Defiance is simultaneously one of the greatest and one of the worst MMO shooters I have ever played. On one hand, it brings back thoughts of what Tabula Rasa might have looked like if it had been created for a 2013 audience, an open world, seamless shooter with RPG elements and guns. On the other hand, it can be shallow and incredibly juvenile at times. So let’s dive in, shall we?

1. The Story

Defiance’s story will likely completely slip by you if you haven’t been paying attention to the upcoming TV series. The basic story is that the alien race known as the Votan comes to settle on Earth after their home planet is destroyed by a stellar collision. While discussion between Votan and Human governments for peaceful settlement dragged on, a high ranking Votan ambassador is assassinated sparking a war between the two species. This war culminates in the explosion of the Ark fleet in orbit, which rains down destruction and accidentally unleashes terraforming technology and introduces animal and plant species to Earth. The debris from the Arkfall event still rains down on the planet periodically.

This is where you come in. As an Ark hunter, you enter the Bay area under the employment of Karl Von Bach, seeking advanced alien technology that is falling to earth with these Arkfall events. Along the way, you pick up side missions and come across various self-repeating missions that involve saving soldiers or finding new technology.

Which brings me to a complaint about Defiance the game, and its “maturity.” Remember when the Battlestar Galactica remake really overused the word “frak” to bypass the censor? Defiance does the same with the use of the term “shtako,” running the word into the ground with all the grace and subtlety of a teenager who just learned a new swear word and wants to include it in every sentence so people know how clever he is. And the effect plays out even worse in an environment that has no censors, since the characters swear anyway and the whole thing just becomes pointless and annoying. I also don’t need to hear every five minutes about how my NPC partner won’t be joining me on this mission because she’s drunk, or how the commander is surprised to see that she has all of her clothes on.

2. Missions

Progression in Defiance is defined by a series of quests, trials, and mini-games, and ends up being one of the highlights of the game. Each character has a personal storyline, dealing with Von Bach Industries and the hunt for alien artifacts that I referenced earlier. The main quest series actually has some decent dialogue and cutscenes. There is another line of missions that ties directly into the television show, and will receive regular updates once the show starts airing. There are also one-off side missions that become available the more you complete the main storyline quests.

Players of recent MMOs should be familiar with the random encounters. Not really random since they appear at the same point every time, these encounters are essentially short public events that occur on a regular basis. You might pass by a downed helicopter and see “revive the pilots” appear on the screen. Revive the pilots, and you’ll have to defend them from incoming mutant soldiers. In addition to the random encounters, you’ll also come across mini-games of skill. These include time trials with your vehicle, rampages (Saints Row players will recognize this), and hot shots which are basically rampages but with the added requirement of not shooting civilians.

I’m not done talking about content yet. As you level up, you unlock cooperative instances. Raids, basically. There are instanced pvp modes including team deathmatch, capture and hold, and resource gathering as well as a shadow war which takes place in the live area. Pursuits act as Defiance’s achievement system, offering rewards for accomplishing things like modding your weapon or achieving weapon skills.

3. Leveling

Defiance’s leveling system is a little overwhelming. Your main “level” is called your EGO rating, and is leveled by completing quests, killing things, and generally doing what you would expect to gain experience for in an MMO. As you rank up in your EGO, that is how you gain points to put into your skills and unlock perks and new abilities. This is where it gets kind of confusing. Each gun you pick up will have its own experience bar. That bar doesn’t level up the gun itself, it feeds experience into your skill in that gun type. So you pick up a submachine gun and level your submachine gun skill. Once the gun has filled up its bar, it no longer contributes to your overall skill level.

This doesn’t really bother me though because the leveling process for weapon skills seems ultimately unimportant. If it hadn’t been for the pursuits requiring leveling in certain weapon skills, I probably wouldn’t even care about them at all. Interestingly enough you level your three vehicle classes just by driving them. So you’ll just be driving along and then BAM! You’re level three in offroad vehicles. Um, thanks Defiance.

