The original Dungeon Defenders is a great game. Taking tower defense gameplay and blending in third-person action, it stole more than a few hours, nights, and weekends from me while I obsessively leveled up a character. And now there’s a free-to-play sequel in the works.

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More Options Equals More Fun

A Changing Market

Lots of new towers to play with in co-op.

League of Legends, Meet Defenders’ MOBA

The perspective for the competitive mode.

Play at Home or Mobile -- This Time They Mean It

When Can I Play, Though?

God help my social life.Today, Trendy Entertainment has officially announced Dungeon Defenders II . Just like the one-time children, now grown-up characters from the original, the game has grown, with a new competitive mode modeled after League of Legends and Dota, a much larger roster of playable characters, and an emphasis on the ability to play it cross-platform. IGN interviewed marketing director Philip Asher and gameplay producer / designer Scott Chatten to learn more about what’s next for Trendy’s addictive tower-defense franchise.“We believe the game was at its best when different heroes with different play styles strategized and fought together,” said Asher, “We wanted to expand that with the sequel. That means more heroes, more towers, more enemies and a greater diversity all around.”Indeed, with a planned initial roster of 24 heroes at launch, the team at Trendy aims to vastly outdo the original Dungeon Defenders' four starting heroes. “This time our heroes aren’t all the same age or same size, so there will be a lot of variation in gameplay,” said Chatten. Every hero in Dungeon Defenders II will have their own types of towers and abilities, and new heroes are slated to be released regularly.Each hero will also have six slots available to customize their appearance. All equipment this time around is hero-specific, and will greatly change the way your character looks. If you end up falling in love with the stats on a particular item, you don’t have cause to worry, as the plan is to allow you to transfer stats between cosmetic items.So why go free-to-play, selling cosmetic items and the like when the original Dungeon Defenders sold more than 1.5 million copies (not including the 3 million downloads it did on mobile)? Asher says it’s all about building up a larger player base with the low-price point incentive. “The constant stream of new players entering the game would mean there were always enough people for low-level players to play with, and eventually more higher-level players to play with the vets.” This sounds great to me, because as a lover of the first one of the things I abhorred was playing alone, and it wasn’t always easy to find a game with people of similar level.The fear with any game going free-to-play is that it might feel like you can pay-to-win, or that you might have to dump untold amounts of cash into the game to get what you need to play. Asher was quick to alleviate my concerns, noting that there will always be a rotating cast of heroes you can play for free, you’ll be able to earn heroes simply by playing, and that you can purchase the original game’s four heroes for about the same price as the first game. Additional purchasable items will include the previously mentioned cosmetic items (some will be earnable just by playing).I found the original game’s competitive modes completely forgettable, and it’s nice to see Trendy recognize that it really had to do something different with the sequel. “Since the release of Second Wave [Editor’s Note: This was DLC for the original], we’ve been constantly playing with different multiplayer modes for Dungeon Defenders,” said Asher. The problem was the modes it introduced weren’t all that great, and didn’t, “fit really well with the Dungeon Defenders’ universe or gameplay.”The solution? A MOBA of course. Dungeon Defenders II will have gameplay immediately familiar to those who play games in the genre, complete with three-lanes, towers and the ultimate goal of destroying the enemy teams’ base. Chatton says that what Trendy’s trying to make is, “a much more casual MOBA,” noting that the studio, “replaced the item system with an easier-to-learn consumable system, decreased the advantages of out-of-game persistent hero progression,” as well as tried to make it overall an easier experience to understand.The competitive mode is somewhat separate from the cooperative mode, too. The progression you make in the tower defense portion of the game doesn’t carry over into competitive mode, or vice-a-versa. You will earn experience to progress what sounds like an overall competitive account, and if you leveling it up will earn you additional skills for competitive play, but your hero will always start at level one in any given match, leveling up throughout. Asher said the team is playing around with ways to connect the co-op and competitive level progression, and may indeed do so at some point in development, but for now the two remain separate to maintain balance.You also gain loot by playing the competitive mode. At the end of each match you’ll be rewarded items, and while you can carry over the cosmetics of any item you find between the co-op and competitive modes, there stats will differ.The original Dungeon Defenders was supposed to have cross-platform play, but it eventually fell through. This time around, though, Trendy is using their own proprietary technology, and they want you to play with your friends whether they’re on PC, Mac, Android or iOS. Called Playverse, it’s also supposed to introduce a number of social features like chat, friends lists, notifications, and more, though details are currently limited.The bit of sad news in all of the talk about platforms is that Dungeon Defenders II won’t be releasing on PSN or Xbox Live. “When starting to develop Dungeon Defenders II, we wanted to focus on platforms that would allow consistent updates and cross-platform play. Because of this, we decided to not release Dungeon Defenders II on current-generation consoles,” said Asher. The good news for console players in all of this is that there’s still hope, as Asher added the following caveat, “However, if the next generation consoles fit this bill, we would consider releasing Dungeon Defenders II there as well.”The biggest question on most everyone’s mind whose read this far! The closed beta for Dungeon Defenders II’s competitive mode has already begun, while the beta for the co-op mode is targeted for later this year. Excited? Yeah, we are too. Look to IGN for more coverage on Dungeon Defenders II when we get access.

Anthony Gallegos is an Editor on IGN's PC team. He enjoys scaring the crap out of himself with horror games and then releasing some steam in shooters like Blacklight and Tribes. You can follow him on @Chufmoney on Twitter and on at Ant-IGN on IGN.