Dean

Last weekend Gameforge held their first “Heroes on Tour” event for the Orcs Must Die! Unchained EU community. The event hosted by GameForge offered a raffle where by members of the community in the EU who were alpha players could enter a contest to win one of eight lucky spots on the trip. The winners of the competition were Shim, Alastaire61, Artimunor, Daeforce, apin and cptcrunch. REF was also invited to attend. Haggy was also a winner but was unfortunately unable to attend.

Day 1

From my side I flew out from Heathrow, London via Lufthansa to Frankfurt, Germany. Once in Frankfurt I had to catch a train to Karlsruhe. Luckily I managed to meet up with Artimunor and Daeforce on the train and we travelled south all the way down to Karlsruhe on the Deutsch Bahn. Upon our arrival FaTeReLLa greeted us at the station and we met up with Alastaire61 and Shim who had already arrived. From there we went to the hotel to relax for a bit before heading out to GameForge HQ!

GameForge have a huge office spanning multiple buildings. If you are unfamiliar about GameForge, they have over 400 employees and support a number of high profile games including Aion, TERA, Metin2, Runes of Magic, Wizard101 and S.K.I.L.L. Special Force 2. They are by no means a small operation. Founded in 2003 they have over 450 million registered users. Its well worth taking a peek at GameForge’s about us page to learn more about them.

After enjoying some pizza and learning a bit about GameForge, we sat down with some GameForge designers and talked about some of their upcoming plans for OMDU. We are bound by secrecy here so unfortunately we cannot spill the beans, but rest assured they have some cool stuff coming. It was great to be able to talk openly about their plans and OMDU in general between the heroes on tour and GameForge staff. Following our discussion we were taken on a tour of the GameForge offices which included the Community Management office and the OMDU room.

The OMDU room is where it all happens, including preparing patch releases and translation. The staff here work very hard (at all hours!) to bring us the best OMDU experience possible. After our tour it was time to get down to playing the game! We were split into two teams across the room and we battled out a few games.

Following the team games we went on to do some matchmaking games. As it happens by stroke of luck one team happened to find themselves on MrOithintfb‘s Twitch stream!



Following the games it was time to return to the hotel to get ready for the evening antics. We took the time to explore Karlsruhe on the way back and did some shopping. We had fun negotiating the Karlsruhe tram system! We met up with FaTeReLLa right on time and then we proceeded to head to the Badisch Brauhaus for our evening meal and OMDU celebrations. We were joined once again by GameForge designers and ES community manager SiS.

We had a great meal here and portion sizes were certainly very big! The atmosphere was great with outside eating and biergarten feel. Following the delicious meal it was time to make our way to the evenings entertainment – the Mittelalterlich Phantasie Spectaculum. This was a fantastic festival event with many people dressed up in clothes from the middle ages. We saw some great music here and a fantastic fire spectacular act and it was a very unique experience definitely one of the highlights of the trip. Check out the gallery below to see some of the photos from the event.

We also have two short videos from the event to give you an idea what the music was like.





Following the evenings activities it was time for us to retire to bed, as you can imagine we were all very tired!

Day 2

Be on the look out for part 2 later this week where we look back on day 2 of the Heroes on Tour where the fun sure continued!