Less Massive Review: Tales From The Borderlands Episode 1

(Note: This review contains spoilers for Borderlands 2.)

Telltale Games is easily one of my favorite game developers, proving the viability of AAA point and click adventure games in a world that had long since left the genre behind. The company spearheaded and successfully proved the viability of monthly episodic games, allowing players to buy the entire season with the added bonus of getting it all on dvd at the end for simply paying the shipping cost.

The idea of an episodic, intelligent, narrative take on the Borderlands universe is one that excited me greatly when it was announced earlier this year. I have a fondness for the Borderlands series, and while the series has progressed quite a bit since the first title, the games have never delved deep into the world in which your vault hunters live. All Borderlands needs to bring out its underbelly is a capable set of hands.

Tales From The Borderlands is set after the events of Borderlands 2. Handsome Jack is dead and the Hyperion Corporation is going through a bit of a power vacuum. Vault Hunters are on the prowl looking for the newly discovered vaults, and Hyperion wants a piece of the pie. The story is told by two narrators. Rhys, a Hyperion employee, finds himself demoted to janitor and heads down to Pandora in an effort to screw over his boss and secure a vault key (and hopefully cement his real promotion). Fiona, a con artist, works on Pandora with her sister and adoptive mentor who absolutely won’t betray them, Felix.

As far as narrators go, you won’t find a pair less reliable than Rhys and Fiona, a factor that the game makes readily apparent from the start. The story shifts between perspectives, often going back and retelling the same story from the other character’s point of view, with both sides regularly contradicting each other. Who is telling the truth? Did Rhys really stand up to that group of psychos or did he wet himself and cry while the machine gun wielding robot did all of the work? That’s up to you to decide.

In their travels, the characters meet a variety of insane locals including my current favorite: Shade. The characters in this version are a lot more tame than their Borderlands counterparts, a more subtle comedy to match the slower pace of the game. As with previous games in Telltale’s lineup, Tales From The Borderlands has more in common with an interactive movie than a full-fledged action title. There are a few actiony moments here and there, mostly fed through quick time events, but anyone familiar with the Telltale Games series knows that these games are all about strong characters, powerful dialogue, and (more recently) giving the player choice to shape their game.

The best part is that the episodic nature allows Telltale to shape future episodes based on features players didn’t like or suggest. I can’t wait for episode 2 of Tales From The Borderlands, not to mention the upcoming Game of Thrones. Check it out on just about any device. Episode one is available now, with new episodes coming in the next few months.

Diaries From ArcheAge #2: Shipping Overseas

As part of the ArcheAge experience, I decided to dedicate some time to delivering a trade pack overseas to the Solzreed Peninsula. I can already tell this is going to end in my death.

As you can see, my only means of transportation across the sea is in the basic rowboat obtained through an early quest. Travel speed: 4.5 meters per second. Likelihood of success: none.

No stowaways! Thankfully ArcheAge has aggro limits and the Seabug got bored a couple minutes later. Maybe it’s not too late to enlist one of those teleporting hackers.

This guy wasn’t interested in what I was selling: A full load of being defenseless.

An hour later and I’m almost there! I can see the port in the distance.

The port is being blockaded by pirates. I’m dead, and the trade pack will probably be destroyed. Finished the quest.

MMOments: Destiny

Have you heard of the black garden? The greatest threat to us all lies there. I wish I could tell you all about Destiny’s rich story and lore, I really do, but frankly there isn’t much that I can remember that isn’t tied to a basic storytelling trope. Basically the story is that a giant construct called The Traveler came to Earth where it ushered in a new era of technology and innovation, taking humanity to the stars. In space, naturally, we encountered aliens hell bent on killing us for no apparent reason other than that they are evil and we have god on our side. A traveler named The Traveler, bad guys called The Darkness, and the guardians of light are Guardians? I’m rather surprised that Bungie didn’t go full force and have you taking missions from Goody McGooderson, aided of course by his eventually-outed-as-evil assistant, Badguy McBackstabby.

It’s hard to remember much about Destiny with such groundbreaking writing like “the Vex are so evil that they despise other evil beings.” Most of this is narrated by a Peter Dinklage who sounds suspiciously like he found a copy of the Destiny script while bored at the doctor’s office and Bungie stealthily recorded him narrating it out loud. The rest is told through grimoire cards, but you’re going to have to go to Bungie.net in order to read what they are because there is no in-game lore book like in, well, every other RPG with some form of lore book. I mentioned my hope in the beta that this would be fully implemented on release, count that as a disappointment.

