Alan Wilson, vice president of Tripwire Interactive, tells me his studio probably wouldn’t exist without the Make Something Unreal Tournament that Nvidia and Epic Games hosted in the early 2000s. "I’d say it’s 99 percent certain," he says.In 2003 he and his roughly 60-person team were the rock stars of the Unreal Tournament modding scene, having successfully and breathtakingly transformed sci-fi arena shooter Unreal Tournament 2003 into Red Orchestra, the brutally realistic shooter set in World War II’s Eastern Front. Is it possible everyone involved could have used the experience to launch individual careers at big game studios? Of course. It happens with mods all the time. But only Epic Games’ support—and the award of a then-outrageously expensive Unreal game engine license—could have transformed the whole team into the studio we now know for Killing Floor, Red Orchestra 2, and Rising Storm 2.

You’ve probably heard this story before. Hell, we’ve told it ourselves. But the lesser known backstory is that Tripwire was only one of the successful indie studios that grew out of the Unreal Tournament modding scene and the the Make Something Unreal competition. Compared to the more familiar tale of major studios or publishers buying the rights to a mod and then turning it into DotA 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, or PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the Unreal Tournament modding scene stands out for having created fully fledged studios. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say the indie scene we know today wouldn't be the same without it.

The many children of Unreal Tournament

Notably, Tripwire’s other hit Killing Floor grew out of the modding scene for Unreal Tournament 2004. But beyond Tripwire, there’s Coffee Stain Studios, best known for the oddball Goat Simulator—itself a creation of the Unreal Engine—but who also created the stunning first-person tower defense game Sanctum as a mod for UT3. There’s Sjoerd De Jong’s Teotl Studios, known for The Ball and The Solus Project, and New Zealand’s Digital Confectioners, who successfully launched shark survival game Depth, itself once an Unreal Tournament mod, on Steam. 

The Unreal modding scene created a perfect storm we haven t really seen since.

Still others followed the "adoption" model like DotA and Counter-Strike, including the team behind Alien Swarm, an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod that was picked up by Valve and released as a new game in 2010. Psyonix didn't directly emerge from the Unreal Tournament modding scene, but as Gamasutra reported in 2015, its hit Rocket League ultimately has its roots in a mod founder Dave Hagewood made for UT2003.With a list like that, it’s tempting to wonder if many moderns games don’t allow extensive modding out of fear it could create too much competition. Epic, though, has long encouraged this kind of creativity. Unreal Tournament led to the founding of so many studios in part because Epic allowed its modders almost total freedom with its Unreal Engine in an age when "modding" often meant swapping weapon skins and making theme levels. Combining active support and encouragement from Epic itself with a large, enthusiastic modding community centered around a single popular series where it was relatively easy to make a name for oneself, the scene created a perfect storm we haven’t really seen since. 

An engine of creation

Hearing early Unreal Tournament modders talk about the freedom of the Unreal Engine sounds almost like hearing tales of religious conversion. More than a decade later, there’s still a note of reverence in the words of Sjoerd De Jong, founder of Teotl Studios (and, these days, the European evangelist for the Unreal Engine), as he speaks about his first experiences with Unreal. "It was 'What You See Is What You Get' in 1998, and way ahead of other tools when it came out," he says. "It was a revolution in terms of game dev tools. Unreal (and consequently Unreal Tournament I) was the first game that was able to blend different light colors together, it was able to display lighting directly in the viewport in the editor, it had a procedural texture generator and editor, it had volumetric fog, it had superb reflective surface support, it had dynamic lighting. And so on."

Anton Westbergh of Coffee Stain Studios had the same thoughts about it years later in 2009 when he was working on the original mod form of Sanctum. "Sanctum was a first-person shooter and a tower defense game, so we had to find an engine that allowed our team to get cranking quickly and since we were very visually driven, the potential and power of the Unreal Engine was appealing," he says. "It was easy to get up and going, and make something that looked great." 

The road to Red Orchestra

The team that would become Tripwire was among the converted. Early in the 2000s, they dabbled in the mysteries of the engines used by Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Battlefield 1942 for their ambitious project, but cast them aside once they discovered Unreal.

Like, buy a $10 copy of UT2K, and you're creating real games stuff

"In terms of graphics, the Unreal engine is one of the best on the market," modder Antarian said in an interview with IGN at the time. "Its ability to support massive maps and models with huge poly counts and texture sizes allows us to make some truly stunning environments."

