Hey War Mages – Kyle here – game director on Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap. We’ve been hard at work on adding some new ways to play and some extra challenge for those looking for it. I’ve been excited to tell you all about this because we’ve been having a ton of fun playing it. So, let’s get into it:
The first addition is the smallest, but ties into the new modes as well. You can now crank the difficulty slider up to 20 – the previous cap was 10. This drastically increases enemy health and damage. I know some of you have reached this scaling during runs, but it feels quite a bit different when you start there with no Threads.
When you approach the Rift in the Order Fortress, you’ll now see two additional mode options. The first you’ll see is Challenge Mode. These are extra difficult challenge runs handcrafted by our designers that can be played solo or in co-op.
I’ve always loved the challenges in previous OMD games, and here we wanted to experiment with some new ideas as well. Unlike previous games, you’ll be able to take the War Mage and trap loadout (and elixir) of your choice into the Challenge.
The Challenges feature custom waves of enemies as well as some Distortions created exclusively for this mode. There are other factors that you’ll see affected by the Challenges: Rift Points, Difficulty slider, Barricade count, and whether your trap and skill tree upgrades are active.
Another cool change compared to previous Challenge modes is that these Challenges can be multiple Missions long. Some are just one Mission, but others are three or five.
There are ten Challenges to start with, and each keeps track of your high score. Some even grant new cosmetics you can equip to your War Mage when you complete them. Note: Some of these are obtained via Endurance Mode (which we'll get to shortly)!
The Challenges are tough, but they’re fun and they get us thinking about beating the levels in new ways.
We hear the calls for Endless mode, we’ve been testing, and we will continue listening. However, we’re also adding a new mode called Endurance Mode that we think takes the best parts of Endless while cutting out the fluff and frustrating aspects.
Endurance Mode allows you to play 25 waves on a single map. That’s 25 waves of placing traps and choosing Threads, so by the end, your killbox should look pretty impressive.
Okay, 25 waves, so it ends, but what improvements does Endurance Mode have over Endless? First, the beginning 10 waves or so of an Endless mission are rote and easy. We wanted to skip that part, so the base Endurance mode starts at Difficulty 10. From there, the enemy health and damage scales on every seventh wave.
That’s the second advantage over Endless – we only scale health and damage. We know the Mission ends after 25 waves, so we don’t feel the need to scale and add features like CC resistance, which previous Endless modes had.
Thirdly, unlike previous Endless modes, you’ll still get a Go Break between every wave like in every other Mission in Deathtrap.
The base Endurance missions only feature one Distortion outside of the enemy scaling, and that’s a coin reduction on enemy kills. This is not to limit the number of traps you can place. However, because we start you at Difficulty 10, you’ll immediately be getting some big combos, and through playtesting we found the default coin generation to just make the mode easy to an unfun degree.
Like in Challenge Mode, we can also affect your Rift Points and starting Barricades. Each Endurance mission starts with 20 Rift Points and 16 Barricades.
Each Endurance mission tracks and displays your high score, and just like the Challenges, some even have cosmetic unlocks. We’re starting with 10 Endurance missions.
And for those who still aren’t challenged enough, we have a second page featuring Nightmare versions of each Endurance mission. These crank the Difficulty slider up to 20 and add three more Distortions: War Mages can no longer be revived by teammates, Overdrive takes twice as many combos to fill, and War Mage Rift Point loss on death doubled.. These don’t offer any cosmetic unlocks because so few of you are even going to be attempting these, but they still track your high score. Tip: Don’t forget your elixir.
An Endurance mission takes us about two to three hours to complete. So, while it does end, we do hope it captures what people are looking for – which is extending that time spent on a map, playing in different parts of a level, experimenting with different trap setups, and really building out that killbox – all while being challenged.
We’ve had a lot of fun building and playing this new content, and we hope it scratches that itch you’ve had for some more challenge. Let us know how it goes. Good luck out there!
PS There’s more to share and show for this patch – keep an eye out for our preview video.