It’s hard to not make comparisons to games like Borderlands, when the two are so similar. Destiny is a solid shooter and a fun time, and yet it will deserve every single one of the disappointed reviews that are currently making their way to press, and that is a shame because Destiny is a very fun game. When all is said and done, Bungie’s greatest sin in all of this will be that they gave too much hype to a generic game, like when McDonald’s would treat the return of the McRib as if it were a brand new discovery when it was the same sandwich we’d been having for years. We get it, Ronald, you put boneless rib on a sandwich and added some onion and a pickle. Twenty marketing campaigns later, and it’s the same sandwich.

Make no mistake, Destiny is an impressive looking game both in the graphical department as well as taking relatively small environments and making them look gigantic. It is also a solid shooter with solid RPG mechanics and progression system with some loot on the side. As with games like Borderlands and Diablo before it, part of Destiny’s draw is the never-ending quest for more loot, higher levels, and progressively more powerful weapons and armor to shoot a lot of bad guys who have committed the crime of carrying your loot. The shooting, Destiny does well. Weapons feel like they have real weight and especially handcannons pack a punch that feels like it could knock the controller out of your hands.

Combat against the AI varies in nature, and as with Borderlands can eventually feel like a chore. Devoid of any intelligent AI, Bungie’s take on difficulty is to employ the same cheap tricks used in similar games, and use them in intolerable numbers and combinations that make me think Bungie missed a course on how combat is balanced in RPGs. You see, in standard mobs there is a balance between power, defense, and speed. You can have mobs that are invisible, mobs that have high health, and mobs that run incredibly fast in large numbers and deal heavy melee damage. Creating a creature that mobs in packs, has a lot of health and does heavy damage, and runs around invisible? Ridiculous. Snipers using invisibility is a pretty common trope in gaming, but snipers that remain invisible while they’re shooting you? That’s just sadistic.

Bosses carry the same poor AI, considering that they merely serve as walking tanks. They aren’t difficult as much as they are unfair, merely large hitboxes with a lot of health carrying a weapon with ridiculously high damage and splash radius, which makes them very easy to defeat if you can keep moving. I think I died by one boss so far, and it’s because his area had a constant stream of mid-tier creatures whose guns all had lock-on bullets. Oh yea, enemies have guns with bullets that change course and follow you through the air. Otherwise, I can guarantee that your death will almost always come when the game goes “screw it” and just throws so many mobs at you at once that there is no way to kill them fast enough and nowhere to use cover to regenerate.

One problem Destiny faces is that Bungie’s take on sociability is, well, odd to say the least. On one hand, partying and getting into impromptu groups with random players and friends alike is seamless and enjoyable. I’ve taken on numerous boss dungeons where I suddenly found two other players by my side, and while none of them talked, everyone seemed to know what to do. Chat is handled through emoticons as well as through local voice chat if you can find anyone else with a headset plugged in.

On the other hand, the social aspect is essentially nonexistent outside of the off chance you manage to stumble upon one of the game’s exceedingly rare public events. The trade hub, the center for social contact, has little promise for social activity. Chat is nonexistent in both its vocal and keyboard form, there are no social mini-games, and trade doesn’t exist at all in Destiny so you can’t even go into town to sell off or give away your loot. Bungie’s official statement is that this is because they want every weapon to have a personal story behind it. This is a pretty heavy order, since it assumes that your combat moments will be memorable enough for players to actually remember how they got their weapons. I remember how I got each and every one of my weapons: I killed a bunch of unmemorable mobs until an orb popped out and then I picked that up.

PvP is a mess, and a real heavy step back considering we’re talking about the company that made Halo 2. The one thing Bungie did right was to consolidate stats in the Crucible, meaning you are no better than any other player just because you are a higher level or have better gear. Everyone is the same. Well, mostly. Maps are far too small and close-quartered, there is no segregation between competitive and noncompetitive players, you can’t vote on what map or mode you want to play next, there is no punishment for abandoning your team, no playlists, no private matches, and no matchmaking by pvp rank.