So liberating was Unreal Tournament 2003 as a modding platform that there’s barely a trace of it in the original Red Orchestra mod. Here instead was a game with "real-world" iron sights rather than crosshairs and grenades that damage from a distance, all set in the bleak eastern front of World War II where Nazis clashed with Russians amid ruins held up more by luck than gravity.Red Orchestra transcended modding. Gaming had really seen nothing like it until then, and elements of it made their way into shooters that followed. The effort made Tripwire a proper studio almost by default. But Sjoerd De Jong discovered the Unreal Tournament modding scene came with other benefits besides providing a blank canvas. The business of promoting his mods, he notes, translated into the business of running a studio. 

"Modding taught me a whole number of things that I otherwise wouldn't have easily mastered, I think," he says, describing his process of envisioning, developing, testing, and marketing his more than 50 popular maps and seeking out reviewers for them. "It taught me to deliver and get stuff done. It taught me to work with what I have (the game), and then be creative with those building blocks. It taught me about limitations in general, because modding is all about working within an existing game."

People looking for a career tend to be more focused on going with indie game dev than with modding nowadays

But at the heart of it all was always the accessibility of the Unreal Engine. "Like, buy a $10 copy of UT2K, and you're creating real games stuff," Wilson tells me. "Now you have the whole Unreal Engine (and others) completely free to use. We give talks at schools and colleges and always hammer home this point: this stuff is completely free to you to pick up."Epic’s commitment to this type of creative freedom was so potent that in 2004 it partnered with Nvidia to kick off the first Make Something Unreal contest, which was aimed at granting $1 million to modders who produced the best work so they could advance their careers in game development. Few projects like it had been seen before or even since.That first year, Tripwire’s Red Orchestra won the award for "Best First-Person Shooter" handily. As it turned out though, the $1 million prize really amounted to around $50,000, as most of the prize money was wrapped up in licensing. But it opened many doors that would have been closed otherwise. "It gave us exposure, publicity, feedback, experience, and an engine license we couldn't have afforded on our own at that time," Wilson says of Tripwire’s win. 

Anton Westbergh’s team won fourth place in both the Best FPS Mod and Educational categories with Sanctum in the 2009 MSU competition, and he discovered cash prizes weren't the only benefit of winning. "It gave the team a big morale boost," Westbergh says. "Without the success in the competition, I'm not sure Coffee Stain would have been around."

Four Make Something Unreal competitions were held in all, but there hasn’t been one since 2013. That’s partly because in 2015 Epic simply started giving out grants to anyone who created something with the Unreal engine that impressed them.

Yet Tripwire, for its part, hasn’t forgotten the role the contest played in its own creation, and to that end it’s currently hosting its own contest to encourage modding for its game Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, which it’s running in partnership with Antimatter Games. On January 15 of next year, the lucky first-place winner will receive a $27,500 top prize. "Anything that helps focus the creativity of all these community content creators is worthwhile," he tells me. 

The changing face of modding

So why haven’t we seen another wave of successful indie studios growing out of a specific game’s modding community? In De Jong’s view, the conditions are no longer the same. "People looking for a career tend to be more focused on going with indie game dev than with modding nowadays," he says. "A shame, I think."

He points out that fewer games support modding, and that there’s now a larger focus on business models like free-to-play that don’t play as nicely with mods. For that matter, he says, modding is simply less prestigious. There’s less demand, and great mods aren’t as frequently in the news. 

"I remember when I was making levels back in the days we had lots of community sites, and each of them had a Level of the Week, Level of the Month, and so forth section on their front page," he says. "The content was pushed forward, and most gamers too within the Half-Life/Quake/Unreal communities back then played custom levels and mods very often. Nowadays that isn't the case anymore."

Wilson scoffs at the idea, saying that "the floodgates opened a decade ago and it hasn’t really slowed up yet." He points to other games that started out as mods like DayZ and PUBG, and reminds me that Tripwire's own Killing Floor and the Red Orchestra franchise allow for content creation.

