Monthly Archives: March 2016

Have you been following closely on Facebook and Twitter? If so you may have spotted some very interesting new “Ask Me Anything” features on Reddit. Known as AMA’s players have been asking questions directly to the bots at the studio. Taking part so far has included:

• Chris Rippy – VP Production
• Justin Korthof – Marketing Manager
• Patrick Hudson – CEO
• Nananea – Community Video Co-Ordinator

AMA Highlights

BadVogonPoet asked Justin:

You’ve worked in a community position across several different companies in the video game industry for quite awhile now.

What are some of the differences you’ve seen in Community Management and Marketing over the years?

Do you think it’s easier to with social media as popular as it is or does it make some aspects of marketing and community management harder?

Justin responds:

The largest change has been that Community Management has split up into several disciplines these days. A CM used to have to kind of be a jack of all trades and manage every conversation that was happening online. These days, it’s all split up. There are social media managers, forum moderators, community feature developers, website developers, and so on. More specializations.

As for whether or not it’s easier with social media, it depends on your goals I think. SM has obviously made it easier than ever to connect with a broad range of people at virtually the click of a button. But it’s also inserted ridiculous amounts of noise into word-of-mouth marketing. It can be REALLY hard to stand out in all that noise if you’re not clever.

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RoyalFino asked Chris:

What was the most difficult or hardest part of the production of OMDU that you never experienced with any game you worked on previous?

 Chris responds:

Oh man… OMDU is a giant game, in terms of all the different tech we use, and all the stuff we’re doing for the first time. Having to create a store, an entire networking service, a dashboard, along with a game is a lot to keep up with.

Probably the biggest challenge though is running a “live” game. In other words, while we have a version that is being played online, we’ve got at least one or two other versions of the game running at the office with new features, content, etc. that needs testing. Coordinating when those things “go live” to the public build, and keeping the public build up and running is a good healthy challenge for us. It’s fun :-).

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MrBlue42 asked Patrick:

The Steam ratings for the game are currently rather negative sadly, mostly due to the business model, not the game itself. Do you think the business model is good as it is currently or is there still some tweaking necessary?

Patrick responds:

Syndrogo asked Nananea:

How well do you think OMDU going to do up against all the other free game out today? I know how hard it is for a games to succeed on a microtransaction platform.

 Nananea responds:

I think there is a lot of stigma out there still about free-to-play games, but I feel like OMDU has plenty of gameplay mechanics to set it apart from the pack. The great thing about F2P is that anyone can download and play the game and make their own judgment on the game and that’s a very powerful thing!

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 emelld1324 asked Patrick:

What were the decisions that made you and the team to shift the OMD Franchise towards the MOBA Genre?

 Patrick responds:

We didn’t set out to shift the franchise to the MOBA genre. For us, OMDU was a very logical progression of the franchise based on fan feedback. The first game was single player and fans were clamoring for co-op so we made OMD2. That led to feedback about bigger multiplayer and PvP. For us, we always imagined PvP as two OMD games pitted against one another. Of course, we knew not all OMD fans play PvP so that led us to making the Survival PvE mode. We really hope PvE appeals to the OMD fan that loves killing orcs with friends.

Remember to be on the look out for more AMA’s – subscribe to the Orcs Must Die! Reddit!  https://www.reddit.com/r/OrcsMustDie/

The Open Beta for Orcs Must Die! Unchained has just kicked off and is now live! Whether you are a previous closed beta tester or a brand new player looking to see what all the talk is about – you can download the game now at www.orcsmustdie.com and play instantly. Not only that the servers are now up 7 days a week, so you can play to your hearts content!

Whatsmore, all player progress will now be maintained and will not be wiped at the next patch. Now is a great time to kill some Orcs. See you in-game!

New Trailer

Check out this great new trailer produced in-house at Robot Entertainment.

BOX_OF_ R0X on YouTube comments:

You guys should have a separate team for animating shorts for OMDU.

Following a successful closed beta stress test last weekend, Robot Entertainment have today announced that Orcs Must Die! Unchained is entering its next release phase – Open Beta on March 29th. This is great news and means that anyone who wants to check out OMDU will be able to do so by registering and downloading the game on the website (OrcsMustDie.com), or via Steam.

There will be one more wipe as Open Beta arrives with all players having their accounts reset. However, this wipe is planned to be the last wipe with player progress from this point being maintained through to release. Any purchases or rewards earned by coin or code redemption will also be returned and available on open beta.

As part of the work that needs to take place to deliver the open beta for March 29th – the servers will NOT be available to play this weekend. Robot will be busy preparing for open beta to land on March 29th, next Tuesday! This also means that there will be no ‘Orcs After Dark’ stream or ‘Meet your Match’ with Nananea this week.

See you all in open beta!

Good news – patch 2.8 for Orcs Must Die! Unchained is now live! Commence your downloading and play this weekend to take part in the server stress test. If you play this weekend you will also be rewarded with this sweet classic Maximilian skin from his OMD1 days. All the more reason to play this weekend!

Orcs Must Die! Unchained will soon be getting its next closed beta patch. Bringing us up to version 2.8 this patch adds a brand new map for Survival gameplay – “Shark Island“. In addition to some changes with survival difficulty there have been coin adjustments on the survival maps with lower levels getting the most additional coin.

Improvements have been made to the new player experience which should help people get faster accustomed to the dashboard and game. In addition a whole bunch of UI improvements for the dashboard in this patch including the play screen and post-game screen. There is a new sound when games have been found by the matchmaker, plus the sound also plays when the window is minimised too – score!

Cygnus, Oziel and Zoey are getting some small changes this patch. For Cygnus, his Mana Sheild has been changed to provide up to 65% damage reduction at 75% mana. Previously, it provided up to 75% damage reduction at 50% mana. He also has a health boost from 100 to 130 initial hp. Oziel will no longer get rewarded in souls for allied player deaths. Zoey’s “Death and Chaos” Weaver upgrade will now only change schools of magic when a minion is killed by her primary attack, rather than on any use. Otherwise aside from Cygnus, all hero health has been reduced by 5% to make things seem more lethal.

For matchmaking there have been some changes to how this works. Principally higher tier players should no longer be matched with bots in most cases and the matchmaker will try to matchmake for longer as the acceptable MMR range grows over time before filling games with bots.

As always this is just a summary of the changes in this forthcoming patch (releasing Thursday!). Be sure to check out the full patch notes on the link below!

Patch 2.8 – Full Notes