If there is one thing to be said about Destiny, it’s the knowledge that Bungie’s alleged dedication to the title means that all of these problems could be a thing of the past when you’re reading our updated review months from now. For now, though, what we’ve seen at launch is an incredibly forgettable story wrapped around a game that is, for all purposes, incredibly barebones and at the retail price of $60-150 despite missing a number of features. The social aspects are weak, if not mostly nonexistent, considering that this is apparently an MMO. Unless you are hell bent on getting the game immediately, give it a few months to go down in price.

Destiny falls somewhere in the realm of decent, and assuredly there are plenty of people who will find joy in it. Hopefully Bungie will work hard over the next couple of months to fix some of the game’s more glaring issues.

MMOments: RuneScape Companion App

I finally had a chance to try out the RuneScape companion app on my iPad today. Currently the app isn’t an actual app, as in one that you download through the Google Play store or Apple store, but exists as a website you access through your device’s browser. The app allows access to a multitude of features, including your bank, the Grand Exchange, stock market, chat, and more. I tested this out using an iPad mini, and found performance to be mostly alright. There is a bit of annoyance in setting up the device, as you are required to have an authenticator set up to access features like the Grand Exchange, which is likely on the same device. You also have to talk to the tutorial NPC at the Grand Exchange and enable access through the game.

As a companion app for RuneScape on the go, this is turning out to be a pretty good program. Trading is done seamlessly via items stored in the bank, and anything purchased through the Grand Exchange is stored in your bank as well. Merchants can use the app on their phone while out of the house to continue making money flipping items (buy low, sell high), which is what many seem to already be doing. You can even simply use the app to keep up with your friends and clan using the chat program. The distractions & diversions window shows progress and reset timers on activities, making it possible to check progress without actually going in-game.

But none of this is useful if you want to have the companion app open while playing, as currently you cannot be logged into both simultaneously (which is unlikely to change). Logging into RuneScape will kick you out of the companion app. On the other hand, you can also access the companion app from your desktop browser, meaning that you don’t need one of those fancy smartphones or tablets to enjoy the convenience.

I have high hopes for the RuneScape companion app.

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MMOments: Marvel Heroes

Marvel Heroes is a great game, in fact it always was. What launched as a superhero themed Diablo clone, it brought together mindless action, barrels of loot, and Marvel’s signature hero and villain roster. Since then, Marvel Heroes has grown to include more than 30 heroes and has even added in new missions and areas to coincide with the release of Marvel films. The problem, at launch, however was that Gazillion had clearly spent far too much time focusing on promoting the market rather than the actual game. The atmosphere wasn’t so much “play me” as it was “give me more money.”

Marvel Heroes was technically free, my favorite kind of free, in the sense that you chose one hero from a small list and could either purchase more or unlock them via random, extremely rare drops. Since then, Gazillion has made it much easier to obtain heroes and costumes through gameplay. Eternity Splinters drop at a small but steady pace throughout normal leveling and can be used to purchase heroes. I managed to get my hands on 175 splinters in the time it took me to level Hawkeye from 1 to 30 (current level cap 60). You can spend anywhere between 200 and 400 splinters to unlock specific heroes, or you can spend 175 and unlock one at random with the possibility of receiving a hero you already own.

You will still receive two or three random heroes as you progress through the game’s story mode and, by the time of this review, I had gotten my hands on Hawkeye, Captain America, Storm, Scarlet Witch, and then Cyclops via the eternity splinters. Five heroes and I’m not even close to hitting the level cap with the first. Not too shabby for not having spent any money.

If you played Marvel Heroes at launch and found yourself severely underwhelmed as I did, you are in for a surprise. Thanks to community response and countless patches, Gazillion Entertainment has managed to polish and refine Marvel Heroes into the masterpiece that it is today. Every hero is viable in solo play, even those who draw their powers from up close and personal attacks like the Hulk. There are no longer the “glass cannon” heroes who can push out large amounts of damage but can be killed in one or two hits by most villains and bosses. Content galore has been added to satiate players once they finish the very short campaign.

The story mode in Marvel Heroes is very short, with heroes finishing the latest addition (Asgard) before level 30 with a level cap of 60. Thanks to the new difficulty modes, however, you can go back and play through the campaign over and with higher level foes. Midtown Madness plays out as something of a boss rush, a giant city with just about every event and foe present in Marvel Heroes, with regular appearances by the game’s villain bosses and plenty of loot and experience to go around. Not only are heroes being added at a regular rate, Gazillion is going back to the early roster and tuning them down the the base level to make sure that none become obsolete.

