to partner with the leading publisher in China, Tencent Games, to further extend our global reach.”

     

    This is not the first time that Robot has partnered with a China-based publisher. In the past the studio has worked with Yodo1 to bring Hero Academy to the Chinese audience and the partnership involved not only localization but also an exclusive new Hero Academy team and map for the Chinese audience.

    It looks like Robot are planning to repeat Hero Academy’s successful model with OMDU. A new hero has been announced, “Mulan” along with new traps. There is a second trailer to give an idea on what these Chinese elements may look like:

    It looks like the Chinese version of the game will be a seperate entity, but there are no specfic details on how big the changes will be compared the EU and NA versions of the game, though Robot has indicated on the forums that the changes wont be too much.

    In any event, its great to see the reach of the game has been extended to another territory. May the Orc invasion continue!

    Spotlight On: Yolteotl
    Dean
    21 Nov 2014
    7587

    We’re heading over across the pond this week for Fan Friday to the OMDU EU community with the spotlight landing on regular forum poster, Yolteotl from France. Lets find out a bit more about him!

    The Basics

    • Age: 24 years old
    • Home Town: Bordeaux, in France

    Questions

    • Outside of gaming, what do you do by day?

    I have been graduated this year, so now I have a master degree in Computer Science and I just started a job in a big French company working in arming and aeronautic industries. I did two internships in this company, so it was an important goal for me to stay inside. It’s what I wanted to do for almost 10 years so I’m very proud to achieve all those steps !

    • Aside from gaming what other hobbies do you enjoy?

    More gaming ? Jokes aside, I jog and bike at least one time by week, sport is important to be fine ! And some could shout out, but I’m a brony  too. Bronies are guys (and girls) liking the new tv show of My little pony universe. If you don’t know it, give it a try !

     

    I can’t stop this answer without talking about gaming. I was a big player of Starcraft 2 (High master with more than 7000 games), before that it was WoW and Counter Strike 1.6. Already 15 years of Esport gaming.

    • What are your top 3 most favourite bands / musicians?

    I almost like all kind of musics, depends of my mood, from pop to electro, metal to classic… My most favourite bands are Nightwish, swedish band playing symphonic metal, Daft Punk, the worldwide known electro artists. For the last, I will hesite between AOA (Ace of Angel), a kpop girls band and Les cowboys fringants, a french-canadian band playing pop-country musics.As I said, a bit of everything.

    • What has been your biggest life adventure so far?

    Not a lot of experiences on this side. I’m not really a traveller or some kind of super guy filming himself with a GoPro doing some crazy stuff.
    I studied 200km far from my parent’s town, and now I’m even more farest, meeting new people, making new friends… Life making his way !

    • 2014 is rapidly drawing to a close, with these last few months left do you have any big plans for the rest of 2014?

    The most important will be to pass my trial period (2 months) in my new job.

    • How did you discover Orcs Must Die! ?

    It’s far away now. I discovered it with the first one. I supposed I read one or two good reviews, and thought this game could be fun. And it was ! The second with coop was even better since I played it with friends.
    When I saw the announcement of Orcs must die ! Unchained, I was both really excited and skeptical. I don’t really like Free to play and MOBA games. So he took me some times to  accept  this and to buy a founder pack. And it was a good decision since I felt in love with this game.

    • How often do you play OMDU online?

    I used to play a lot more when we were able to play as 5 premade teams. We tried to push the meta, discovered subtleties of gameplay. Trying to find how a  pro team could play it, it was fun, it was great because we were able to find some crazy stuff. I can understand that lot of games were just noob-stomping , but we found some other teams too and some of those games were legendary for us.
    Now, I’m playing one or two games per day, waiting the new patch, and an open beta which is so long to come.

    • Which OMDU hero is your favourite and why?

    MIDNIGHTTTTTT
    Some people hate me because of this character. At the beginning, I tried lot of heroes, Stinkeye, Ivy… But when I started playing with Midnight… It wasn’t just another hero, I felt the fun, I felt that she was for me and I could do my best with her.

