I have always been a fan of Dungeon Defenders, but I've always wanted to see some new classes and new modes to give the game some variety. The variety is coming in the forum of modding tools, which I talked about before here, and through the Mines of Etheria. The Mines change up the gameplay a lot by having you attack the Etheria Crystals of enemies, no longer will you be on the defense. This map is part of the Assault Map Pack that will be highlighting this new mode with a bunch of new maps. These are both screenshots from the Miners of Etheria that show off the new objectives and the new gameplay constraints of having lives and being timed.





Seeing as to how you are going to be assaulting enemy positions in the Assault Map Pack it only seems relevant to bring up the new melee based class, the Barbarian. This class doesn't use towers, traps or aura's, he is all about getting in the enemies face and hacking them down. The Barbarian uses five stances to change up his fighting style: Siphon, Turtle, Hawk, Tornado or Lightning.



The Barbarian and the Map Assault Pack will both be available on Steam on January 30th. They will both be on sale when they come out, each for a dollar less than normal, making the Map Assault Pack $0.99 and the Barbarian $1.99. If you already own the Eternia Shards Complete Pack then you will get the Map Assault Pack for free.  Unfortunately these DLC will both only be available for PC through Steam and they've declared that no DLC will be making it to the console versions due to various problems, which you can read about here on their official post. Now onto news about the upcoming patch.

The previous patch, 7.15, hit sometime last month and the upcoming 7.16 patch is adding some interesting features on top of various bug fixes and improvements. The patch is indeed timed to come out at the same time as the two new DLC and with that part of the patches are support for those DLC, but they are also adding items folder for the item box and hero shop. It looks to make it quite a bit easier to sort through the various types of items that you collect. Check out how it looks.



The second new feature seems tiny but it has the potential to be more significant in the future. This feature adds hardcore competition stat recording. Now there is another new icon that signifies hardcore completition and there is also a new achievement for beating all  levels on nightmare mode and on hardcore. Apparently it will unlock something in the future, but they are being a bit vague about it.



The third and last new feature is something that will make it so you can take fantastic screenshots. They are calling it on-the-fly full-frontal viewing and no hud display. To decrypt that let's just say its a full 360 view that removes the hud and allows you rotate around your character. You can do it at any point during gameplay. Here is an example.



For the full patch notes from 7.16 head on over to the Trendynet forums and check out the full log. For more information on the most recent news check out Trendies Dungeon Defenders Digest for 1/25/12. Thanks for reading and I'll be back with some more news shortly.
Steam Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/65800/

-Written by Sean Cargle