Epic, fittingly enough, played a major role in this shift to indie game creation when it opened Unreal Engine 4 to everyone—license-free—in 2015. All Epic asked was a 5 percent royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. You don’t have to look far to find the fruits of this development, which extend to everything from blockbusters like Gears of War 4 to the quiet Myst-like Obduction or the long-awaited Shenmue 3. 

All the same, though, the associated freedom makes the fight to the top so much harder. Modding communities in the busy early days gave hopeful developers an already-large and enthusiastic community. Standing out was comparatively easy, thanks in part to the developer attention De Jong described.

Nowadays, though you may be starting with the Unreal engine at your command, you’re starting from scratch with everything else. That means not only does your game have to be good, it also has to rise through cluttered spaces like YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, all while wrestling with the Kickstarters and Patreons and other precarious means of gaining funding. Compared to the glory days of Unreal Tournament modding, it’s work that’s done in comparative isolation.

Were the old days better? That’s not an easy claim to make, considering that we’re smack in the middle of a golden age of indie gaming.But I do believe the path from mod to studio was slightly better then, bolstered as it was by well-meaning publishers and developers, a gaming community that loved mods more and was more tightly focused on specific games, and competitions hosted by big-name manufacturers and studios that gave modders high-profile venues to showcase their greatness. Fittingly, it was a bit like a tournament, and one that unfolded in an arena where fans could cheer on the favorites they’d come to love.The modern approach feels more like shouting in a crowd, hoping your voice will be heard among the hundreds of thousands around you. Compared to the wonderful alchemy allowed by Unreal Tournament and Epic in the last decade, success in those conditions feels almost unreal.

Phil tells me he's lost friends score-chasing in Waves, but I don't play score attack games any more. Not since the incident. However, if you're up for straining your relationships with a glow-in-the-dark twin-stick shooter, Waves 2 (Waves Squared, I should say) will be crashing into Early Access on December 16.

The original Waves had you rolling around a cyberspace arena with the distinct air of Geometry Wars, blasting swarms of corrupt processes trying to take down your network. The sequel doesn't look like a dramatic departure at this juncture, although the arena has changed shape and it certainly looks sharper. Developer Squid In A Box has scheduled Early Access to last six months as new weapons, modes, power-ups and enemies are added.

The Steam Workshop is a giant thing, containing over 24,000 Skyrim mods, over 413,000 Portal 2 levels and, for some reason, over 100 Goat Simulator characters and mutators. It's also a profitable thing. Team Fortress 2, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive all have curated Workshops—letting players pick the community-made items that will go on sale in the game.

Valve has now announced that, since the launch of the Workshop in 2011, the total payments to individuals for the creation of in-game items has surpassed $57 million.

Previously, only Valve games had curated item Workshops—something Valve attributes to the "sheer number of challenges required in order to scale to a global audience of creators and players". Seemingly, these hurdles have been overcome, as the Workshop is now hosting curated item Workshops for Chivalry: Medieval Warfare and Dungeon Defenders: Eternity.

"Purchases of this great new content directly enables those community members to continue practicing their craft and making more awesome content," writes Valve, before going on to say that they expect more curated Workshops in "the coming weeks and months".

Nearly three years after Dungeon Defenders came to the PC, the "definitive version" of the game is available as Dungeon Defenders Eternity, an all-in-one package offering "previously released material, new content, redesigned gameplay balance and cross-platform play." It is not, however, the sequel, which is still in the works.

A tower defense/RPG hybrid, Dungeon Defenders didn't knock it out of the park in our review, but it was a big success nonetheless, moving more than one million copies across all platforms by early 2012. That was enough to spur a sequel, announced in 2013, and while work continues on that, developer Trendy Games has made it a little easier to pass the time by bundling up the original with new features, new options and new levels.

"As we get closer to the arrival of Dungeon Defenders 2, we re thrilled to revisit the title that forged the franchise," Darrell Rodriguez, CEO of developer Trendy Entertainment, said in a statement. "Dungeon Defenders Eternity is in many ways a product of our players, built around feedback from fans. Having an open dialog with our fans is core to all our efforts at Trendy, and that same philosophy is being actively applied to our work on the sequel as well."

While it's essentially the same game as the original, it's been "rebuilt from the ground up," with rebalanced heroes, a redesigned loot system and more tools for players to use in defense of their dungeons. It also adds visible armor, a new dashing system, consumable boosters, increased security by way of dedicated servers and four new missions, with more planned as free add-ons in the future.