4. The Best Parts

So to start wrapping up this impressions piece, I thought I’d first discuss what is so great about Defiance. As I pointed out in the beginning of this article, I am getting a heavy Tabula Rasa vibe, but what Tabula Rasa should have been. My main complaint in MMO shooters in the past, and this goes for games like All Points Bulletin, is that the developers for some reason don’t give the guns any power to them. In All Points Bulletin you felt like you were carrying around peashooters, and Tabula Rasa similarly had kind of underwhelming gunplay. Defiance is first and foremost a shooter, and Trion never forgets it. For an action MMO to do well, it has to blur that ever-present set of dice that are dictating your damage dealt and taken. Defiance does this extremely well.

Also, the story missions are without a doubt the game’s highlight. The lawkeeper Jon Cooper is one of the most memorable, and actually one of the few memorable, characters I’ve seen in an MMO in a long time. I actually look forward to the story missions and how the cutscenes play out, and in one scene where Cooper has to mercy kill a construction worker, needless to say it was one of the most powerful moments in recent memory. I’ve also been having a lot of fun playing around with hotshots and side missions, including my inevitable victory over that damn chick shoot mission. You have to shoot chickens with a gun with limited ammo, and I found that there is a small window of opportunity where you can throw a grenade, and the game lets you continue playing with your normal weapons until those run out of ammo as well. It’s an exploit, I’m sure it will be patched in that April 15th content update, but I’m willing to savor my gold trophy for the mini-game until then.

5. Aimless Ranting

All of that considered, I can’t help but find Defiance’s problems to be more than annoying. I know that Trion is making equal advertisement to the shooter crowd as they are the MMO gamer, but does everything have to explode? Alien “mortars” fire explosive rounds into the air toward the player with amazing accuracy, all things considered. Flying bugs fire rounds that not only explode, but they also hold you in place. Hell, I even saw my character get headbutted by one of the larger Hellbugs, and there was an explosion. There are enough explosions in Defiance to make Michael Bay uncomfortable, and the more I progress through Defiance, the less sensible they seem to become.

Which leads me to the second thing that I hate about Defiance: Movement. The controls are fine for a third person shooter, although the process of entering and exiting a car could be more responsive. I’m talking about the heavy use of this movement slowing goo. Movement debuffs are obnoxious enough when just a few types of NPCs use it, but since Defiance has just a handful of mob types, you’re going to see it quite a bit. I have had a few times where five of those Hellbug flying mortar things pop up at once and just barrage you to death in seconds, because they have no cooldown on this explosive, sticky, insanely obnoxious attack.

The UI for Defiance is also one of the worst I’ve seen in recent days, and not just because it took me a good ten minutes of searching before I finally figured out where the “exit” button was. For those who don’t know, in order to exit Defiance you must first hit escape to bring up the main menu, click on the button in the lower left hand corner to bring up the radial menu, then avert your eyes to the top right hand side of the screen where the “exit” button sits. Honestly, it sounds easier than it is since you expect the exit to be somewhere on the radial in the center of the screen, so you look through all the options and still can’t find it, and the exit button blends in pretty well with the background with the blue on blue. It’s sort of a hiding-in-plain-sight deal.

And while I’m on the subject of the UI and I’m tearing this game apart more than I expected to, the chat system is terrible and nobody is using it. The chat disappears far too quickly, the profanity filter is ****, and not enough chat displays. You also can’t move the chat box from the lower right hand corner. I’m surprised to see that Trion, a company that has released an MMO in the past and therefore should know what they’re doing when it comes to basic interface, aesthetics, etc, would have screwed up so badly on the way players interface with Defiance, at least on the PC version. The system seems developed for console users with little regard to PC players.

6. Conclusion

I am having a lot of fun in Defiance, even though my article may seem slanted towards the ranting side. If you come into this with the expectation of Tom Clancy level of strategy, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. Defiance falls somewhere between the tactical planning of Rainbow Six games and the beer chugging fist bumping Call of Duty bros, and makes a place for itself in the genre that is unique to the other games you might find on the market.

And I have to applaud Trion for how they have once again aggressively patched their game post-launch. They did the same with Rift, and I can only imagine that we’ll see some heavy discounts on Defiance in the near future to try and shop the game to as many people as possible, especially once the show airs. While I own the PC version, apparently Trion were putting out multiple patches per day on the Xbox360 to fix problems as they popped up. The console versions didn’t have a great launch, but Trion’s been working around the clock to get everything as smooth as possible.