Today I arrived home to learn everything I had enjoyed in Orcs Must Die! Unchained (currently in open beta) had been ripped out and tossed aside: the Siege mode (a weird hybrid of tower/trap defense and MOBA) has been removed to focus solely on the cooperative Survival mode. The official blog post states it's because Siege mode "isn’t building a healthy long-term community around itself". I've invested over 300 hours in OMDU myself, so I definitely have a stake in what's happening... and a rather strong opinion about why it happened. But let's start with how we ended up here:

The History

The original Orcs Must Die! is a third-person over-the-shoulder "tower defense" game... although "trap defense" would be a more fitting term. Waves of orcs and other monsters streamed in from various doors and tried to enter a magical rift in the center of the map; it was your job to set up traps to slice, skewer, and incinerate them before they could reach it, picking off any survivors with your trusty rapid-fire crossbow. It stood out from its competition by having a cartoonish style and pacing that wouldn't look out-of-place next to a Warner Bros. cartoon; a protagonist clearly based off Bruce Campbell didn't hurt, either). I played it when it came out, beat it, and enjoyed it; it wasn't one of my favorite games of the year, but I considered it $15 well-spent.

Orcs Must Die! 2 was released about a year after the original and was very similar to the first one, with the big addition being a 2nd protagonist and 2-player cooperative play. I also played it, but without any interest in the cooperative play, I dropped it after several hours of gametime and never finished it.

Orcs Must Die! Unchained has subsequently been in development (and closed alpha/beta) for several years since OMD2 was released; it was finally released on Steam as a free-to-play open beta this spring. That's when I got back into it; I still had fond memories of the original OMD and wanted to see what they did with the competitive mode, which I had heard was a MOBA...

Siege Mode

OMDU Siege mode was, frankly, the weirdest MOBAlike game mode I've ever played. It had enough fundamental differences that, when the developers later told us "it initially wasn't a MOBA, it just... kind of evolved into that", I believed them. For instance, instead of minions crashing into minions on each lane, it's minions against a variety of killboxes and traps you set up. Each lane is distinctly Offense (your minions) or Defense (their minions), with players primarily focusing on a single role/lane instead of constantly swapping between defense and offense. As the game progressed and both sides earned Minion Experience, the waves grew stronger and you needed larger (and deadlier) killboxes to keep them from reaching your rift. If you were on defense, your goal wasn't winning your lane so much as "losing it slower than them", which led to several nail-biting games where you were trying to hold off their attackers long enough for yours to make the final push into their rift.

There were also no items to buy in-match; you chose a loadout of traps & minions before you started the match and you used the coin you earned in-match to buy and place them. Rather than buying a half-dozen items for stat upgrades, you placed a few dozen traps for everyone to see. Defense was not just a finely-tuned killing machine, it was an artistic statement where players could put their own spin on the killbox. (I personally preferred a No-Barricade All-Fire Traps loadout that was surprisingly effective despite ignoring the general consensus that every good killbox needed Barricades.)

It had a slew of problems, of course (open beta, after all), but it did things differently enough I sunk a few hundred hours into it regardless and followed its development fervently.

The Problems

The biggest problem was it was hard to understand. Siege mode looked like a MOBA, but it played so differently novices were tripped up by the mechanics. Players on offense didn't realize they had to escort their minions to protect them from the enemy's traps and would instead default to the gameplay they expected from a trap defense game, namely setting traps to defend. Unfortunately, this tended to interfere with the actual defenders' killboxes; between the limpwristed offensive push and the crippled defenses, the enemy team had an easy time breaking through and winning.

This wouldn't be a problem if the community was larger, but with only a few dozen playing Siege at most times, newbies were regularly paired with (and against) top-ranking OMDU players. It only got worse when premade groups were put into the same queue as non-premade groups; by creating a 5-man premade (enough to fill up an entire team), veterans could shunt all of the solo queue and newbie players onto the opposite team, pretty much guaranteeing a steamroll victory. The steamrolled newbies would quit Siege mode never to play again, and it got so bad a lot of solo queue veterans like myself ended up either joining a premade ourselves or just not playing whenever one of the full-man premades was online.

The veterans didn't help matters much, either. There was no bug, quirk, or broken hero they wouldn't exploit for all it was worth, even if it completely broke the game, and the devs took months to patch the exploits and imbalances (way too long for a competitive online game). Afterwards, several of those veterans took to the forums gloating about how successful their premades were, or how many newbies they chewed up and spat out. The community divided itself into players to get more newbies in and players trying to exploit said newbies, and in the process got so toxic I nearly quit participating entirely.

So my theory? The game probably could've recovered from the low player base and steep learning curve, but the game's own community strangled it and the devs didn't move fast enough to stop it. More testimony for the theory an online game's greatest threat is its own players.