Dungeon Defenders Eternity is available now from Steam for $15, a launch week promotion of $5 off the regular price. Gamers who already own Dungeon Defenders will get 45 percent off the regular price until September 22, and anyone who buys it will also get exclusive items, titles and pets in Dungeon Defenders 2 when it launches.

Grab a cup of eggnog, a candy cane, some other Christmas clich s, and celebrate the holiday with developer Tripwire Interactive's fourth annual Killing Floor Twisted Christmas event. This year, it brings us two new maps, "Hell" and "Forgotten," both from the mind of community mapper swift_brutal_death. That just screams holiday cheer to me, or maybe what we're all wishing for anyway as we untangle the Christmas lights.

The limited-time event also brings back all the previous Twisted Christmas maps and enemies, and another opportunity to unlock the special Baddest Santa character and ZED gun.

If you want to get in on the fun, now would be a good time, as Killing Floor is 50 percent off on Steam ($9.99) until Jan. 2.

Tripwire Interactive also used the opportunity to announce new content for its other big game, The Ball. The new content pack is free, and includes a two-hour campaign. All players who own The Ball will now also be able to use its protagonist, Harchier Spebbington, in Killing Floor. The Ball is also 50 percent off ($4.99) until Jan. 2.







 

It's been two years since Dungeon Defenders' quartet of child heroes saved the color-saturated world of Etheria with a mixture of tower defense and action RPG hacking, slashing and shooting. Since 2011, the Squire, Apprentice, Monk and Huntress have all grown into taller, lankier teenagers. Dungeon Defenders 2's tower defense fusion has grown up with them.

I donned the Apprentice's floppy wizard hat for a preview of Dungeon Defenders 2 with Trendy Entertainment's lead content designer Daniel Haddad and marketing director Philip Asher. The build we played represented only four months of work for Trendy, so it was completely focused on "core mechanics": Building towers and killing a whole bunch of armored orcs and skittering goblins. That focus came with a frank admission from Asher: the action RPG/tower defense combo didn't entirely work in the first game, and they want to do better.

In the first Dungeon Defenders, tower defense was fun. The combat was playable, if a bit mindless. But the two didn't gel at all. The camera would pull up into an awkward overhead perspective when you built towers, which also had to be selected from an equally awkward series of radial pop-up menus (though keyboard shortcuts did help). Aside from building, upgrading, and repairing, there was no interaction between players and towers.



A new trait system is part of Trendy's solution to that separation. In Dungeon Defenders 2, towers, hero equipment, and abilities can be assigned traits--freezing damage, for example--that affect enemies. A new Apprentice tower shoots flames that spread from enemy to enemy; if someone douses those enemies with oil, they'll take much more damage. Frozen enemies can be shattered. The Apprentice can also launch a tornado spell that knocks enemies into the air, where they're bombarded by devastating shots from anti-air towers that would normally ignore them.

Before I tried out the new tower/ability combinations, I spent a few minutes running around our preview map, a small village with multiple entrances, admiring the sequel's new look. Dungeon Defenders 2 is gorgeous. The first game's charmingly garish bloom and heavy black outlines are gone, and the new color palette is more pastel. Other than The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, I can't think of a game that looks more like an honest-to-god cartoon.

Dungeon Defenders 2 feels good, too. Asher said that the developer put a ton of work into improving basic combat mechanics for the sequel, and it shows. For example, in the first game, the young Squire swung his sword back and forth with each click of a mouse button, but there was no finesse or weight to his attacks. The same back-forth animation looped forever as he ran through mobs of enemies dishing out damage without much feedback. Trendy nicknamed it the lawnmower effect.



There's no lawnmowing in Dungeon Defenders 2. The teenaged Squire and Monk now perform attack combos with a series of animations for sword/staff swings. Trendy wants melee combat to be more third-person brawler, less landscaping. The animation improvements extend to the other characters as well; when I held down the right mouse button to charge up the Apprentice's magic shot, he held his staff behind him and then snapped it forward to unleash the blast.

The strategic build phase--planning out tower placement, collecting resources from chests scattered throughout the map, fortifying defenses--remains mostly unchanged. However, Trendy split the first game's currency, mana, into two resources: One for casting hero abilities, and one for constructing, repairing, and upgrading towers.

