Just curious if any 'dopers have tried it out and what you thought of it. It’s currently free in Beta on Steam (and I think you can create an account and just download it if you aren’t a steam user).
It’s not a bad game, especially considering it’s still in beta at this point. There are definitely some balance issues they need to work though, but the last patch notes seemed to indicate they are going to overhaul several of the more grindy aspects. I’d say the most broken part of the game, ironically, is the survival part, which is more like the traditional OMD games where players play co-op against waves of incoming baddies either to a set number of waves or endlessly until eventually overwhelmed. Hopefully they will fix this at some point…right now it’s either too easy or impossible with very little in between. The siege game, which can either be PvP or PvB (bot) is pretty fun and relatively well balanced, though they need more maps and they need to make all the bots available for the various heroes (currently there are only 5 of the 10 heroes that play as bots, so it gets a bit old fighting the same bots over and over again).
oft wears hats and I saw the Orcs Must Die: Unchained booth at last year’s PAX East and were so excited we signed up for the closed beta. From there on out, OMDU has been a massive disappointment. We played it during the closed beta and tried it again during the open beta, and I don’t think we’ll try it a third time. To sum up our major complaints, it’s a MOBA, not a tower defense game; it’s free-to-play but pay-to-win, given the way the monitization and unlocks are set up; and the gameplay is repetitive and uninteresting.
If you want a recent tower defense game in the spirit of Orcs Must Die 2, I’d recommend Fortified. The gameplay isn’t as deep or polished polished and it’s 1940’s comic-book Martians instead of fantasy, but it’s still fun to play and scratches the same itch.
Seemed pretty bad. The number and effect of the traps was turned down a lot to keep the physics manageable for 10 player multiplayer. The survival mode is extremely boring compared to the original games. The maps are too simple. The shooting has no impactful feel to it. The amount of grind needed to unlock the traps and abilities you want seems crazy.
I loved OMD 1/2, and I wanted very much to love whatever the next one is, but they basically systematically stripped all the fun out of it. It has almost none of the elements that made the first two games fun. I’m pretty angry that we got this pile of shit instead of OMD3.
Being a big fan of OMD1, and 2. I took part in the beta, and gave it another shot with the release recently. Pretty disappointed with Unchained. Seems like it was designed for multiplayer, maps are a mess, can only place traps in choke points (small rooms) which allows for very little in the way of trap design that the previous versions did. A lot of running around from point to point to deal with waves. Might be a fun multiplayer game which it seemed to be solely designed around with feeble attempt of throwing a single player component to it. Something irked me about the graphics about it as well, character perspective wasn’t as comfortable as the previous versions.
Sad mess.
Steam tried to auto install another update for it not long ago, stopped that and uninstalled. Not worth the bandwidth.
Apparently they gave up on the whole PVP/siege/MOBA mode and are focusing on the survival mode.. The player count has shrunk to levels that couldn’t sustain a moba. The people who were still playing are probably people who invested a lot of money and time, and when they got matched up against new players they’d crush them.
They also apparently restricted survival mode to only three players down from the original five. Since OMD1/2 supported 2-player co-op, this is barely more than that.
But the problem is that OMDU survival mode is nowhere near as good as OMD1/2. Those games had very tight mechanics that rewarded clever trap configurations, had unique designs that made figuring out how to direct traffic flow a puzzle in itself, had very satisfying and visceral shooter mechanics, and had really fun and whacky physics. Unfortunately OMDU survival doesn’t have any of that.
The map and monster design is much simpler and less interesting. The traps play a less important role and don’t have very good physics compared to the original game, probably in order to give low overhead to sync up 10 players with them. The shooting feels spammy and non-responsive. It basically lacks of all the tight, synergistic gameplay mechanics that made OMD1/2 great.
I don’t know how much money they got out of people while the game was active - with the over the top monetization I’m sure they milked a few whales for quite a lot of money. But since they spent years on this, I can’t imagine this is anything but a disaster. Which is really too bad, because I’d probably buy OMD3 on day one. But I don’t think they’re going to salvage a fun survival mode out of OMDU, and I suspect they’ve invested too much in it to go back to the drawing board and create OMD3 from scratch.
It’s really sad - one of my favorite game franchises basically killed myself by getting greedy and going for the F2P/P2W cash grab.
