Orcs Must Die Message Board

Bart Tiongson is a concept artist with almost 15 years experience in the games industry, having worked first at Ensemble and then, when the Age of Empires studio went bust, to Robot Entertainment.Read more...

Wade Sharp is a young boy born with Osteogenesis Imperfecta, a condition that means his bones are as brittle as chalk, and which stops him playing sports and keeps him inside playing video games. Wade's Make-A-Wish request, then, was to see how games are made, so Robot Entertainment (Orcs Must Die) were only too happy to oblige. Earlier today, Wade and his family visited the studio, and he was made a game developer for a day, not only seeing how video games are developed, but getting to help design himself as a character to boot. In addition to seeing himself turned into a virtual superstar, he even got a statue of the character to take home. Wade's character is called "The Super-Master", and will be appearing in Robot's next, unannounced game. Wades Wish [Facebook]

Perhaps the pack-leader of the recent ‘do x to fantasy/sci-fi staple y’ game name trend, Robot Entertainment’s Orcs Must Die was a giddy, gory carnival of greenskin slaughter in a tower defence meets Diablo kind of way. A mere nine months later, we get the sequel. Can such cheekiness be justified? You have two ways of potentially finding out before you buy it. A) play this here free demo. B) Read the collection of typed symbols below.

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A sequel to the popular tower defense game will be out this summer on PC, developer Robot Entertainment said today. If you go to PAX East this weekend, you can slaughter orcs there. And play the game. [Robot Entertainment] More »

Orcs Must Die, Shoot Many Robots, Kill All Zombies… A trend emerges, and I’m not entirely sure I’m down with so many prosaic game titles. Especially when they’re all so violent. Can’t we have Hug Many Cats, Cake Must Be Eaten, Visit All Museums?

Until then, we shall make do with Orcs Must Die! 2, which will slaughter its way towards our PC’s hard drives this Summer. It brings in a c-op mode, introducing a lady partner for the returning, possibly Evil Dead-inspired War Mage hero. She’s apparently ‘more nuanced’, using stuff like mind control rather than the bloke’s straight-up genocidal tactics. Mind controlling orc hordes sounds like a good time to me. Reveal trailer for the game that is sadly not subtitled ‘Must Die Harder’ is below.(more…)

Steam's midweek madness sale has Orcs Must Die! and a bunch of L.A. Noire goodies on sale through March 15. Orcs Must Die! is 75 percent off, for $3.75. L.A. Noire, L.A. Noire Complete Edition and the Brady Guide are all half off: Snag the standard title for $15, Complete Edition for $20 and the Brady Guide for $10. The Complete Edition and Brady Guide combo is also 50 percent off, for $25.

If that's not enough, today's Daily Deal is Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box, on sale for 75 percent off, or $5.

Have you already fulfilled the titular imperative delivered unto the player in Robot Entertainment's XBLA strategy-action title Orcs Must Die? The joke's on you: There's always more Orcs. This time, they come in the form of the "Lost Adventures" DLC pack -- an expansion which came to PC last month, and will bring its five new fortresses, two enemies and additional collectible skulls to the XBLA version of the title sometime in December.

Of course, the 400 Microsoft Points ($5) you drop on this bad boy will also net you a handful of new tools, like the energy-restoring Mana Well, the health-draining Vampiric Gauntlets and the Shock Zapper, which both shocks and zaps. We know, we always assumed those two were synonyms as well. We guess we'll have to see the thing in action before we understand the subtle differences.

We're sure PC players were disheartened to learn that Orcs Must Die! is officially done with downloadable content. Of course, we imagine the news was more of a shock to Xbox users, as the XBLA version of the game has yet to receive any DLC at all. Good news then, as Robot assures Xbox users that DLC is still on the way.

Speaking on the Robot forums - a few days prior to revelation that DLC was over, actually - community manager Justin Korthof stated that the company definitely has DLC planned for the XBLA version but isn't "quite ready to announce details yet." He added that players can probably guess the details if they use their "imagination." Presumably, the DLC planned for XBLA will match the two packs already released for PC.

Orcs Must Die developer Robot Entertainment recently revealed to us the identity of its next opus: A two-player competitive iOS board game titled Hero Academy. It's a tactics game in which players move heroes across a staging area in an attempt to destroy their competitor's home base crystal before theirs, in turn, gets smashed. If that sounds a little too intense for your usual iOS gaming tastes, don't fret -- the action all takes place asynchronously.