    Even if I liked her, when I started to play her, I died a lot. It’s the character with the less hp of the game, and it’s one of the hardest to master. It took my one or two months to get some results. Now my goal is to find new ways to play her. I can’t say everything about it (or Rimmon would kill me), but you have to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Defending one wave, attacking the next, and chasing some low-life people after that. You don’t have to be every waves in defense, if the opponents think you can be here, they won’t be as impetuous as they could be.

     

    • OMDU has been in closed beta for a while now, do you think the game is ready to move to open beta or are there more things you would like to see first?

    The game is in a good shape, but lot of features are missing. If they want to do an open beta, they will need to have all basic Esport features, spectator mod, replay, ingame chatroom…
    They really need to have the perfect game, at the good time. Robot will have one chance, one only chance to succeed and be the next thing. From what they showed to us, I’m confident, but it won’t be an easy task.

     

    • What do you think about the Halloween themed map for OMDU – would you like to see more themed maps throughout the year?

    This theme was great, but if it’s possible, I would prefer to have more maps rather than more themes. 

     

    Shout out

    • Is there anything you would like to say to all the OMD fans out there right now?

    Talk about the game to all your friends. The next two months won’t be easy since we won’t have any patches, and we need to keep an healthy and growing community. This success depends of Robots and us. For example, I wrote a preview for a french website some months ago, and some readers started to play. If it can help the game and the community, do it !

    Best of luck with your new job Yolteotl! If anyone has any ideas for the community over the next few months, let us know in the comments!

    Hero Academy and OMDU patches are incoming
    Dean
    16 Nov 2014
    7567

    The bots at Robot central are on the cusp of releasing two new patches shortly. The patch 1.7 for the closed beta of Orcs Must Die! Unchained, but also the iOS8 patch for Robot’s popular mobile strategy game, Hero Academy.

    Hero Academy

    The upcoming patch will enable better support for the title on iOS8. The patch is due to land on the app store this upcoming week and features the following changes:

    1. Fixed issue with screen hanging when starting a game
    2. Fixed game chat bubble glitches
    3. Fixed issue where modal message overlay dimming wasn’t covering entire screen on wide screen phones
    4. Various iOS 8 crash fixes

    Next week is a great time to fire up Hero Academy and play some games – why not take on some players from the Hero Academy League?

    Orcs Must Die! Unchained

    The 1.7 patch for OMDU is due to land November 18, 2014 and as always is jam-packed with features including the much wanted Guardian changes and even a brand new Hero! Lets dive into some of the highlights of this patch.

    New Hero – Apprentice

    There’s a new apprentice in town. The War Mage is all grown up, following his training under the stewardship of the Master. Now he is ready to take on an Apprentice of his own.

    A spunky adolescent with a penchant for “accidentally blowing up the turkey” and “not meaning to freeze Temper’s tail to the forge”, the Apprentice is War Mage’s first (and probably the last) protégé. She can’t really control her powers, including which element they happen to be, and that is both awesome and terrifying. Her familiar, Feebee, is a shape-changing creature of chaos itself; the firebat will change element to match her mistress.

    You may be wondering what element the Apprentice has. It turns out that as she is still in training, she is currently un-decided on her elemental powers and she actually receives her assigned element at the beginning of each match. This element can be either Fire, Frost, Lightning, or Arcane. This certainly makes her quite a different and unique hero.

    She has some pretty interesting abilities to. Her passive is “Feebee the Firebat” which stays at her side during battle and will help attacking minions and heroes by randomly shooting the apprentices current magic element.

    Should you find the current element assigned isn’t too your liking, you’ll be wanting to use her Q ability “Spell Swap” which causes an area of effect blast of the new randomly assigned element. After which this new element takes effect. She is going to be a very interesting hero on the battle field. Check out the patch notes to learn more about her.

    In-Game Leaderboard

    New in this patch is an in-game leaderboard which keeps track of what teammates are getting up to. The leaderboard will show which players are currently doing best at attacking and defending by assigning point scores. (Think Age of Empires “score” for those AOE fans). It should be pretty cool to have a great wave and see your name up in lights. The leaderboard can be activated by pressing “B”.

