Tag Archives: Jerome Jones
Robot’s Lead Design Director, Jerome Jones has sat down to talk with The Gamer about Orcs Must Die! 3 which is still making good progress towards its launch this year despite the delays caused by the Coronavirus pandemic. The game is on track for release later this year as a timed exclusive on Stadia and then coming to other platforms a bit later after that.
So.. the question on many players might be why Stadia and what does it bring to the table? Also why might some of the problems that other games have faced might not be such a big issue OMD3? In essence they key benefit is the power of cloud computing and that now Robot will be able to greatly scale up the game. Think bigger levels, more minions, more physics. What this means in reality is that players will now be able to step more outside of the castles and place traps outdoors at much bigger scale.
“When first playing a war scenario in OMD! 3,” Jones said, “the army of orcs that comes at you is quite epic! It might even seem unwinnable.” Previously in the OMD! series, players would complete battles within the castle itself, but never had a chance to step outside. Now, the scope of the game will increase dramatically as you leave the castle, where OMD! 3‘s mousetrapping mechanics have been significantly enhanced, and battles will be bigger and more exciting than anything we’ve seen before.
Huge war machines can be set up by players taking out masses of Orcs at once. These will be some of the biggest offensive weapons in players armouries like never seen before, even in Unchained.
However does all this exciting new up scale come with a cost? What about things like lag? Jerome explains this should not be an issue with OMD3:
Stadia has found the most problems with first-person shooters, where an immediate response is expected to get the full effect of the gameplay. OMD! 3‘s tower defense-style of action isn’t as reliant on response time, and any lag that might be there is impossible to detect.
Check out the full article over at The Gamer to see more of Jerome’s thoughts on OMD3 and Stadia. Get excited for the biggest Orcs Must Die! yet, coming later this year!
It has been a long road to release but it seems now the release is just in sight! Robot Entertainment have announced that Orcs Must Die! Unchained will be launching with patch 2.0 to the masses on April 19th 2017! That’s less than two weeks away! The game will be launching on Steam first with a PS4 release to follow later this year.
There are more goodies up Robot’s sleeve too. The OMDU launch will also feature a brand new multiplayer mode called Sabotage!
This mode sees two teams playing on the same map however, they don’t play together per se, instead they play in another dimension. Both teams main objective is to defend their rift as per normal but additionally they can make life hard work for the other team by choosing and sending in minions into the opposing teams waves. Consumables can also be used as well such as causing a mana drain or minion speed buffs for example. There a bigger minion cards like bosses and powerful spells at players disposal as well. The key to victory will be the teams that communicate well and harmonise the minions and spells that are being sent in to the opposing teams waves.
This new mode tailors to new and advanced players, there is a new tactical map which can be used to see the activity of the other dimension to plot further for the best ways to out-wit them.
Video
To help explain Sabotage more, Nananea is on hand with a useful introduction video taking players through the new concept. Check it out below:
Sabotage is about head-to-head fun, its not a direct replacement for the now departed PvP mode. Speaking on the Orcs After Dark stream this week, designer Jerome Jones commented that this mode is designed to be light hearted fun in similar vain to games like Mario Kart. Where Mario Kart is an “elastic” racing game where players who fall behind gain bigger and better items, in Sabotage a similar effect will happen. Be sure to also check out the commentary on the stream below, but beware the audio issues with volume. I recommend pressing the button to skip the audio issues segment.
Not long now
With the release now less than two weeks away its time to get excited about OMDU becoming ready for the masses come April 19th. Tell your friends!
The Robot Entertainment AMA (ask me anything) series continues on Reddit. The latest bot to take part is Design Director – Ian Fischer, you may better recognise him as “Mother” on the forums. Check out his answers over on his AMA. Plenty of interesting discussion about his industry past and the current state of play with Orcs Must Die! Unchained.
You’ll also want to be on the look out for Jerome Jones tomorrow. He’ll be joining Justin “SixOkay” Korthof on the Insider Access twitch stream at 3PM US Central time to talk about a brand new map coming to OMDU. Be there, or be square!
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.
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!