Check out the screens below for a first look at the downloadable title, and keep an eye out for the debut trailer in the coming days!

The latest episode of the Rocket Jump podcast contains more than its usual banter between the hosts. Special guest Justin Korthof, Community Manager at Robot Entertainment, drops by to talk about the studio's recent release, Orcs Must Die. In the discussion, he confirms that there isn't any more DLC planned for the game. Apparently Robot set out to offer two different DLC packs and that's it. Bummer.

But that doesn't mean the studio is kicking back in Hawaii, counting the coin made off the genocide of the orc race. Korthof also explains that the studio is working on two new titles but, obviously, he doesn't explain what those are. That's fine by us, because we need more time to get five skulls on every Orcs Must Die map anyway.

You can find the pertinent info right around the 34-minute mark of the episode; DLC discussion takes place around 44 minutes in.

Updates to Orcs Must Die! have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

• Added a user.cfg option to limit your frame rate forceFPS=X where X is what you do not want it to run faster than (for example: forceFPS=30).
• Added custom keybinding using user.cfg
• Fix for the Tenderized achievement.
• Fix for the fireball achievement.
• Switch to a hardware cursor to help people with slower machines.
• Fixed up the cursor acceleration option slider to make it more useable.
• Fixed up pathing near the doors on Twin Halls.
• Fixed the bug where you could have both costumes on at the same time.
• Fixed an issue where some levels, like Gateway, would crash the game.
• Fixed the text for the costume weapons if you had a particular weaver set selected
• Fixed "Oiled Gears" Weaver Upgrade
• Fixed a bug in upgraded Swinging Mace. It wasn't doing what it was supposed to. It is now.

It's time for the orcs to die deader than they've ever died before with the help of the first DLC pack for Orcs Must Die! (See? Told you.), The Artifacts of Power, due out Tuesday, Oct. 25 for $2.49 on Steam. The DLC includes two new weapons, two new traps and an item-upgrade upgrade, as listed by Robot Entertainment:

o. Vampiric Gauntlets: Armed with these grim gauntlets, you can drain the enemy's health while healing you at the same time. If you have a desperate need to use spells, you can also use the gauntlets to drain your health in exchange for mana.
o. Alchemist's Satchel: Toss a series of deadly acid bombs that explode on your command to melt flesh from the bones of multiple groups of orcs at once.
o. The Shock Zapper: Mount the Shock Zapper on the ceiling and zap fliers and ground units equally dead with this oversized pest remover.
o. Floor Scorcher: By the time they see the fire, it will be too late. Burn entire groups of complacent enemies with this pop-up flaming surprise.
o. New Trap Upgrades: You've got two new reasons to go back and earn those 5-skull ratings on War Mage and Nightmare levels. With the Artifacts of Power Pack, you can now spend skulls on new upgrades for Shock Zapper and Floor Scorcher.

The Artifacts of Power is the first of two DLC packs Robot has planned for Orcs Must Die!, so keep on killin', Mages.

To all things, DLC. It’s the law. The law of slightly tiring microtransactions. This law includes Robot Entertainment’s impressively ridiculous Orcs Must Die, which is due two globs of DLC in the not too distant. The first of these is Artifacts of power, which launches for $2.49 next Tuesday. I could describe them to you, but I have a headache and need a lie down/hug, so I’m going to show them to you instead. No, don’t weep for me. I’ll live. If you can really call it living.(more…)

Orcs Must Die is the first game from Robot Entertainment, the studio raised from the ashes of Age of Empires dev Ensemble, and it was released on PC (via Steam) yesterday. It is a tale of many, many, many Orcs, and of their very, very, very regular deaths. And this? This is what I think of it.(more…)

Orcs Must Die! is now available on Steam! Receive the Knight of the Order costume if you purchase by 8am Pacific Time on October 12th.

As a powerful War Mage with dozens of deadly weapons, spells, and traps at your fingertips, defend twenty-four fortresses from a rampaging mob of beastly enemies, including ogres, hellbats, and of course, a whole bunch of ugly orcs. Battle your enemies through a story-based campaign across multiple difficulty levels, including brutal Nightmare mode!

It is true. They must die. They cannot do anything else, except for make me die. I am, of course, not about to let that happen. Not while I have a fine selection of spike traps, tar traps, arrow traps, crossbows, spears and wind-summoning belts at my disposal. I am so sorry, orcs, but you must indeed die. Don’t try and talk me out of it – I’m on one of those moods. A mood where I want you all to die for my entertainment. No sir, I do not want to talk to this monsters this time.