If you have played Marvel Heroes in the past and got fed up with the cash shop or hero system, now is the best time to come back. If you haven’t given Marvel Heroes a try, what are you waiting for? You now have an increased pool of heroes to choose from on new accounts.

MMOments: Elder Scrolls Online Part 2

Despite some setbacks, my time spent playing The Elder Scrolls Online hasn’t exactly diminished over the past week or so. I find myself dropping the game for the day due to quest-breaking bugs quite often, but it always seems that they are fixed by the next time I log in. I keep going back to my newly purchased Playstation 4, but I find that experience even worse with Warframe and Blacklight Retribution both plagued with bugs of their own. With that in mind, I don’t think that I am even close to the burnout point with ESO.

At this point, Razum-Dar has easily become my favorite character in the game. If you don’t know who this guy is, Razum-Dar is a Khajiit and agent for Queen Ayreen, that players will interact with a lot in the Aldmeri Dominion quest chain. Whenever my character wakes up in Jail, Razum-Dar is no doubt not far behind and in the process of murdering every single guard to secure my freedom. The quests and their stories are, without a doubt, fantastic.

In one storyline, for instance, I wound up uncovering a training academy that was treating its trainees like slaves and, in some cases, murdering those who act out of line. In another, I uncovered the secret behind an entire village turned to stone. The conclusion will surprise you.

The more that I play The Elder Scrolls Online, the more I get used to the floaty, not-100%-accurate combat. You get used to the fact that the game provides some lenience for lag which results in wider hit cones, or how magic attacks are auto-aimed. The issue with bugs in Elder Scrolls is one that varies from day to day. Mostly the instances of broken quests, NPCs, or missing nodes is dwindling. It seems like whenever the game does break, now, the bugs are worse. The loading screen stuck in a never ending cycle, crashes to desktop, being thrown out of the world, falling under the map, etc. Items disappearing from banks, the works.

Keeping interest in the war in Cyrodil is difficult, and I will admit that this is my sore loser side talking. The Daggerfall Covenant on Skull Crusher has completely rolled both of the other factions to the point where you can see below that they are nearly one hundred thousand points ahead of both of us. Turns out that Zenimax’s prediction that balance would be kept by the two losing factions ganging up is complete bunk, at least as far as my campaign goes. My faction isn’t even showing up anymore. I can’t even get the 15,000 alliance points needed to change campaign.

It is rather disappointing because, for Elder Scrolls Online, a disappointing campaign lasts three months. The good thing is that there is so much to do in The Elder Scrolls Online that I can pretty much ignore the PvP for the time being, between questing and exploring, completing achievements and finding treasure chests.

Ever since the last MMOments article, I only had one instance where I was ready to throw my computer out the window, and it is a quest in the Aldmeri Dominion campaign where your companion turns into a werewolf. Some combination of bugs and lag resulted in the most frustrating fight I have ever experienced in this game, where he was hitting me from across the room, cone of fire attacks would simply auto-target me even if I was directly behind him and nowhere near the area of effect, blocking was not working, and I would randomly go from half-health to dead instantly. Frustrating, yes.

The next MMOments that I run for Elder Scrolls Online will be in about a month. For now, this will continue to be my primary MMO.

MMOments: Elder Scrolls Online Part 1

The Elder Scrolls Online is a game that, for all intent and purpose, should have launched and immediately crashed into the ground. Most of us will remember a couple of years back when pre-alpha footage leaked onto the net, showcasing a product that looked nothing like what we would expect out of an Elder Scrolls MMO. It looked like a shoddily built World of Warcraft clone, a cheap mockery that harkened back to the days where the MMO was a stick that companies used to beat their properties to death. With the impressions deep in everyone’s mind, and much of the media already declaring the game dead on arrival, Zenimax went back to the drawing board and reshaped the game to what it is today.

And frankly, we should be thanking every single person who overwhelmed Zenimax with feedback after that leak. We will likely never know for sure if that is how the game would have turned out had the leak never happened, but I’m willing to go ahead and say we should treat the scenario as Earth Prime and be thankful that Warhammer Online hasn’t been guaranteed a successor in post-launch exodus. The game as it is right now isn’t perfect, but it is indicative of a company that quickly pulled its head out and at some point since that pre-alpha footage was taken, started treating the game like more of an Elder Scrolls experience and less like a new World of Warcraft.