And here's a big change: There's no longer a limit to the number of towers you can build in a map. According to Asher, the first game's build limit marginalized the strategic choice between building more towers and upgrading them to be more powerful. That will be a common choice in the sequel. Because using abilities is now a big focus of combat, and there are no build limits, both resources feel more valuable.



On top of making combat deeper, Trendy's introducing varied objectives and more opportunities for strategy into the tower defense framework. In the map we played, enemies came through a large set of gates in the middle of the map, while smaller gates let in more enemies from the sides. Where there were once generic Eternia crystals to defend, there are now main objectives and sub-objectives. On this map, the two sub-objectives were locks that opened up more gates for enemies to flow through. During the final round, we made the tactical decision to sell our defenses near the sub-objectives and pull them back to the main gate, which we had to defend at any cost.

Some of Trendy's small improvements do a lot to smooth out their tower defense/action RPG formula. The camera never leaves its behind-the-back perspective, even when placing towers. Building towers mid-combat no longer locks you helplessly in place, as heroes can still move and attack within a small radius as a tower is being built or repaired. Flying enemies now use AI to choose a target instead of beelining for a predetermined Eternia crystal.

Ultimately, the most encouraging thing about Dungeon Defenders 2 is how candidly Trendy's devs talked about the first game's problems. And there were a lot of problems, though they didn't prevent the game from being fun or addicting--according to Steam, I played 112 hours of it. DLC releases were geared towards higher difficulty levels, so players who were away from the game for a few weeks could come back and find themselves hopelessly behind. Loot scaling was so steep, only grinding for hours on the highest difficulties produced the best gear.

Every issue I could think of Asher admitted to, or even brought up first. Trendy Entertainment has gone through some adolescent growing pains of its own over the past year; when the developer first announced Dungeon Defenders 2 back in March, it was confusingly divided into a cooperative tower defense like the original, to be released at some point in the future, and a MOBA, which went into beta in the spring. The two would share characters and, supposedly, some form of progression.



But the MOBA was a dud, and Asher admitted that the studio grew so quickly after Dungeon Defenders' success, they ended up chasing the MOBA genre's popularity and making a game no one in the studio really wanted to make. So they scrapped it--all of it, with the exception of their new teenage hero character designs--and started over.

From what I played, I can't say how Dungeon Defenders 2 will improve upon the original's loot mechanics or character progression, or how well Trendy will vary its stages with creative objectives. Those are the elements that will make Dungeon Defenders 2 a 200-hour addiction instead of another 20-hour tower defense game.

Trendy is at least saying all the right things. Traits applied to weapons will affect how attacks animate and injure enemies. An ability hotbar at the bottom of the screen is the only hint of MOBA design in the cooperative mode, and each character will supposedly have multiple abilities to fill out that bar--there could be some very cool tower/attack combinations if they deliver on this front. Lead content designer Daniel Haddad talked about a metagame that would organize the community into taking on challenges together to push the Dungeon Defenders 2 story forward. Campaign missions will not be selected via a boring menu, this time around.



There's still one big wildcard left: How Trendy will implement F2P monetization into their game. Asher was adamant that the core gameplay would be there even if you didn't spend a dime. The good news is that Trendy plans to launch Dungeon Defenders 2 in open beta in the first quarter of 2014 and let fans influence the F2P structure. There will definitely be heroes beyond the core four, but how many, and how much will they cost? Until the beta launches it's too soon to say.

One thing's for sure: Dungeon Defenders 2 will still come packing a challenge. Haddad casually mentioned that the build we were playing was easier than the final game, since all of our objectives returned to full health between waves. We still lost on the last wave, to the final three enemies, who hammered our main gate into submission before we could deliver the killing blows. I left the demo thinking about how we could've set up our defenses more efficiently. Next time, I'll be ready.

If I was nerdy enough to have a "favorite engine," it would probably be the Unreal Engine—not necessarily for its technical achievements (though you can't say it hasn't been an essential tool for developers in the past decade), but for its accessibility. The easy-breezy development kit has been especially kind to indies, and because of that, some brilliantly creative games have been built on the engine. Now Steam's flogging an Unreal Indie Bundle, and for $20, it's actually got a pretty admirable selection of games.