    New Skins

    No patch is complete without some new funky hero skins! Heading to the outfitters this week are Ball and Chain, Prospector, Apprentice, Ancestor and Temper. Check out the new skin choices!

    Hero / Trap / Gear Updates

    There are a bunch of hero, trap and gear updates that avid players will be sure to want to read the full patch notes to dig into them. But some things we found particually interesting include:

    • Prospector- Building a new Underground Road tunnel will destroy the oldest tunnel instead of both.
    • Stinkeye – Placing Totems in walls is no longer a thing and Totems can no longer be placed on ledges or small areas.
    • Anti-Magic Field – resized to 2×1 instead of 1×1.

    Gaurdians have quite alot of changes so here are the patch notes verbatim:

      • Increased sight radius of Guardians.
      • Guardians wait longer between attacks on faster movers.
      • Enemies in the area get an all armor type debuff of -70.
      • Guardians don’t attack players if there are minions present.
      • Guardians won’t walk to players, will only shoot ranged attacks.

    As has the Ring of Last Stand:

      • Cooldown increased to 60s.
      • Mana cost reduced to 25.
      • Keeps you In Combat for the duration of the invulnerability buff.
      • Duration reduced to 2.5s.

    This pretty much sums up what we think are the biggest changes. If you are thirsty for more the full patch notes beckon. We’ll see you online come Tuesday 18th November when the 1.7 patch is due to be released. Happy Orc slayin’!

    Spotlight On: Amarith
    Dean
    14 Nov 2014
    7561

    We’ve reach the end of the week which can only mean one thing – its time for another Fan Friday interview! This week we’re speaking to Amarith from the OMDU NA community. Amarith has recently attended the Blizzcon event and can often be found posting on the forums. Lets find out a bit more about him and his time at Blizzcon!

    The Basics

    • Name: Nick
    • Age: 26
    • Home Town: Las Vegas

    Questions

    • What do you do by day?
    I work at the largest target in the state of Nevada, working in the Starbucks and sometimes the food court. I am actually trained to work in almost any area of the store.
    • We hear you went to Blizzcon – how was that?
    It was amazing. This is my 5th year going, and it was just non stop fun. Overwatch (the game they just announced) handles very nicely and is super fun. I also went to the youtube meet they had and got to meet Markiplier and Ross (from Game Grumps).
    One of the most fun things about Blizzcon is the E-sports aspect of it. All the competitive gaming of Starcraft, Wow Arena, and now Hearthstone. I really want to see OMDU develop into E-sports and have just as much excitement about it.
    • Whats the most exciting thing that has happened to you this year?
    Obviously it was what I mentioned in the previous question, going to Blizzcon. Just being able to meet some new people, and even pass out some of the codes I had for OMDU to people that were interested, and just generally talk shop on games I enjoy. So much hype for Overwatch as well as OMDU now.
    • How would you describe your taste in music?
    I like to listen to a good variety of music, usually ranging from rock to techno to dubstep. Rap/hip-hop and country are the only nos on my listen list.
    • Favourite film of 2014?
    I do not really watch many movies or TV, but the best movie this year has to be Guardians of the Galaxy. I didn’t know anything about it going in, thinking it was going to be a super hero movie. When I got a space action movie, I was floored.
    • Aside from OMDU – what other games are you playing at the moment?
    Aside from OMDU, I play Hearthstone. I do go through steam games every once in a while, including 5 Nights at Freddy’s (cleared 20/20/20/20) and Shovel Knight. I can’t wait until Overwatch is released so I can add that to my list.
    • How did you discover OMD?
    I actually found OMD first when watching Let’s Play’s by Team Four Star, who were playing OMD2. At the time I didn’t get into it, but about a year or so later (about 4 or 5 months back now?) Noxious took a break from Hearthstone for a few weeks and played this. I decided to give it a try and instantly fell in love with it.
    • What do you think some of the big changes will be in the OMDU phase 2 beta?
    I would really like to see an upgrade/modding system for the guardians, or maybe an endless wave mode that lets you play like OMD1 or 2.
    • What would you like to see more of in OMDU – heroes, maps, minions or traps?
    In order, I would like to see Maps > Heroes > Minions > Traps. More maps means better replay-ability, heroes are good for different team comps. Minions add different ways to handle defense and what traps you want to keep. Traps I think are the least important. I am actually in the process of writing a post about traps (it will probably be posted before this interview goes live).
    REF Edit – the post can be found here.
    • Thinking of OMDU heroes – which are your favourite and least favourite? 
    Favourite has to be Kobold King by far. A lot of people dislike him because they think he is an assassin, or try to play him as such. He is a very high skill hero that requires a lot of finesse and timing.
    Least favourite (to play against at least) is Warmage. He can do amazing things when placed in the right hands and can be one of the most deadly forces on a team if played right.

