I picked up Dungeon Defenders a few months (!) ago, and got Orcs Must Die! more recently, when it was on sale. I’ve put an alarming number of hours into DD (25, according to steam), and just beat OMD for the first time – going to start my second run shortly.
They’re very similar games, in a lot of way – fantasy, tower defense with a third-person action-RPG mixed in – so it’s fascinating to see the different tradeoffs they made. Basically, at every turn, DD made the choices that moved it toward co-op grinding, and OMD went for single-player fun.
DD splits its towers and traps across four classes, encouraging co-operation but giving the individual player far fewer options during play; OMD gives you all of them, of course, more towers total than there are across all of DD’s four classes. (And arguably more varied – DD has a ton of redundancy, with stuff like the inferno trap and the lightning aura, or the fireball tower and harpoon tower, or the explosive trap and ETHERICAL SPIKE trap – all of which do essentially the same thing, with small tweaks. OMD, on the other hand… )
DD’s progression is based primarily on character ability – no matter how good a player you are, you need to level your character and gear up to beat the later / harder levels. OMD feeds you a steady stream of new traps and abilities, but none of them ever really ‘obsolete’ the old ones – you can keep using the starting ones until the end of the game, if you feel like it. The progression is primarily in player skill. I find that much more fun, myself, but I can understand how people would feel otherwise.
The biggest difference, though, is visceral. Playing as a huntress recently – a few days ago, the first time playing DD after starting OMD – I found it took an entire magazine to kill one or two enemies. (And then I had to wait for the sloooow reload time to finish, unable to do anything but run and jump…) In OMD, you can kill most enemies with one well-aimed snap-shot.
For some reason or another, I found it really hard to enjoy DD that night!
(OMD is also infinitely more characterful and funny, but that’s a much more subjective impression, of course.)
So the reason this thread is fascinating to me is that it’s so completely the opposite of my own impressions of the matter – after playing OMD, I wondered, “How can DD hold up to the charm, polish, and mechanics of OMD?”
