Orcs Must Die! 3 Interview: Dev Talks Story, Stadia, and More
Robot Entertainment's tower defense and action hybrid series is set to continue this year with Orcs Must Die! 3, the first mainline game in the franchise since Orcs Must Die! 2 released in 2012. The title was announced during Gamescom 2019 as a timed exclusive for Google Stadia, a cloud-based streaming platform. Jerome K. Jones, Design Director at Robot Entertainment and the Lead Designer on Orcs Must Die! 3, has been involved with the series since its inception.
Jones helped design the campaign for 2009's Halo Wars, and soon after that released its developer Ensemble Studios was disbanded. Many of Ensemble's former employees moved to Robot Entertainment, which was making a game that was scrapped and became eight different ideas for staffers to vote on. Having been a fan of games like Desktop Tower Defense, Jones voted to go in the direction of a tower defense title. That decision spawned a series now almost 10 years old. Game Rant spoke with Jones about Orcs Must Die! 3's new War Scenarios, the developer's decision to launch exclusively on Stadia, and more.
Q: How is Orcs Must Die! 3 evolving the series formula, and maybe taking things in from Orcs Must Die! Unchained?
A: If you're an Orcs Must Die! fan, you just need to think of this in terms of 1, 2, and 3. The two really big gameplay things are a brand story that evolves approximately 23 years after the end of Orcs Must Die! 2 when Gabby and Max — or the Sorceress and the War Mage — were getting ready to rebuild the order. They have solved all the problems of 2, and are going to rebuild the order by getting some new young apprentices and heroes in. I don't want to give too many spoilers away, but the story is a big part of it.
The second thing is War Scenarios and War Machines. What I really want people to understand about War Scenarios is that they're meant to be like boss scenarios. I don't mean that from the standpoint of 'there's a boss in there,' the scenario itself is meant to be like a boss, or a big wave.
There are five War Scenarios in the campaign, and they are quite epic. If you're an Orcs fan, just the ability to go beyond the door or the gate itself feels really cool. You go outside and there's a gigantic battlefield. You have brand-new War Machines, which are the new traps for War Scenarios. The entire outside of the battlefield, the castle, everything is all trappable. If you can imagine that, it's a pretty big scale. Those levels are big, they're epic, and it's more enemies coming at you than has ever been done in Orcs.
So those are the two big gameplay things. The third thing is we have a new engine. We're using Unreal Engine 4, and the graphics and everything are through the roof because of it.
Q: I have noticed that the first reveal trailer focuses a lot on the scale, how there's going to be bigger armies than ever.
A: That is a War Scenario in that old trailer you saw at Gamescom.
Q: How big of a scale is the game able to get to? Is there a concrete number as far as how many orcs you can see at a time, or anything like that?
A: I don't know if that would be something I want to put an exact number on, but I can tell you this: In the old Orcs games we had rules. The designers broke the rules occasionally, but those rules said that 100 orcs or enemies in a wave was about the max. In Orcs Must Die! 1 and 2 you may have, over the course of a wave that lasts anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes, 100-ish enemies coming at you.
In a War Scenario, there are much higher numbers than that, more than any other wave in any other scenario. As a matter of fact, a wave in a War Scenario is sometimes as many units as an entire regular 'indoor' scenario — which is what I call them, even though technically War Scenarios can be indoor and outdoor. Basically, if you can imagine what the battlefield were to look like outside of an old Orcs scenario, that is a War Scenario.
Well over 1,000 [enemies] can appear in a complete War Scenario, but I don't know the exact numbers per-wave. It's a lot, and it's intimidating when you see the army sort of cascade over the ridges and come into the battlefield. But the War Machines are meant to deal with the intimidating numbers.
Q: So what do the War Machines do, then?
A: The two really big stand-outs are the Mega Boom Barrel Launcher, which is a giant catapult that fires Boom Barrels, and the Rapid-Fire Ballista. The cool thing about those is they are mountable, so the player can get inside of the weapon and man them. They are called 'traps' or 'War Machines' for the purposes of the game, but technically they're like big, gigantic weapons.
They have massive range and power. Think about the grenade or the Boom Barrel from Orcs Must Die! 2, the Boom Barrel might kill five or six orcs, or the grenade from an old Blunderbuss might kill three or four. The Mega Boom Barrel Launcher, when it hits, might kill 50 orcs with one shot. You need that to control the War Scenario armies.