In the seven-game lineup, the stand-outs for me are the hypercute Dungeon Defenders and slick-looking Sanctum - these are two tower defense games I've dragged numerous pals into playing the past couple of years, and I'd feel pretty pleased with myself if I could drag the readers of PC Gamer into playing it too. Meanwhile, I'm also looking forward to giving Primal Carnage a whirl. While our preview in October last year thought it decent despite not seeming quite fleshed out, it's half a year onward, and I'm dying to see if those promisingly savage dinosaurs have cut their teeth on the beta stage and become truly, frighteningly awesome.

The other games included in the package are Q.U.B.E., The Ball, Unmechanical, and Waves. All up, the games are worth about $80, but in the Steam bundle? You can get 'em for twenty. Though there isn't a specified end date for the promotion, it's warning that it'll be around "for a limited time only."

I didn't like Dungeon Defenders 2's competitive MOBA mode very much, something I feel a little guilty about. I probably would have enjoyed it more had I not been playing DotA since the time steam was simply another word for hot water or if my team had a quarter of a clue between them. The guy beside me? He went zero and nineteen. By the end of it, I wanted to bake his mouse into a pot pie and feed it to him.

That said, Trendy Entertainment's interpretation of the increasingly popular genre is interesting. The most obvious change made is the complete removal of the usual armament of items. Gone are the Divine Rapiers, the Manta Styles, the insufferable Dagon. Instead of Power Treads (or Steam Boots, or what have you), Dungeon Defenders 2 uses time-limited consumables and only time-limited consumables: health potions, mana potions, things that give you a temporary increase in speed, things that absorb damage after your health has been lowered by a certain percentage and so on.

It's a peculiar decision that I'm completely on the fence about. On one hand, I can see where Trendy is going with this—it's not only trying to simplify things, it's attempting to circumvent unstoppable snowballing. On the other hand, this maneuver neither stops bad teams from being bad nor does it allow the individual to potentially salvage a disastrous situation. We've all seen an angry Spectre turn the tide of a Dota 2 game on her own. This, sadly, isn't something that I'd expect to happen in Dungeon Defenders 2.

The other major change is the switch from the familiar top-down perspective to a slightly over-the-head but mostly behind-the-shoulder third person view, like Smite. How does a third-person MOBA dressed up in Dungeon Defenders' syrupy-sweet visuals actually play? Okay. The selection of available heroes is somewhat impressive given the fact the game has only just recently entered closed beta. There are many faces that will be familiar to veterans of the franchise and others such as the Spider Princess that may be a not-so-subtle nod to the MOBA mode's spiritual progenitor.



For my hands-on, I went with the Gun Witch, a short-skirted sylph with a rather big gun. She had the ability to fire a bullet that would ricochet between opponents, a projectile that would silence (and damage) the first thing it hit, a leap that had her barreling headlong into a targeted area and a "snipe" that let her, after a brief wind-up period, unleash massive damage in a direction. In an the environment filled with players playing the game for the first time (PAX), the long-ranged glass cannon seemed the best bet.

Everyone picked their heroes and the game began in earnest. I bought a few potions, waffled at the base for a minute, before briefly joining the rest of the team as they charged down the middle lane, past our tower, across the river and then into a self-propelled genocide at the enemy's tower. Needless to say, I stopped before they got to the second half of that excursion.

Three minutes. Four dead teammates.

While I'd like to blame my team (who could probably feed all of China) as much as possible, it's understandable that they might've found themselves bedazzled by Dungeon Defenders 2's colorful visuals. Though marginally shorter than the heroes themselves, the "creeps" in Dungeon Defenders 2 weren't immediately noticeable. It took me a good ten minutes to realize that the hunch-backed creature wielding a ball and chain was a teammate as opposed to a slightly more powerful NPC.

I also have my suspicions about this possibly being the fault of the third-person perspective. Though an arguably excellent way to showcase the artwork, it offered a narrower frame of vision. Even in Dota 2 or League of Legends, it can an absolute nightmare keeping track of precisely what is going on in the battlefield. Things get even more complex when heroes can slyly duck behind a siege engine, one located at the very periphery of the fog of war. Is it a crippling difference? No. I can see getting used to this new viewpoint. Was it a necessary and effective change? Probably not.