But what The Elder Scrolls Online fulfills is wholly based on your expectations. If you want Skyrim online, you’re out of luck. As with previous additions to the series, ESO is a new take on the Elder Scrolls formula that adds and removes features as it sees fit. There is certain to be a block of Elder Scrolls fans who want nothing to do with this title, as we saw with the releases of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, and undoubtedly those who never played earlier games in the series who will give the game a try.

Elder Scrolls Online brings to MMOs what has so woefully been lacking over the years: Exploration, and more importantly the desire to explore the world around you and tinker with the things that you find. What Zenimax brings to the table isn’t just a scavenger hunt disguised as exploration, either. Whether you find yourself in a dark cave or some alchemist’s house, there is always something to grab your interest. Resources dot the land, herbs require a keen eye and maybe a helpful perk in order to spot in the tall grasses and flowers. Treasure chests can be found and picked for loot, and one of the grandest features of the Elder Scrolls series is back in full force: The books. Those of you who have played Elder Scrolls games will be fully aware of the series’ signature massive library of hundreds of books of varying length, and Online does not disappoint at all.

I have a love hate relationship with the combat in Elder Scrolls Online, and admittedly most of my problems will likely be smoothed out in the next couple of months. Combat is a pretty straightforward system of using your mouse keys to attack and block, and the number keys to use special attacks. Enemies choreograph what they are about to do to give you ample time to defend or interrupt and get in a quick counterblow. Some foes pull off cool abilities, like freezing you in place or hopping over your head to get in an attack from behind. You won’t get very far standing still and spamming buttons.

The problem with Elder Scrolls Online right now is that combat is very clunky and occasionally completely unresponsive and deceptive. I can count several instances where my character simply refused to attack or defend himself, as well as others where he did attack but the animation did not play. In a game where visual cues are everything and bugs can be expected, it becomes frustrating when you can’t tell if your inability to move is because of lag, or because the NPC you are fighting cast a freezing spell but a bug is causing the ice not to show up. ESO also has a terrible habit of not conveying why you can’t do certain actions. Some enemies have the ability to momentarily stun you, but there is no visual cue on the player when they do. Again, no way of knowing if your inability to attack is due to a bug or intended game feature, because it could be either.

When I originally began writing this MMOments piece, I meant to talk about how the interrupt ability was completely broken. Turns out, after reading through a Reddit thread, that isn’t the case. The game tells you to press the left and right mouse buttons to interrupt certain attacks, when what you actually need to do is block and then hit attack. If you press both at the same time like the tutorial tells you, odds are you may accidentally stumble into the right formula ten percent of the time. You can also bind interrupt to a single button, apparently, which is much more convenient.

Leveling in Elder Scrolls Online continues the ongoing evolution of the series, sticking to its roots while branching into new areas. As was the case with Skyrim, leveling up offers points to invest in health, magic, or stamina. Gaining levels and obtaining Skyshards also awards skill points to invest in combat or crafting related skill lines. As with Skyrim, you will need to raise your levels in individual skills by bashing the skulls in of mudcrabs or making mudcrab stew in order to unlock related perks and abilities using your skill points. Those of you familiar with the series will be happy to know that the system of gaining levels by finding specific books has made its way in as well.

One of my peeves with Elder Scrolls Online has fermented in the form of provisioning recipes. Barring finding other players willing to sell them to you, your provisioning ability is tied one hundred percent to recipes that you find randomly in stashes or in mob loot. In the last beta period, I managed to finish the tutorial with four extra copies of all of the starting recipes. Once the game went live, I didn’t find a single recipe until several hours into the game when I managed to stumble upon a recipe for pork soup.

The Elder Scrolls Online looks great and sounds amazing. The world changes rather dramatically as you go through and complete multi-quest storylines which often revolve around liberating some village from a curse or group of bandits. It is a very sharp turnaround from the standard MMO fare where you are asked to kill twenty five wolves to cull overpopulation only for it to have no visible effect on the game. It also diverts away from The Old Republic, where phasing was mostly done in isolated chambers that only you could access.