The Rapid-Fire Ballista has very fast firing, it penetrates through orcs, and kills very effectively. Then there are a bunch of other great War Machines too, like a gigantic flip trap, a giant killer beehive, and a tornado in a box. I don't want to give it all away, but there's a lot. I'll just let the fans imagine what some of those things actually do, but they're all pretty cool and some are quite epic. They need to fill the battlefield, right? They need to match the army that's coming at you.
Q: So are War Scenarios purely about killing orcs? Or are there other objectives that players might encounter?
A: No, the design of the gameplay is intentionally the same. We don't want to confuse the objective of an Orcs game, that's what makes them fun right? All the orcs are coming, stop them from getting in the rift. That's always been the plan.
The differences are, aside from the size and the epic stuff we've been talking about, some additions. There's always a boss, and they're different. You have more rift points to work with because, like I said, it's very intimidating and there's a lot of stuff. The space itself is huge, but another big thing is you have a gate or a door that keeps the army from getting into the castle, and from there you have the rifts. Losing the gate is the first step in the process, so-to-speak. You might defend outside for a couple waves and then as your gate gets low on hit points or after you lose your gate, you might have to start trapping up the indoors as well. It's pretty much what you would imagine it would be, and I think fans will be pleased.
Q: Would it be fair to compare the idea to something of an 'objective pushing' mode you might see in games like Overwatch?
A: I wouldn't use an Overwatch as an example. But I would say that like in an old, smaller Orcs scenario you get pushed back further and further to where you have to move around and trap up different parts of the battlefield. Now, believe it or not, we have some really good players at the office who can beat War Scenarios without ever losing their gate, which is fun right?
We also have our higher-level difficulties where things get harder, but I find that if you think in terms of the old scenarios with 100 enemies in a wave, you might want to reduce that down to something manageable before they get into the castle. You're still backing up and fighting as they get closer to the rift. [In War Scenarios] you don't have hard milestones so-to-speak, but in terms of writing you can think of losing the gate as one par and then them actually getting into the rift as the second part. Then when the boss comes through it can be very different, he can change the whole scenario in the last wave.
One good thing fans should know is we made the decision on War Scenarios to give you a Go Break after every wave on Apprentice and War Mage difficulties. That's important because you have a lot of ground to cover, so players need time between fighting how many hundreds of orcs to re-organize, re-trap up, spend their money, things like that. That was sort of a big decision to make for War Scenarios and I think it was the right thing to do.
Q: If there are War Scenarios built into the story campaign, will there be a separate mode for them as well?
A: The War Scenarios are in the campaign, they're available on all difficulties. Because they're so big, you can play them a crazy amount of ways. I've literally gone through the process on specific War Scenarios to try and beat them with entirely different War Machines, entirely different concepts on how to beat the level, and just by virtue of the fact they're so big there's a lot of space for experimentation.
I would imagine in the future if we do DLC for the game and we add weekly challenges and things like that, War Scenarios will be a really cool place to come up with weekly challenges for players. One example might be beating a War Scenario without using a War Machine. Challenges like that that would be interesting to players and allow them to garner more skulls so they can upgrade their stuff and get more skins.
Q: In terms of something like DLC, if there are five War Scenarios now will there be opportunities to add more with different kinds of maps that you guys are thinking of?
A: Absolutely, I think we're learning how to make War Scenarios now. Honestly I can't think of a game that's done it this way, and the reason I say that is because we literally try not to limit you almost at all. There are boundaries to the map, but there is trap grid everywhere. You can do a lot of stuff, which I think is what makes an Orcs game cool. If you think of the old games, there's trap grid all over the ceiling and the walls so you can put traps everywhere, and we're trying to follow that exactly with the War Scenarios.
I think in the future as we get better at making War Scenarios we'll have more of them and more ways to play them.
Q: Orcs Must Die! 3 is going to be exclusive to Stadia for some time. Did that exclusivity affect its design philosophy or the capacity of what you were able to achieve?
A: This is what I've been saying about Stadia. There's all this controversy about Stadia, so if you're a gamer and read about consoles or platforms you've probably read all sorts of stuff about it. But there are two things to me that are awesome about Stadia.
