Orcs Must Die! Unchained is a follow-up to the classic tower defense series from Robot Entertainment. Unchained has seemingly followed a different creative route though, according to design director Ian Fischer, who told GameSpot that the game started as a more strategic version of Team Fortress 2 but is now being identified as a MOBA (massive online battle arena) game.
“When we first started working on the game, if you could take a time machine back two years, ‘MOBA’ never would have come out of our mouths. 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.
“When we were getting ready to go to PAX and show the game for the first time. We got two dozen people from the college down the street from our dev studio, and we didn’t tell them anything. We just had them sit down and play it. They helped us immeasurably to refine our demo for PAX, but also, to a person, all two dozen of them said, ‘Your game is a MOBA.’ 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 gonna spend the next year trying to convince you that it’s not a MOBA. You think it’s a MOBA, it’s a MOBA.”
Orcs Must Die! Unchained is currently in the closed beta stage. Do you think it’s a MOBA or not? Let us know in the comments.