F.Pu mentioned that OMDU had an update coming, and we were both worried that it would be exactly as you described: a pale shadow of the previous games’ greatness. We knew that they wouldn’t be able to retool OMDU to play like OMD1&2 without restarting from scratch. Thank you for the update, you saved me a couple of hours of reloading it and confirming our suspicions myself.
I share your assessment of OMDU and your disappointment with it. I was super excited when I saw OMDU at PAX East 2015. I thought it was basically OMD2 with four player co-op. Then I played it and my joy turned to ashes in my mouth. At this point, I think our only hope is that Bad Robot decides that OMDU has been a failure and commits to developing a proper OMD2 sequel for its next project. Perhaps, if we’re lucky, we will have a worthy OMD game to play in a few years. I have no idea how much money they’ve made, and whether they’ve alienated enough players to do it again, but I hope they come to their senses.
Yeah, I saw the email announcement that they were getting rid of Siege mode and ‘going back to our roots’. I’ll probably fire up the game once the new patch comes out…I’m hoping that what we get is OMD3, as you mentioned. Right now, even the Survival is not very rewarding, even after they finally put the skulls system back in. It’s nearly impossible to 5 skull any of the maps they have, even for high level players (which I consider myself one of). What I’d like to see, at the very least, is more maps which are automatically scaled to the players level (instead of a couple of maps that start off at level 1 and go to level 100). Hell, they can re-use the maps from OMD1 and 2…I’d be cool for that as an initial starting point.
I guess if you spent any money in their shop they are going to refund you in game gold (not the money of course), and are going to do a complete point reallocation wipe, so you can focus on traps, heroes and items/skills for the new system.
Like I said, I’ll give it a try, but the game is a mess as it is, and so far they don’t seem very able to fix it.
I think the physics are so tuned down, the shooting mechanics so unsatisfying, the map design so blah… I really don’t think there’s anything worth salvaging there. They’d have to start over from scratch, which I don’t think they’re willing to do after investing years in this. This game doesn’t feel like the same developer that delivered OMD1/2 - they pretty much lost every bit of what’s great about those games. It feels like some third party developer bought up the rights to the franchise and then created a pale imitation of the games they bought. That’s not the case, so far as I know, but that’s what it feels like.
I actually think there’s room for an adversarial tower defense game too. It’d be fun for each player to take turns - one on defense running the survival game normally, and the other on offense creating a lineup of minion waves to attack the other guy to exploit his weaknesses and the current situation. You could definitely come up with a PVP tower defense game that would be a lot of fun, but a MOBA was not it.
I actually wrote them a fairly long note about doing the multi-player tower defense where one team defends and the other attacks. I definitely think it would be fun…basically OMD2 but with humans doing the attacking as well as the defending.
I’m not imagining an attacking player actually appearing in the game and shooting at the other players. I think that’s hard to make satisfying in a way that balances the horde survival and doesn’t just end up with people repeatedly shooting each other in the face while mostly ignoring everything else.
But what I’m imagining is that the attacking player has a pool of available minions and a certain point total, with different minions costing different amounts. He could design the waves on the fly to best attack the enemy defenses. He can float around in free cam to observe what’s going on, and maybe invoke some sort of power ups - maybe temporarily boost the armor of a particular minion wave or give a temporary burst of speed or something. You’d go back and forth like this, with increasing wave difficulty (more points/powerups for the attacker) until someone won with a successful attack.
Same here…the attack players wouldn’t be 3rd person heroes in the game, though I suppose you could do that. My thought was that you’d be allocated so many points to buy mobs…and perhaps you’d get more points after each wave, or perhaps access to higher level mobs. Perhaps you could even upgrade mobs and add things like fire resist or whatever. You’d design your wave then unleash it, being able to follow your mobs and see how the other team is defending to craft your strategy for the next wave.
I saw the announcement and wasn’t hopeful or enthusiastic enough to pull OMDU off the shelf and give it another go. So, thanks for taking one for the team and trying it out yourself. I’m not surprised that you confirmed that it wasn’t up to par with the original games, but it does make me really sad.
In fact, you may find me this evening wearing black, drinking heavily, and playing Orcs Must Die 2 while mascara streaks run down my face.
Sorry, to be clear, I didn’t try it again - I was just relating my experience from when we played months ago. I was just mentioning that they were going in the different direction. It’s possible they improved it since we played but it seems like the engine and gameplay mechanics are fundamentally different enough from the previous games that I doubt they could ever make survival feel like OMD1/2.
