Orcs Must Die! Unchained

~ the obituary ~

Robot Entertainment is the Plano studio that former Ensemble Studios staff set up after Microsoft closed Ensemble. Its first two Orcs Must Die! games, in 2011 and 2012, were paid games about filling a corridor with spike traps and arrow walls before a horde of orcs ran through it. Unchained was revealed at PAX East in April 2014 as the third one, and it was different in kind, a free-to-play game built around multiplayer. Gameforge would publish it in Europe. Tencent signed on for China that November and bought a minority stake in Robot the following February.

The headline mode of the beta was Siege, five against five, where each team defended its own rift with traps while escorting minions toward the other one. Founders could buy into the closed beta from 2014, and the open beta began on 29 March 2016. In December 2016 Robot removed Siege from the game entirely. The release version of 19 April 2017 kept co-op Survival for up to three players and added Sabotage, in which two teams of three played separate copies of one map and could send trouble across to the other side. A PlayStation 4 version followed on 18 July 2017.

Between matches sat the free-to-play layer. Traps and guardians went into a deck of limited size, and loot dropped by orcs was crafted into upgrades. All of it could also be bought with real money. Metacritic filed the reviews as generally positive.

~ the case file ~

~ a studio sized for two games ~

On 27 March 2018 Game Informer reported that Robot had laid off more than 30 people. CEO Patrick Hudson explained that the studio had grown a great deal while building Unchained and had spent 18 months running two teams, one of which shipped Hero Academy 2 that January. It was now going to make a single game, and the headcount was cut to fit. Unchained and Hero Academy 2 would stay online, Hudson said.

~ monday, 10 a.m. central ~

The letter went up on 7 January 2019. "It's painful to even write this," it began. "We've kept these games operating at a financial loss for many months. Unfortunately, it's no longer sustainable for us to do so." Unchained and both Hero Academy games would remain playable until Monday, 8 April 2019 at 10:00 a.m. Central Time. Everyone who logged in before then would receive what the letter called a substantial free grant of hard and soft currencies, to be spent in the remaining weeks.

The date got garbled on its way out. Eurogamer's report gave "Monday 16th April", a day that fell on a Tuesday, and the English Wikipedia article says 9 April. Robot's own text says the 8th, and so does PC Gamer, whose writer spent the final weekend inside the game.

That writer had resolved to finish every map in co-op with a friend before the end, and arrived at the last weekend with 36 maps still to go. With the free currency the pair took a battle pass and 60 chests of upgrades, and the piece says so without shame: "We're troughing at the buffet table of the Titanic while the ship sinks." The lights went out at 4 p.m. on Monday, UK time.

~ what the orcs did next ~

According to Wikipedia the game can still be run through an offline mod made by its community. Robot went back to selling the series at a fixed price. Orcs Must Die! 3 reached Steam on 23 July 2021, and the studio's own announcement described its new Scramble mode as "reminiscent of Chaos Trials from Orcs Must Die! Unchained".

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »