Dungeon Defenders is a fps, tower defense, strategy and RPG game developed by the nice people over at Trendy Entertainment. The only series they are currently known for is Dungeon Defenders with only two games so far, Dungeon Defenders and Dungeon Defenders II. Dungeon Defenders four starting heroes are the Squire, Monk, Huntress and Apprentice in which you are called upon to save your parents, adult versions of yourself from the land of Etheria. The last map is called Crystalline Dimension which is the only map in the whole entire game in which you will encounter your parents that have been kidnapped frozen into a crystalline substance. You face an enemy, a final boss known as the Old one which is a term that is symbolic of a satanic type demon. Your main goal in the whole game is to survive wave after wave with hordes of enemies such as sharken, djinn, goblins, trolls, ogres, wyverns, spiders and others as you have thousands of enemies usually per wave. The end goal is to survive all waves and make it to a final boss on each map on the campaign mode. It has a story, xp leveling system, loot, pets, items, weapons and accessories characteristic of most role-playing games.


Trading System/ Farming Community/ Trading Forums
If you have been playing computer games for a long while and have never heard of farming, let me now educate you on it and my personal pet peeve and vendetta with it. Farming is an action in role-playing games that are composed of loot and is needed in the progressing of the game in order to improve damage and defense output against enemies and large bosses. Farming is a systematic process and cycle that habitually reoccurs whereby players grind to get a variety of weapons, armor, pets and accessories with different tiers, rarities and qualities. So, farming by itself seems like a rather harmless endeavor that was originally meant for the progression of games in which a random number generator selects random stats, some good, some missing in key areas and some with all important stats that use specific algorithms towards item production which is then consumed by users for their own personal gain within the game and can even be sold on trading forums.

The Misconceptions of the Farming Agglomerated Half of the Community
Hackers have been present in Dungeon Defenders since the first three months of its PC release in late 2011 right before the Christmas holiday. Item checkers were called upon to volunteer their time given special privileges and spreadsheets in order to validate the authenticity of all stats on weapons, pets, duped event items without a trace, and duped weapons, pets and armor that lie outside of the minimum and maximum values they are given to work with that are spawnable in the actual game. The random number generated catastrophe led others at the time in 2013 towards a new downloadable content map called Lab Assault that soon came out. Trendy's only motivation for releasing this map was to generate more numbers in the community since many people were leaving their game and numbers of people playing in the community finally reached an all-time low before summer 2013. In order to avoid this, they instituted what is now one of the largest farming endeavor maps into more modern gaming. Lab assault is a tedious and laborious map that last anywhere from three to four minutes per run meant to provide users with a very quick shortcut towards obtaining the highest armor in the game. Armor ranges in the following order of rarity: godly, mythical, transcendent, ultimate, ultimate plus and ultimate plus-plus.

In order to use transcendent items, one must be level 78, ultimate; level 90; and ultimate plus and beyond; the max level 100. The goal is to get armor pieces of the same kind in order to form a full set composed of four pieces. Then, once you get a full set, you get a set bonus which increases your overall stats as well as any resistances you have taken time to upgrade.


Pros
•A rewarding game environment in which other users collaborate and can farm items together while having fun smacking ogres, goblins, trolls and tough bosses together over and over towards mastery of different defense placements and setups
•A nice dedicated community of people driven by their love and passion to see the game's survival
•A tactful game that never gets boring, stale; there is always so much to do
•Great trading community, armor types; rarities, characters and downloadable content worth every dollar you spend on it
•Classes need to constantly be switched at the forge in game in order to place defenses, which usually one player on a good team does while the rest defend

Cons
•Terribly addictive and when I mean terrible addictive, I mean to the point of ad nauseam due to the farming nature of the community divided half and half into the casual and then the hardcore dedicated regular players that farm every day and week
•Hackers always present though there have been future steps in the sequel, Dungeon Defenders II to fully prevent hackers because they remodeled their servers to be client-side instead of server-side
•Endless replayability
•Each round can last up from forty-five minutes up to an hour per run on the top difficulty

Overall 8 - I do recommend it but be careful to the incredible addictive tendency of the game's elements, the trading system and the farming, darker side of the community

Overall, Dungeon Defenders is a family-friendly game for all the kids, teens and adults out there looking for something fun and endless to play in the role-playing and tower defense cross-platform genre. However, due to its constant persistence on the farming side of the community, it has inevitably led to its downfall and any chance of surviving. The community development team currently has been doing update after update to improve upon the game's features, maps, rewards and mechanics. However, this also means that those that are addicted to the game like I was can never leave it or it will be much harder to. I have presented my views towards this over time towards the community and also questioned it in light of all the paradigms that have overtime posed a great emotional, cognitive, psychological and illicit response in the community. At first, my thoughts both towards Trendy Entertainment behind their support I found on Facebook upon Dungeon Defenders II when it was in early access stating that people needed to take off work to farm all day long after the new update they had made, I decided not to support a company like this whose hidden intention is to keep a dying user base at times constantly hooked and coming back.

This is the reason why downloadable content in the early planning stages were released so rapidly to maintain that ambition and degree of pleasure over selfish greed, ambition and callous actions that promote a negative overall attitude in the community instead of humility and helping others before yourself. This alone led to people sometimes maintaining bragging rights and at the end of the time farming for virtual wealth while maintaining their own insecurities that some, though not all may have in real-life.