The demo of Robot Entertainment’s tower defence-as-blood-crazed-third-person-action game landed on Steam last week, and gestures amiably at around four of its 20-strong greenskin-bothering traps across three levels. It should have lasted about 20 minutes, but I managed to sink about two hours into it, wastrel that I am.(more…)

The current trend in tower defense gives players an avatar to control and sends them into the action, rather than letting them simply place towers from a safe distance. Toy Soldiers did this with much success in two Xbox Live Arcade outings, but for a more medieval affair you should check out Orcs Must Die. From Robot Entertainment, developer of Halo Wars, Orcs Must Die lets you play dungeon interior decorator and build playgrounds of orcish murder...

There truly are few things more satisfying in a video game than watching a plan of your own invention be executed with immaculate success. For all its bells, whistles and promised hordes of greenskinned invaders, the real meat of Orcs Must Die happens in the moments before your fortresses doors are kicked down. You're given as much time as you need to survey the area, choose your traps and weapons, and begin crafting piecemeal your survival strategy for the waves ahead.

There are far more layers than the game's straightforward, titular directive would suggest. Over the next few minutes, you don't just have to make all of the Orcs dead. You have to tend to that very first seed of strategy, growing it into an engine of impenetrable destruction.

#orcsmustdie! Y'know, for a medium where interactivity is king, 99.9% of game trailers get it wrong, by simply not offering anything to do. Sure, all the chanting, shiny CG and ominious voiceover is okay for setting mood but that stuff tells you nothing about the actual play experience of a game. More »

Everyone knows orcs' biggest weaknesses are business guns.

Silently, so silently the Orcs arrived. And silently, so silently, they uploaded a demo of their sort-of-tower-defence opus of sadism to Steam, a week ahead of the full game’s release. A week ahead! No-one does that anymore. Well, not many. Let us celebrate Robot Entertainment’s unexpected kindness! How? Well, by following their single, simple imperative. That imperative being, of course, Orcs Must Die. 995MB of greenskin-bothering awaits the curious (demo link is on the right of that page) right now.

I am one of the curious, but first I must download 21 cocking gigabytes of Rage. Megatextures is a pretty apt name, I guess.

Orcs Must Die! will unleash the horde on October 5 and 12 on Xbox Live Arcade and PC, respectively. Robot Entertainment's third-person tower defense game charges the player with defending their castle from wave after wave of Orcish invaders, using diabolical and silly traps.

Robot Entertainment has been showing off the game since early this year, so there's plenty of gameplay footage to check out. Most recently, the developer made a clever interactive trailer that gives the viewer a choice on what traps to place.

Robot Entertainment seem to realise that if they’re going to tell us that Orcs Must Die, they damn well better give us plenty of ways to make that happen. They could have gone a different route and cast the player as the orcs pipe-smoking bowler-hatted defendant. Press the left mouse button to say, “Must they though, gentlemen of the court? Must they really?” Instead, they’ve just laden their tower defence type game with all manner of traps and have decided to show some of the various ways that orcs will die in this enjoyable interactive trailer. It’s like playing Heavy Rain but with green humanoids instead of red herrings.

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If you haven't had the chance to try Orcs Must Die! at a PAX this year, here's the closest you'll get before the game's October launch (or a demo). This interactive walkthrough trailer, with 30 possible combinations, lets the viewer choose traps and see the results.

Robot Entertainment is not only bringing tower defense title Orcs Must Die to PAX Prime later on this week, but the company is providing a show special as well. At the booth in Seattle during the show, they'll be giving out special codes for the game's War Mage character, designed after Penny Arcade's own Cardboard Tube Samurai, to visitors who sign up for the company forums.

The first 200 people to play the game each day of the show will also pick up a prequel comic book from the company. The rest of us, at home, who can't play the game live on the floor of PAX? All we get is to wait until the game comes out later this year on XBLA and PC.

There's nothing more satisfying than seeing a plan through to completion. That's why the latest project from the folks at Robot Entertainment is so rewarding. You might think Orcs Must Die is all about action because of the sword-wielding mage slinging fire and ice with a cocky smile on his face. Bu...

Set up a number of different traps to dispose of nasty orcs.

Prevent the orcs from getting from one side of the world to the other.

Learn a few special spots in this world and advanced abilities.

Unleash the horde and slay tons of orcs as creatively as possible in this gameplay.