One is no matter what we do as far as the size of a War Scenario, the experience we create will be the same for everyone regardless of their machine. I guess if you have the slowest Internet on the planet you would suffer, but that's for every game. It has nothing to do with Orcs. The point I'm trying to make is that everyone will get the same War Scenario on Stadia because everyone gets that same experience. When you think about that, it's pretty cool because if you have a crappy machine and we released this game you wouldn't be able to have all the things a War Scenario can offer. You'd have to turn off your effects and everything, and live with the best-case scenario you can get... And then also probably have crappy frame rate. But with Stadia, everybody gets the same experience.
Another thing I'd like to say about Stadia is it's pretty impressive technology when you get down to it. The ability to pick up a controller, or a keyboard and a mouse, and play these games on any single screen is impressive. I think people are just going to have to give it a shot, get used to it, and work in the direction of a platform-less, if you will, world in the future. A cloud streaming world. It feels like we'll move in that direction over time, this is definitely the first step.
Q: Did the decision to go with Stadia come after you had time to test it? Or did you make an agreement first and then start to design the game?
A: We were invited to Google a while back to see Stadia and potentially pitch ideas that might be cool. We weren't even talking about Orcs Must Die!, but over time we learned that the guys at the Stadia team were big Orcs fans. They said, "Hey what about Orcs Must Die! 3, are you guys ready to take on something like that?" Then everything sort of evolved from there, so we partnered up.
After that we started talking about what we could do with Orcs Must Die! 3, and War Scenarios and War Machines bubbled up. I don't want to say that was an accident, but it wasn't the plan when we first went there way before anyone got to see it. When we went to see it, we were talking about maybe Robot being able to come up with some cool ideas for Stadia. Things just evolved into a cool partnership.
Q: How long ago was this meeting? What's been the general timeline for how long the game has been in development?
A: The game has been in development a little bit over a year, and it will be out this year. But I don't know, it feels like we went and saw some cool stuff on Stadia maybe even a year before that. You can't quote me on that perfectly, because my dates aren't great, but it could have been as far as two years ago or more, give-or-take. Patrick Hudson, our CEO, would be better to specifically nail that date if you ever get him on the phone.
Q: How long is Orcs Must Die! 3 going to be Stadia exclusive? Is the plan to go to all consoles after that period?
A: I'm not sure I'm allowed to talk about all of that, but I think one would surmise that based on the game and how people are perceiving it we might want to do something more. For now we're focusing on Stadia, we want to make the best game we can given those boundaries.
Q: I get that, I was curious if transitioning onto other platforms would affect the game's design philosophy.
A: I hope not, but we'll have to see. I think we've done an amazing job on the performance of this game considering the numbers you're going to deal with. I'm sure in the coming future people will start to see a lot of new stuff, that's why we're doing these interviews. The guys in the programming department are friggin' awesome when it comes to that stuff, and it's pretty impressive.
Q: Other than the War Scenarios, about how long is the game's story?
A: That's a really hard question to answer. If you're a great player, you jump into the first War Scenario, and beat it your first time, a single one can still take 30 minutes. I would imagine some players might spend quite a bit of game time trying to decide how to beat a War Scenario or to five skull it, and that's a whole different world. Some people just don't accept one skulling a level and moving on.
That actually makes designing this game very difficult. Some people consider one skulling a level losing, which just isn't the truth. We allow you to move through all the content at the pace you wish. But in general I think we've been saying [Orcs Must Die! 3 is] more hours than any other Orcs game as far as getting through the campaign. I can't remember all the hourly quotes on 1 and 2, but 3 is 18 scenarios alone, and then there's the whole endless component with a bunch of levels and endless campaign levels. Then you've got all the different difficulties, all the unlocks you get when you beat the campaign...
There's a lot more Orcs game there than in 1 and 2, that's for sure.
Q: You mentioned designing for different players because there are so many ways to play. Has your team perceived the audience reaction while waiting for the game, or gotten a sense for what they're expecting?
A: We have a group that are crazy hardcore Orcs players, we call them the Red Pod. Some of these guys go way back as old Orcs Must Die! fans, some of them are into the Orcs Must Die! dark arts — I don't know if you've heard of that, but apparently there are people that make YouTube videos focusing on killing a single unit with as many traps as possible, stuff like that.