    Shout out

    • Is there anything you would like to say to all the OMD fans out there right now?
    Just keep finding obscure bugs and reporting them. Do what is fun for you in the game, be it playing casually with friends or going crazy with theory crafting what is the best strategies to use. Just have fun, it is a game after all.
    OMDU EU beta key winners announced! – Keys to follow
    Dean
    12 Nov 2014
    7556

    The winners of our 100x closed beta key competition have now been announced. Are you a lucky winner? Check out the winners list using the link below:

    Orcs Must Die! Unchained  (EU) 100x closed beta key winners list.

    If you are a lucky winner – congratulations! You will be receiving your closed beta key via the email address you used to enter the competition within 48 hours from now. We will try to get these keys out as soon as possible. If you do not receive your key by Friday please contact us.

    Didn’t manage to score a key this time? Keep your eyes peeled on REF for more competitions coming soon!

    OMDU Patch 1.7 is coming. Plus news about phase 2 of the closed beta
    Dean
    08 Nov 2014
    7545

    Did you catch the Insider Access stream earlier this week? If you have not had a chance yet you will surely want to watch the VOD. Community Manager SixOkay sat down with our friendly Mother, OMDU’s Design Director to discuss the state of the game. The stream started with Q&A from things posted in the forums and on the stream chat.

    As the stream progessed we began to talk about patch 1.7 and “phase 2” of the beta. The 1.7 patch is expected to land pretty soon and it will contain a number of things in similar vein to the kind of things we saw in patch 1.6, though there is no word on any new heroes, maps or specific detail at this time. Though expect Guardians to change a bit. More details will be revealed later next week.

    In even bigger news we learned about the projection for OMDU’s development over the next few months. Following patch 1.7 Robot is going to take a break from regular patches over the holiday season. Instead they are going to focus on delivering a much bigger round of content in changes in what is being called “Phase 2” of the closed beta.

    There’s been a lot of great discussion going on lately in the meeting rooms and hallways here at Robot. We’ve been digging in deep to review the mountains of detailed feedback we’ve received from Closed Beta players. You guys are really good at this. As we’ve continued to play the game and to watch you play, we’ve come up with a long list of ideas that we think greatly push the game forward. We’re eager to start adding these ideas to the many plans we’ve already outlined to you on the forums, and some of them are pretty big. Like, Mountain Troll big.

    Robot are going to be spending time looking closer at the overall game and working on some much bigger core changes to the game. Taking into account both internal feedback and feedback received from the community. Phase 2 of the closed beta is expected to land some time in February 2015.

    Whilst we await patch 1.7 to be released and whilst we wait for details on Phase 2 of the closed beta the community will no doubt have a ton of questions. Robot are very keen to keep the community engaged as we enter this longer stretch of content releases. As such the studio has announced five important dates for our diaries.

    • December 2, 2014
    • December 16, 2014
    • January 6, 2015
    • January 13, 2015
    • January 20, 2015

    These dates correspond to the Insider Access streams which take place each Tuesday. Be sure to make a note of these dates as each will contain an exciting announcement about OMDU. In the meanwhile check out this weeks Insider Access VOD below and the forum post on the community forums to read more about what is happening with OMDU over the next few months.


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