This week on the Insider Access stream over on the official Twitch channel saw community manager Justin Korthof (SixOkay) sit down with Art Director Dave Kubalak (Kube) and designer Jerome Jones (Bugs911) to talk about some of the hero designs in OMDU. the War Mage, Master, Sir Winston and Bloodspike took center stage this time around.Each of these heroes as it happens, had origins from previous games in the OMD series. Bloodspike was first considered a boss fight in OMD2 where he would be in a mine cart throwing dynamite.
The name “Sir Winston” also has a very interesting past. It all goes back to this YouTube video by level player “Sips”. When he encountered the paladin he called the paladin “Winston”. Later in the game when he was able to place paladins on the map he called them “Sons of Winston”. This became a running theme in his videos all from there on all the way through OMD2. Robot decided to name their Dark Paladin concept Sir Winston as a nod to Sip’s YouTube videos. If you skip to 1:40 on the video below you can hear Sip’s first mention of Winston!
During the rest of the Insider Access interview we get to see tons of concept art never seen before and even some sneak peaks at some awesome new skins coming out soon.
Along with some Q&A on the Twitch chat and some answers to some forum threads this insider access is once again well worth watching. Check it out on the video below!
Earlier today a news post on Polygon suggested that toxic players, people who worsen the community, think people who purposely cheat or make the game Out of Sync, as in Age of Empires for example, might be acceptable in the OMDU community. The article indicated:
Robot Entertainment designer Jerome K. Jones is of the opinion toxic players can be an asset to games such as the firm’s Orcs Must Die! Unchained.
En contre, it seems that this has been taken out of context and may have come across that toxic players are acceptable. This is, of course, not the case. The team at Robot with many having worked on Age of Empires have years of experience in dealing with toxic players and will be using their expertise to ensure all the best things they can be doing to reduce toxic players will be done in OMDU to ensure the best possible experience for players. On a new post on the Orcs Must Die! website Robot Entertainment said:
Before we get started, let us be crystal clear – toxic players that worsen the experience for the Orcs Must Die! Unchained community absolutely will not be tolerated.
Earlier today a headline suggested that Robot Entertainment welcomes toxic players in Orcs Must Die! Unchained. In the full interview, we acknowledged that toxic players are an unfortunate facet of multiplayer gaming. We made clear that we want to hear from all players no matter how passionate they may be. Passionate but not toxic. We have an active community management team in place that will address toxic players quickly and decisively.
So never fear everyone, Robot have the experience, knowledge and expertise needed to deal with toxic players, and we know how awesome the community team are. We’re in good hands and the OMDU community will thrive. No doubt like in all games toxic players will be encountered, that is a given but we have the confidence that these will be handled in the best way possible.
You can read more about Robot’s position on their website:
https://orcsmustdie.com/news/toxic-players-will-be-incinerated-and-gibletized
Many fans joined SixOkay, Nananea and a number of bots in todays “The War Mage” stream. Two great games were played showing all of the War Mage’s capabilities who was expertly played by Mastermind (Justin Moe). If you missed out on the stream be sure to replay the stream on the Twitch channel. Its always a good idea to catch the stream live where you can as there is plenty of chat Q&A that goes on. On this occasion designer Jerome “Bugs911” Jones was in the chat helping to answer fan questions.
So what did we learn about the War Mage in this stream? Lets dig into the details:
- The War Mage brings his trusty crossbow into the action as in previous OMD games. The left click shoots energy while the right click allows him to stun others with a reasonable area of effect.
- His primary ability is called “Trust Me” which protects friendly units against traps allowing them to pass through enemy traps safely. Meanwhile it also affects enemy units who become more vulnerable to friendly traps.
- The secondary ability is used to target other heroes or minions and damage done to the War Mage will instead be transferred to the targeted unit. Sneaky.
- His stats make him a great choice for defending.
- Other than that he is the same old trusty War Mage, complete with witty remarks!
In other news..
Moltenink has shared some awesome art on Twitter today. Moltenink is a digital animator who happens to be an OMDU alpha tester and shared this brilliant OMD inspired piece.
You can find out more about Moltenink at his website to see more of his art for other games and comics. http://www.moltenink.com/