I played Dungeon Defenders on the Xbox 360 a few years ago and it was easily one of my favorite games that I've ever played. The PC version is just as good. Between the DLC characters and maps and still functional online mode, it's become a favorite of mine once again.

Used to be great, but then the leaderboard/item hackers and extremely grind-requiring new DLC came out (If wanting to do it on harder difficulties). Some player created server hosts were being very elitist towards players without hacked gear (or asked to stfu and just AFK), too.

9.5/10 back then, now maybe 7/10.

Let's see if I can put my thoughts together on this...

When I first heard about Dungeon Defenders I was incredibly excited. I've loved Tower Defense games for a while and always been a fan of Co-Op games. So when I heard there was a Co-Op Tower Defense RPG coming out I couldn't wait! Once my friends and I got our hands on it we had a blast. Sure it had some problems... Squires were OP, Survival was too easy, ranged enemies would attack behind the spawn shield... but it was really fun! Eventually the first part of their expansion came out, that's when things went downhill.

Trendy decided to add a new difficulty level in their expansion, since players thought the game was too easy. On "Nightmare" difficulty Player/Tower stats were altered to make the game more balanced . A new item tier "Mythical" was added for Nightmare, presumably to incentivize playing it. Which sounds good until you find out Mythical items had massively inflated stats, trivialising past content. Though to be fair, getting said gear incredibly difficult. Drop rates on Mythical were very low on all but the hardest maps. Seeing how those maps were balanced around you having Mythical gear, pretty much the only way to get the gear was to join someone who was hardcore and farmed early maps for it or was also carried.

Did I forget to mention they added new enemies for Nightmare? The Spider was the first one they added. Having a new set of (invisible) spawn locations, chosen to backdoor common defense locations, they would web towers drastically reducing fire rate and increasing the damage they would take. Thankfully spiders would prioritize players, webbing them and reducing movement speed, attack rate as well as preventing the use of abilities. Djinn were the second ones added, flying enemies that have the ability to "instantly" destroy defenses with a cast time based on what tier the defense was. Also possesing the ability to buff enemy units, turning them gold and making them significantly stronger. Sharken were the third, having the ability to charge through defenses pushing them out of the way. Probably the least obnoxious of the new enemies. Lastly the Goblin Copter, flying enemies that would spawn from Wyvern spawn locations. They would spawn carrying an Ogre and proceed to fly somewhere on the map and drop them off. If you made the mistake of not killing it before then, it would proceed to fire player seeking missiles, anti-tower flares and rockets at players/defenses. They also made Ogres much more common on Nightmare, in case all the previous wasn't enough.

Trendy, confident in their new found balance, proceeded to add new maps with this in mind. Basically having the difficulty options be varying differences of Nightmare difficulty, new enemies included. Most of the maps they added were well designed (some not so much). Unfortunately to play these maps you have to own them (shocker). To be fair, Trendy had this odd business model of having (most) maps be free the first two weeks after their release. Now a days you have to buy them and there are A LOT of them.

They also added some new classes, Barbarian for pure melee DPS, Series EV able to wield two ranged weapons and use an adjustable wall and a buff beam, Summoner for pure builders with movable towers and Jester for pure ranged DPS and minor trolling. Though the first classes they added were gender swapped versions of the vanilla heroes, with slightly different abilities. All of these you had to pay for as well, though I'd say they're all worth it (excluding the gender swaps).

Overall, Trendy hit gold with this game and did a pretty good job at keeping it alive. Personally I don't like what Nightmare did to the game but I think they had a lot of good ideas. Dungeon Defenders is definitely a game worth playing, if you haven't for some reason. Just make sure you get some friends to play it with and don't expect to play all the maps unless you're REALLY into it. DLC strongly recommended.


Also Trendy seems to have granted a community team the ability to officially update the game, so maybe we'll see some cool stuff out of that.

Back when I was on Windows 7, this game was awesome. I spent a lot of time completing the main campaign and challenges and leveled up a lot of characters of all classes. Some of the updates back in the day sort of put me off, and I stopped playing it. Now, fast forward a few years.

This game was not even in the back of my mind when I switched to Ubuntu. I saw that the game was getting the Rising Phoenix update. Awesome! Come to find out that the CDT (Community Development Team) took over updates for the game! Even better!

After not playing for a few years, I installed it and played it. Not only did the Rising Phoenix update not come to the Linux version, but the same bugs and mis-features are still present that has been plaguing the Mac and Linux version for years, as evident by the warnings on the PC Gaming Wiki page , which quite frankly should be present on the store page.

With all the reports of a dying player base, and Mac/Linux players being left in the dust, stay far away from this one, even on sale. Glad I enjoyed it during its golden days. Shame on you, Trendy.

Excellent tower defense game, similar to Orcs Must Die, but slightly slower. Still very much fun with it's own blend of heroes, skills, towers, careful planning and acting out of your defense. Multiple systems and layers to keep you going for a long time. Great to play solo or coop.

Highly recommended to any TD genre fan.

It's easy to get into and has an unlimited amount of reply value as you master the game. The artstyle is nice too.

Plus for jump in out co-op and splitscreen online

No microtransactions.

A good hard worked game. Deserves to be in most top 10 game lists.

Very enjoyable game!