So we found this group of people, and we really respect their feedback. I have to say one thing, they do not pull punches. These guys beat the crap out of our games and say 'this sucks' and 'that's good,' or 'this is great' and 'that's bad.' We get all the feedback from these guys very, very early because they're some of our most critical fans.
As far as people who have gotten to play outside of Red Pod, it's been received pretty well. Like I said, people are impressed by the War Scenarios. It's very intimidating to sit down and see that giant army coming at you, but beating it is very rewarding. By far the hardest thing for us to solve and design sometimes is the rating system we have. It's very hard for people to accept a one-skill victory, and we offer three difficulties too.
I think it's very friendly. It's friendly to say 'well I'm a five-skull Apprentice player but I'm only a two- or three-skull War Mage player, and I haven't even tried Rift Lord yet.' There's a lot of room in there. and the skull system is almost like a difficulty within a difficulty. We allow you to move through the content either way, it's just getting more skills for upgrades and things in your spellbook, and that's something you hopefully get out of replayability.
But yeah, the Red Pod would be the fans that if they're happy, I guarantee you everyone else is going to be happy.
Q: Is 'Red Pod' what these players call themselves? Or is that just what the developers refer to them as?
A: I think it's what we call them. They're our go-to, hardcore fans — and when I say hardcore I don't just mean hardcore gamers, I mean they're hardcore Orcs Must Die! fans as well as gamers. Some might not be Rift Lord players, but hardcore in the sense that they don't miss a trick. They have lots to say, and we take all of it.
When I get feedback, I answer all of it. I respond to every line, whether we can or can't do it, or just talking about what we're going to change. I'll bet you on this game alone, if you count all the feedback we've taken based on Orcs Must Die! 1 and 2, I've read between 5,000 and 10,000 lines over the dev process. It's all taken very seriously.
I don't know if you know much about the people working at Robot's past, working for Ensemble Studios on the Age of Empires games, but that's always been our process. We really respect and are sincere about getting and responding to feedback. We're good at it, and we're relentless about it. I think we're better than most, and the smallest voice can get heard through our process.
Q: So you said there's possible DLC planned out, or some sort of service for the game?
A: All the DLC stuff has not been completely worked out, but yeah. There will be support for Orcs Must Die! 3 on Stadia for that full exclusivity.
Q: How long do you think the lifespan of the game is going to be? Are there plans for whatever's next at Robot?
A: We've always got things going on. We don't talk about new stuff, but Robot keeps going forward.
For the Orcs world, I and the rest of the narrative team try very hard to keep our story written and think forward or backwards — I don't want to spoil anything there, but it might be a little hint at some things. We try to think 'what if we make Orcs Must Die! 4,' or 'what if we make Orcs Must Die! 10,' you know? We try to keep that in mind and talk about our dreams and hopes
But with the gaming industry, you never know when things for a franchise will come to an end. I think Orcs is strong though, it has a very strong fan story following, which is good because it's funny and lighthearted. It seems to strike a nerve with a lot of people.
Q: I can imagine it will keep a lot of its comedic core with things like beehive War Machine.
A: Yes, and the tornado in a box. You never know what's going to happen with that, do you?
Q: Is there anything else you want to add?
A: Just that we have a remarkable fanbase for Orcs, which is cool. If you look at some of our past numbers on platforms like Steam and PlayStation, you'll find that some people who play Orcs play it for a very long time. We have some of the best retention numbers as far as gameplay session goes.
When someone sits down to play Orcs, a lot of times they play for an hour, hour-and-a-half, two hours. Obviously that's going to vary by player, but in general we've got great fans and we're really happy with that. We want to continue to give them more of what they like about Orcs. I don't want to reinvent the wheel, but I want to come up with new traps, things that make the franchise fresh and new story-wise. But we want to make sure we keep giving them more of what they want, which sometimes the answer is 'more.' More levels, more traps, more enemies. We try very, very hard to fulfill those wishes [end interview].
All in all, it sounds like fans of the franchise have a lot to look forward to with Orcs Must Die! 3. It sounds like it'll be a solid title for Stadia as well and be rewarding for those who have past entries; after all, these orcs needs to die.
Orcs Must Die! 3 will be a timed exclusive on Google Stadia starting in Spring 2020.
Post a Comment