14 DAY TRIAL // Orcs Must Die Unchained borrows from a wide variety of multiplayer experiences, according to developer Robot Entertainment, while still trying to bring its own touch to the free-to-play experience.
Orcs Must Die 1 and 2 delivered some great action tower defense moments, focusing on the single-player with the first title and on cooperative multiplayer with the second one.
This time around, with Orcs Must Die Unchained, developer Robot Entertainment is focusing on bringing forward a competitive multiplayer experience. Two teams of five players work together to invade the rift of the enemy team, while simultaneously making sure that their own rift is well guarded with traps and other things.
Right from the get-go, lots of people drew parallels to multiplayer online battle arena experiences like Dota 2 or League of Legends, although the studio didn't set out to create such a thing.
"If we were explaining it, we would say, 'It's like playing two games of Orcs Must Die simultaneously' or 'It's like Orcs Must Die but now you get to do the offensive side too.' The game that we compared it to the most at that point was TF2. 'Think about TF2 but more strategic,' that's how we'd describe the game," Robot Entertainment's Ian Fischer told GameSpot.
However, when the studio got around 24 students from a local college to test out the game, all of them first said that it was a MOBA. The team debated whether or not to go on the offensive and outright deny any resemblance to the genre, but it ultimately decided to let players figure things out for themselves.
"We got to a point where we were saying, 'We have to come out and tell everybody we're not a MOBA. We have to position ourselves as not being a MOBA at all,' but everybody said 'MOBA,' so at that point, it was like, why fight it? I'm not going to spend the next year trying to convince you that it's not a MOBA. You think it's a MOBA, it's a MOBA."
According to Fischer, there are plenty of Dota 2 or League of Legends players in the team, and they could easily highlight reasons why Orcs Must Die Unchained is completely unlike those experiences, but Robot Entertainment wants to admit all the influences it had during the game's development.
"It obviously borrows from MOBAs. It borrows from TF2. It borrows from Magic: The Gathering. It borrows from Warframe. We think that with the traps, the offense, defense, the minions, the different kind of combinations of stuff in there, whether it's a MOBA or not, we're still giving you a pretty unique experience. We're still doing something that players haven't seen before."
Orcs Must Die Unchained is currently in a closed beta stage and is set to debut as a free-to-play experience on PC in the near future.