This week we were privileged to have a personal press Skype meet up with the guys over at Gameforge to check out the newest closed beta release of Orcs Must Die! Unchained, a fast-paced PVP action MMO where players work in teams to attack the opposing enemy fortresses, summoning minions, planting traps and doing everything they can to overwhelm the enemies defences to get their minions into the enemy rift whilst they themselves try to do the same. With a variety of characters with their own unique classes, traps, gear, minions and bosses the game has a high level of customisation which has only been further improved with the new update.
If you're interested in checking out this game by yourself, grab your CBT key here, as we're currently hosting a giveaway for Europe!
Signing in to the game and Skype we were introduced to Sean Heffron, the European Senior Producer at Gameforge who would be our guide for the press tour and who we would be fighting alongside as well as whole bunch of other team members in their office. We have played the game a couple of times previously, first with the Alpha build in June last year and then the Closed Beta phase 1 at GamesCom last August; even back then the game was extremely playable with very little polish needed, just extra content being added and a few changes between then and now.
For our playtest we were given control of a top level 40 account that had access to all the game content as we were warming up Sean guided us to "My Stuff" where we could check out the Deck Editor and Trait Builder. The Deck Editor allows your character to pick two pieces of gear, seven different traps, two bosses, and eight types of minion ranging from tier 1 to tier 4 minions. Players unlock these various items as they progress to the game, fortunately we had access to all them and made a pretty awesome deck. Checking out the Trait Builder players get a Stat Point each time they gain an account level that they can spend on their Stat Boosts including Wealth, Power, Fortitude, Authority and Spirit, which all affect different stats in the game as well as give players an influx of cash or Leadership points to unlock minions if that’s what they want to focus on. As well as the stat boosts there are also Traits Carve that players must also unlock/gain access to, ultimately players can pick up four different traits for their character represented by the different cards, once they have these cards they must meet specific stats requirements before they can use them as a trait for example unlocking the "Brother Mauled by Grizzlies 1" trait players require to have five points in Power and Wealth, the higher the tier of a trait the more demanding the stat requirements. Players can create different builds with the editors depending on the cards that they have and the type of Hero they like to fight as.
Build made we read it up a game and looked over the available Heroes, with 12 currently available (and more constantly added) we weighed up our options and given that we'd focused on a build and deck for a mage character we decided to check out Cygnus: The Master of the Order, who was a pounce the an Advanced Hero to try and use and required a little extra skill! One of the biggest changes between the patches/phases is that Heroes have been tweaked and now focus on being Offensive or Defensive roles primarily, though players are still free to use characters outside of that role. One of the benefits of the two roles is that players with and Offensive Hero start with more points to summon Minions, and Defensive Heroes start with more points to laydown traps.
Jumping into the game we loaded up the Cliffside Clash map, currently the only available map for players, though it has had its own tweaks placed into it including colouring objects in different areas to give players a more instant indicator of which area of the map they find themselves in (friendly or enemy), there are also escape lanes on the Cliffside lanes for offensive players, when outside the enemy war room players can make a leap of faith to a ledge below and run along the beach if they are careful all the way back to their own gates.
So as far as my character goes he had four abilities, his standard magic fireball primary attack, a chain area lightning secondary attack and then two cooldown quick skills including a charge ability to replenish my own mana, which you'd normally need to do by returning to your rift room, and also a "Feint Death" that I could trigger to appear as though I had died, apparently a bit of an in-joke from the previous Orcs Must Die! game where players would constantly speculate as to whether Cygnus was dead or not. You also have other abilities based off your equipped gear; it was at this point that we realised that we had not selected our build or our deck and so had the starter versions of both ie. we sucked!
We were not deterred, escorting our first wave of minions from Fortress Warcamp (the Warcamps are now known as Fortress or Helmet as players seemed to be able to relate to this better) and headed through the enemies first trap filled area. Assisting with a few kills whilst pushing the lane we earned XP, which flagged the new in-game levelling system that has been introduced where, similar to other MOBA, we could improve specific skills and areas each time we increased our level by 2. The game also has barricades with Phase 2 which allow a more tower defense aspect where you can tailor the killbox to take out minions a little easier, though some minions are able to leap these barricades. Pushing lanes and taking out Guardians (the big mobile turrets that can pretty much drop you if you're not careful) opens up Glyphs on the floor that upgrade minions when they pass over them, further helping a lane push.
A little way into the game the enemy had dropped one of our Guardians on their attack route I took a glance at my acquired trap points and realised that I had... well... quite a lot, really not contributing to my role as a defender. Heading to our killbox area I splashed down a bunch of traps around, on the roof, walls and floor, unfortunately without the deck loadout they were all pretty crappy spike traps, which at the time I didn't realise went to your overall team map spend of how many traps you can place and so I really didn’t contribute too well to that either. Among the trap revamps are new support traps that benefit players and minions, giving them speed and attack boosts among other things. Spending the minion and trap points was something I definitely wasn't used to, getting very caught up in the excitement of battle, hording them for a little longer than I should have been, similarly not paying enough attention to my minimap to see where I needed to get to in order to help pushing and defending; that said it isn't actually that complicated once you play a game.
With tier three Warcamp opened we were able to summon our first free Captain, huge minions that accompany the wave and are able to smash down gates, minions and anything else that stands in their way; taking down a Captain gives your team a nice boost of coins and leadership points to spend. This got us into talks about tactics and strategy when dealing with Captains, sometimes opening your gates and allowing them to just enter your rift (giving the enemy team 4 points) and saving yourself some gate health that they smash through pretty easily.
Halfway into the game it was fairly balanced and so far I had managed to avoid death and help with my fair share of defending, taking out minions and getting a few good assists on enemy players. My moment of triumph was in a one on one I found myself against one of the Gameforge gals called Cmsis who had chosen the Sorceress, duking it out on our own on one of the far lanes I was able to take her out after a good battle, as I cheered and ran away victorious I was told quickly by Sean that she had a phoenix ability (which I’d completely forgotten about from my first time playing as her in the Alpha) and as I rushed back she began to quickly dominate me. Thankfully my trusty Feign Death timing just as my health hit low had her running away to which I started laughing. Over Skype I heard her say "I'm sorry" to which Sean responded "For what? He feigned death." That was met with a "Seriously!?" to which I called out "At least MY death was feigned!" Extremely entertaining.
The battle raged on for a good 45 minutes, it felt like we were constantly on the back foot, but hardly surprising given our team pretty much being a man down with my badly decked and inexperienced self! Though at the end we managed 1 player kill and suffered 2 deaths towards the end as we started to get overrun.
All in all the game is extremely fun and whilst we do like the occasional MOBA we do hope that a rush is put on the second (and future) maps, albeit we appreciate how much balancing is needed with things like this to make it fun, fair and stop bottlenecking. Orcs Must Die! Unchained feels extremely polished and complete in its new closed beta phase, it is simply being refined and the new player experience being tweaked. With constant community feedback the game has already changed due to what the players want, including the assigning of roles on heroes, throwing out a lot of garbage traps (where they had every variant of spike trap) and adding the bosses to mid-late game all really helped with the snowballing effect the game was suffering that the community identified.
The game will remain in closed beta with a view to hopefully opening it up to open beta in August depending on everything working to expectations on player experience and server back end, with commercial release before the end of the year and the PS4 also tracking around the same time.
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