And, really, that's the most relevant question: were the changes made both necessary and effective? Did Trendy have to swap from the traditional control scheme to the slightly more awkward WASD mode of control? Does designing a MOBA that exclusively uses consumables promote accessibility, or is it simply an attempt by Trendy to distinguish itself from an ever-growing set of competitors?

In Trendy's defense, its competitive mode is a decent marriage between what makes Dungeon Defenders work and the trappings of the genre. However, there's a lot to be said for wantonly stripping out and stripping down features. Games like Awesomenauts and Smite both had the right ideas about things but I'm still not so sure if there's anything to defend about Trendy's encroachment into the muddy waters of the MOBA.

Trendy Entertainment is planning a staggered release of Dungeon Defenders 2. The cooperative mode of the game goes into beta late this year or early 2014, and the competitive mode is currently in closed beta. Read more on the Dungeon Defenders 2 FAQ.

Dungeon Defenders is a fun co-op action tower defense game. Dungeon Defenders II, announced today by Trendy Entertainment, is that idea give or take everything that's happened in PC gaming over the past three years. It's free-to-play with cross-platform multiplayer (PC, Mac, iOS, Android, and Web), and it's launching in two parts: a new competitive MOBA mode that's in closed beta now and will be playable at PAX East this week in Boston, and an update to the cooperative defense mode of the original, which is scheduled for beta late this year or early next. So, not much has changed.

The competitive mode, which Trendy happily labels a MOBA, is taking beta signups right now. It will initially feature just one 5v5 map, but on the hero side Trendy anticipates it will have amassed 24 to choose from by launch. Some of those will be paid heroes, but the rotating selection of free heroes is expected to match "similar free-to-play games." Meaning League of Legends, of course.

And, as is now standard practice when announcing F2P games, Trendy already has an answer for the question: "Is the game pay-to-win?"

"Of course not!" reads the official FAQ. "As of this moment in development, everything sold in the game is obtainable through play. Furthermore, all stat giving items are awarded only through play, not pay. Like many other games in the genre though, you will be able to purchase boosts that will let you level faster or find better cosmetics."



But why make a cooperative game into a MOBA in the first place? Answer us that, Trendy!

"During the development of Dungeon Defenders we constantly tried different multiplayer modes. Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, you name it. None of them really fit. When planning the sequel, we couldn’t drop the idea that a MOBA in the Dungeon Defenders universe would rock. Maybe it was all the after hour games of League we played in the office. We don’t know. But it fit well into the storyline and achieved a core goal of helping Dungeon Defenders players meet new players, so we went all in."

Oh, well that makes sense. But what makes it different from League of Legends and Dota 2? Don't have an answer for that, do you?

"Our take on the MOBA genre is more rpg-esque, with more hero customization, persistent hero leveling, loot and a town square where players can socialize, manage their heroes, shop, trade, and queue for matches. We’ve drastically simplified the item system, to reduce the learning curve for new players and are aiming for shorter total match times. We’re also experimenting with some other unique twists that you might find out about later (if they work!)."

Alright fine, announce your game with plenty of details and jump straight into closed beta like some kind of indie game studio that communicates frankly and only when it has something to show. See if that works. And while you're at it, why not promise a gameplay reveal in the announcement post? Schedule it for this Friday, maybe? Yeah, I thought you would, and now I guess have to get real excited about it with no need for sarcasm, because it actually is pretty exciting.

I'm not a big MOBA fan, so I'm more excited to see more of Dungeon Defenders' original co-op, but I'm willing to give the competitive mode a chance while I wait. What say you?

Don't worry, the Humble Bundle for Android 5 may name-check Google's telephonic operating system but, in typically Humble fashion, the latest round-up of pay-what-you-want indie games is available for PC, Mac and Linux too. This version of cross-platform indie pick 'n mix includes four games as standard, with another two available to those who beat the average. Among them is the excellent Super Hexagon.



Joining Terry Cavanagh's geometric avoid 'em up are music based schmup Beat Hazard Ultra, 2D action adventure Dynamite Jack, physics toybox Solar 2, and atmospheric puzzle platformer NightSky. You'll also get Dungeon Defenders plus its DLC for paying more than the current average.

As always, your payment can be split a variety of ways between the individual developers, the charities EFF and Child's Play and the Humble Bundle organisers. Pay over $1, and you'll also receive Steam keys for all of the games.