We’re back stateside with Fan Friday this week and the spotlight is landing on SirBeast of the US Orcs Must Die! Unchained community. Lets find out a bit more about him!

The Basics

• Name: SirBeast / Frank
• Age: 42
• Home Town: Akron, OH

Questions

• What do you do by day?

I’m the IT lead for the Public Works department in a major metropolitan city

• What exciting things have happened this year?

Of course, OMDU released this year, which I had been long awaiting, along with the release of some other great games: Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, Middle-Earth: Shadows of Mordor, and Gauntlet. I also spent a week vacationing with family in the Outer Banks this summer. Additionally I recently got to see the stage musical rendition of “Evil Dead”.

• Do you get excited about Christmas?

I *LOVE* Christmas and get very excited about it every year. I got my outside lights up (though I did not turn them on) the week before Thanksgiving, as well as one of our two trees up and decorated. We got a new tree last year that is not only pre-lit but also rotates. I have 2 kids, a boy aged 5 and a girl aged 9, and seeing them get excited for the holiday – ESPECIALLY with the escapades of “Ducky Duckaroo”, their “Elf on the Shelf” just makes it all the more enjoyable!

• How would you describe your taste in music?

My taste in music is best described as eclectic. I’ll listen to anything but Country and Polka. Primarily I prefer heavy metal and classic rock, along with artists such as Daft Punk, Deadmau5, and Weird Al Yankovic

• What would your Top 3 films of all time be?

 (1) Animal House (2) Star Wars Episode IV: “A New Hope” (3) The Nightmare Before Christmas

• How did you discover Orcs Must Die! ?

I was a big fan of OMD1 and OMD2. Until the devs stopped supporting it and the score hackers started running rampant on it, a friend and myself were highly ranked on the two-player world rankings on OMD2.

 

• Who is your favourite OMDU hero and why?

I think my favourite at the moment would be Blackpaw. He moves fast, which can allow him to get in, do some good damage really quick, then get out just as fast, leaving enemy heroes dazed and confused as to where they should be watching the next threat to come from. He’s even more devastating if your teammates have gnolls in their decks, which is often the case.

• Which OMDU hero causes you the most trouble on the battlefield?

Midnight causes the biggest trouble. Not only can she mass-disable traps quite easily, but a skilled player who can use her backstab efficiently can do some real heavy damage to enemy heroes when they least expect it.

• What is the biggest balance problem with OMDU right now?

I think the biggest balance problem right now is simply the lack of players. I think the heroes are pretty fairly balanced, if you have players who know how to play them efficiently. But getting into a full 5v5 game outside of Twitch streaming hours is nearly impossible.

• What is the topmost thing you would like to see added to OMDU?

Text and voice chat both in-team and cross-team. The devs think that “toxic” players in the community would cause this to be more trouble than it’s worth. It’s been my experience that such players in the OMDU community are few and far between. Plus I think they could easily take an example from the voice chat features of such games as TeamFortress 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004. Those games not only let you choose if you wanted to chat only to your team or to all players in the game (including opponents), but if there was a “toxic” player you had the ability to mute them – both text and voice.

 

I for one would very much like the opportunity to say to a teammate-turned-opponent (from one game to the next) “Hey, great job last game! Good luck, and try to not kill me too much, or just stand still and let me kill you!”. I think everyone could appreciate the humor and comradery that everyone could benefit from with such a feature being available.

Shout out

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

As a final shout-out, I must say thanks to devs for working so hard to make this a great game that everyone enjoys. Thanks the community as a whole for simply being there to play with, and to the newer players try and ignore those that are simply there to PvP-railroad and spawncamp their opponents – don’t let them discourage you, and just think of it as a way to work on additional strategies for overcoming that type of offense.

This week was the first of five big Insider Access twitch streams where we tune in to Robot staffers revealing some of the plans and details about Phase 2 of the Orcs Must Die! Unchained closed beta kicking off early next year.

In this weeks episode we learnt a number of things. Perhaps one of changes that will be sure to excite fans will be the return of the much missed trap – Barricades! Thats right, barricades will be coming back in phase 2. Robot have worked out all the niggles that have prevented them appearing so far. Barricades add a whole new layer of depth for defenders. Of course, barricades is just one example of the things being discussed on Insider Access. There was also discussion about trap caps, which will now be capped at the team level and not individually.

Be sure catch up on this weeks Insider Access with Justin Korthof and Ian Fischer to hear more about thats coming up in phase 2!

Watch live video from OrcsMustDie on Twitch

The next reveal will be December 16, 2014

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.

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!

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.

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’!

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.