Monthly Archives: November 2015

The patch notes for patch 2.6 for Orcs Must Die! Unchained are now available online, and oh yes, its a big patch!  Robot helpfully provides a super quick bullet point summary:

Patch 2.6

• New Traits!
• Crafting!
• Potions and Scrolls!
• New Survival Game Mode and accompanying map = SURROUNDED!
• New Guardians, to be placed in Survival Games!
• Updated New Player Experience!
• Unchained Fortress Returns with a Neutral Objective!

There are also a number of changes to heroes in terms of balance and some ability adjustments. Be sure to take a look at your favourite heroes before the patch lands so that you are in the know of changes that could effect how you play.

The patch is landing this Thursday, 3rd December. Please be aware that there will be an account wipe as before.

More information on Insider Access

For more information and discussion on the patch notes prior to the release next Thursday be sure to tune in on Tuesday 3pm Central to the Insider Access Twitch Stream where the bots will be on hand to answer your burning questions!

Did you catch this weeks episode of Insider Access on the OMDU Twitch channel? If you did you missed out on another exciting episode, and this one had alot of big reveals! Designer Jerome Jones was on hand with Community Manager, Justin Korthof to talk about the brand new PvE exclusive map coming to OMDU in the next patch.

[Show as slideshow]

The new map is called “Surrounded” and is built specifically for PvE. This is not a PvP come PvE map, but a map built from the ground up for Survival Mode. A preview video of the new map can be found below and you’ll soon see why it gets its name “Surrounded”. Indeed players will be thrown into the action in a castle that is being attacked from all directions. Check out the video below!

There are tons of cool features in this new map. Bringing an OMD2 feel with environmental traps and a larger map with many different entry points for minions to spawn. Numerous rooms are found in the castle such as say an armoury and players can place a specific room related guardians to help defend. Players will have many choices on where to build their killboxes on the larger map providing a great depth and breadth of strategy and options. Check out the interview with Jerome Jones to get all the details on this new map and its features!

Jerome Jones on Insider Access

Surrounded and more coming in patch 2.6 landing Thursday 3rd December!

Thats right, also revealed on Insider Access is that the next patch will be available on Thursday December 3rd when the servers come back online after usual maintenance. This next patch is going to be a big one, one of the biggest yet for OMDU – so brace yourself for some pretty heft patch notes that should be incoming shortly!

Have you been keeping an eye on the OMDU Insider Access streams? If not watching live you can catch up by VOD on the official OMDU YouTube channel. This weeks Insider Access was very interesting. Community Manager, Justin Korthof (SixOkay) sat down with Mike Creasy (DangerMike) to talk about the new tutorial system. Poor Mike has yet again had to re-work the tutorial system with all the changes that have been made over the patches. He has been working on the tutorial system since August 2014 and has had to deal with many major gameplay changes since then.

The good news is that a new revised tutorial is coming together and its looking really awesome. On Insider Access we saw a 9 minute video taking us through the new tutorial for Survival mode with the video being produced by Nananea. The new tutorial is looking and sounding great with comprehensive voice over talk from Maximilian the War Mage and excellent visual cues. The new tutorial also teaches players good practice at setting up kill boxes so that newbies have a better steer on what to do on their early games and to help integrate into the community faster. If you haven’t already seen the Insider Access episode be sure to check out the video extract below!

Spoilers!

One of the added bonuses of seeing the new tutorial is we get to see some upcoming new OMDU features. If you are eagle eyed you can spot a number of new things. Here are some examples:

New Guardian Options

Looks like options to place different types of guardians is coming

Yarr! – New Boss

Any guesses on Captain Orc’s name?

There are some more hidden reveals in the video too if you take a look closely at minion armour, traps and some more bosses / minions. Check out the new Survival Tutorial video below which is coming in patch 2.6.

Some news for both the North American and EU communities currently enrolled in the Orcs Must Die! Unchained closed beta, there are some changes coming surrounding the times that the severs will be available for playing. Currently the OMDU servers have been available pretty much 24×7 except for patch days and scheduled maintenance. From November 10th (NA) / November 11th (EU) this will be changing and the servers will only be available during certain time windows.

For North America this means:

OMDU Closed Beta servers will only be available during specific times. This testing window will be between the hours of 6:00pm – 10pm Central (that’s 7pm – 11pm Eastern and 4pm – 8pm Pacific) on Thursday through Sunday. This means that when the servers go down on November 10, 2015, they will not return until November 12 at 6pm Central.

And in the EU:

The servers will be available 7pm – Midnight CET from Thursday through Sunday. So after the game goes down, the first time you will be able to play is on Thursday November 12th which we will open with the usual Thursday stream from FaTeReLLa

Why the change?

One of the challenges of having a closed beta test is that the pool of players is very small. This can make it tricky to matchmake for games (especially siege) as it can be difficult to find a group of players online at the same time in amongst a small player-base. By keeping the play-testing set to certain windows players will know when to log-in and should find it easier to matchmake.

There are other reasons for this change too as described on the OMDU website. Robot advise that they are looking to give testers more of a steer on what components the studio is most looking for feedback on at a given time and gather more specific feedback around that. According to the website:

• We want to test specific aspects of OMDU as we polish them. We will provide information in the dashboard about what you should be testing each weekend as we close in on those time periods.
• We want to gather your focused feedback. To help make that possible, we want to make getting matches more reliable. An added benefit to this change is that you will be able to matchmake with like-minded Orc slayers more easily.

So remember from next week OMDU will be transitioning into the above closed beta testing windows. See you in-game!