Kill Ten Rats

Dungeon Defenders has many account-wide features rather than character-specific ones. Your characters share a single bank for money and items, and you can pass upgraded items to the next generation. Your tavern o’ achievements is the same for all characters, rather than suggesting that you repeat all the achievements on every character. You unlock levels for your account rather than your characters, so beat the game once to make everything available for all future characters. You probably cannot beat the end boss with your level 1, but the map is there.

One unusual feature is that you can swap characters during the Build Phase of each wave. The tip screen encourages you to combine towers from different heroes, which is a nice synergy bonus for having multiple characters. You can also have a tower-focused character build then a combat-focused character fight through the round. It’s a bit of micro-management, but what are optimizers if not micro-managers? (There are limits here. You cannot have unlimited build time on the highest difficulty, so you are limited by how quickly you can swap characters, run around the map, build, repeat.)

This lets you skip the low levels at which map difficulty scales poorly. My Squire is 40-ish and can clear the first level on Insane difficulty with a half-dozen towers. Start the map, clear the first wave (6 enemies), you now have enough mana to build the first round of defenses. Swap to your new, level 0 character. Watch the defenses clear a couple of waves, bring back the Squire to build the upper-level defenses. Swap back, watch the rest of the round happen. Congratulations, your new character is now level 13 with 40,000 experience points. It feels like an exploit, and the character has no useful equipment, but it does have all its basic tools to play for real rather than fumbling about with minimal mana and one tower.

: Zubon

In our occasional series on blatant objectification of women in gaming, we have the Dungeon Defenders contribution. The Apprentice and Monk are covered in cloth, the Knight has no visible skin except for his knees, and the Huntress is wearing this. The halter top is common enough female “armor” to escape comment, but note the line showing where the whale tail would be if she were not obviously commando under her skirt that droops around her hips.

Note also her pose. At the character select screen, the Apprentice spins his staff, the Squire brandishes his sword, the Monk floats meditatively, and the Huntress shakes her tush. The male gaze comes before the tutorial.

: Zubon

• Recent patches have improved the interface reliability. The Ranked server is still less reliable than, oh, what you might expect from a MMO in its first week.
• The solo difficulty curve levels out several hours into the game. You can reasonably solo medium difficulty once you have enough levels to access most of your tools and a decent weapon.
• A good weapon makes all the difference in the world. You might start out swinging for 10s, then you find the weapon that gets a bonus 50 elemental damage that increases by 10 (and increasing) every time you invest mana. When your damage triples, the impossible becomes the trivial.
• Hey, neat, a boss fight!
• The looting mechanics are anti-social. SynCaine comments on the anti-social xp mechanic. This is exacerbated by the mana mechanic: grab as much mana as you can to build/upgrade as much as you can to get as much xp as you can, however little that makes sense in the context of your team. Mana is both the in-level economy and the between-game economy, so you have an extra incentive to undermine your current game/team for minor personal profit. The loot mechanic is at least as bad, with items going to whoever hits E at them first. Sold trash items seem to be the primary source of mana for long-term upgrades and buying pets, so everyone has an incentive to grab everything. This games needs some version of “everyone gets everything picked up” to avoid competitions and races for acquiring personal benefits. The Nash equilibrium is not at a good point here. Of course, then you get into the leecher problem…
• I like the loot mechanic of only dropping items for the classes that are there. No Huntress? No Huntress items drop.
• You get several layers of customization. You have 10 spots to put your points when you level, half for you and half for your towers. You can pick from the variety of loot that drops or shop the few in the store. You can invest mana in your equipment and choose which aspect to upgrade, although you can only upgrade extant aspects rather than building from scratch. Pets are treated like items.
• I’m really liking the Squire. I have melee towers that knock things back and ranged towers to shoot from behind them. If I repair the Bouncing Barrier up front during this, I am tank, DPS, and healer all in one. Better than repairing, I can just run around slashing at things with my sword that cuts a hole in the world while the towers deal with other directions.
• You really do feel more powerful as you level up. There must be a treadmill effect going on here, but I am not feeling it. My numbers are big and growing faster than the enemies’ numbers, although the quantity of enemies may be growing to offset that. All the better.

: Zubon

• Absorbing. 3 hours went by without much notice, although there were two times where I was frustrated enough to stop until my buddy invited me back.
• More action, less tower defense. You do have some towers, but this is not a stately strategy game where you place your defenses and watch over them like a demigod. In the early waves/levels, you are there in the front shooting, and later, you are repairing them while the attacks are coming in.
• Still buggy. I think the gameplay works, but the game environment is problematic. I’m told it is more of a PC issue, and you immediately get the sense of how much the PC matters to the developers when it opens with “press start.” My “push to talk” turned off every time I zoned. The keybindings reset with one of yesterday’s patches and became uneditable at the options screen. My friend playing ranked remarked that the game/server/whatever crashed 3 times while he was still in character creation. The Steam achievements were not working for me.
• There’s not really a point to high score screens in open. It displays while you are there, but those are obviously modded/cheat games, with scores in the millions versus the thousands. But it still displays on your forge while you’re on the map. Ranked gets you away from this, but did I mention “crashed 3 times at character creation”?
• It’s absorbing and frantic but not great (so far?). Weak tower defense plus decent action is not synergizing strongly.
• Classes differ strongly. I had lots of Squire envy, as their tanking+knockback towers were the heart of our defense. My Apprentice was the DPS behind them, and then I was the healer keeping the tank tower repaired. My buddy the Huntress had mostly last-ditch traps rather than attacking towers, so that class presumably is meant to be on the attack more. I did not see the Monk in action, but I get the sense it is similar.
• There is a level grind. The difficulty and experience point curves assume that you will repeat levels to be prepared for the next, although I presume that great planning and execution can overcome a lot of that. There is also an equipment grind, and finding a staff that tripled my attack damage changed things.
• Update, missed one: bring a group or go home. Maybe this is fun single-player, or doing older maps once you are high level, but only the first map is really solo-able (when you reach it). The maps do scale with group size, but they your combined power scales up faster than the enemies do, so perhaps it is better to say that they are 4-player maps that do not scale down well.

This is through about 4 maps, so who knows how things differ much later.

I’m giving Dungeon Defenders a shot this week. (Steam link) Some uncertain number of friends will also be trying it. I’m on Steam as Zubon if you want to connect. It looks like a more entertaining, cartoony take on Iron Grip: Warlord.

: Zubon