Oh and did I mention that you get to talk to Sheogorath?

I expect to have a part 2 for MMOments as I go along, likely within the next week or so.

Impressions: Defiance Gunslinger Trials DLC

Gunslinger Trials is the fourth of five DLC packs in the Defiance season 1 pass, and if there is anything that this season has taught me, it is that the Defiance team has mastered the art of recycling on a level that would make Al Gore cry tears of pride. That being said, coming out of the 7th Legion release, a package of DLC so devoid of content that the feature page has to scrape at the bottom of the barrel just to come up with four points of interest, there was almost no way that Gunslinger Trials could come off as anything other than the silver lining on this cloud of disappointment.

Defiance’s new DLC: Gunslinger Trials is the first content pack to expand upon the storyline following the disappearance of Von Bach at the end of the main mission series. The actual story progresses nowhere, but you get to meet three Von Bach Industries and take on a series of missions recovering things and ensuring that technology doesn’t get into the hands of raiders and other ne’erdowells. Ultimately the missions serve as an extended tutorial to get you to play each of the game’s nine new arenas. I hesitate to call them arenas, despite the game calling them so, because the name implies a relation to the Thorn Liro arenas which are horde mode encounters. The new arenas are recycled maps from the instances we’ve all been playing but with a change in enemies and objectives.

The tweaking of arena scoring has made cooperative play more rewarding at the cost of severely inhibiting players who solo the Gunslinger and Thorn Liro arenas. While playing through the Gunslinger missions, I managed to barely scrape by bronze on most arenas while playing solo and, in most cases, sticking around as long as possible to wait for enemies to respawn. The addition of a new death tax that swipes points by the thousands for dropping, reviving, and evacuating has left certain features like the Warmaster boss rendered pointless.

One of Gunslinger’s highlights is the addition of a new line of weapons available to those who purchase the DLC. These weapons can be obtained by opening gunslinger lockboxes which, thank god, are purchased using standard Von Bach Industries reputation points. Many of the weapons that I have come across offer the chance of initiating a special upon meeting certain requirements, like a sniper rifle that has a 30% chance of initiating cloak after a critical kill or a shotgun that can unleash overcharge if your shield breaks. Unlike previous weapon releases that were essentially small mods attached, the gunslinger weapons have the chance to change the way you play, allowing for players to utilize one static and two dynamic and less predictable specials at the same time.

Ultimately, however, I have to say that Gunslinger Trials exceeded my expectations. The weapons are great, the arenas are fun even if they are recycled from existing dungeons, and the new scoring system shows promise but needs to be tweaked to get right. One suggestion I hope that Trion implements is the ability to enter public queues for gunslinger arenas along the same lines as the public groups for instances. Also the fact that you have to purchase the DLC to access most of the content, unlike previous DLC where the content has mostly been made available for free, also factors into this.

For ten bucks, why not? This DLC was reviewed using the PC version. Your mileage may vary.

MMOments: 7th Legion DLC Impressions

Now generally whenever I write an impressions piece about a game or DLC, I take a few days to get a feeling for the content and make sure that I’ve played it long enough to get a good feel for how everything works. In the case of Defiance’s third DLC pack, the 7th Legion, I spent much of that time wondering where the content was. After a while, I got pretty bored of trying to figure out where I needed to go, and went back to working on completing Defiance’s Season 1 achievements. I got stuck on the first cooperative map, Liberate the Lost, and after several runs through the instance, I can only assume that the achievement for completing the map without dying isn’t working. Still. Since last April.

And that’s pretty much been my experience with 7th Legion, finding something better to do and eventually logging off while I wait for the real content. You see, the DLC doesn’t bring in any new missions or things to actually care about who the 7th Legion are or why they are in San Francisco. The 7th Legion doesn’t have any real presence, you don’t really become a member of the group as the previews suggested, and I’m not entirely sure what their goal is. A unified earth? Isn’t that what I’ve been doing this whole time?

So the meat of 7th Legion’s content is in these new events called Incursions. To start off the problems, I could probably make a trip to the DMV to get my license renewed in less time than it takes to wait for an incursion to pop up, and the DMV by my house is staffed by corpses. The incursion itself is a series of the same events that you come across randomly in the world, based around a central foe, like the Volge or the afflicted zombies. After traveling around the circle and popping the event pimples as they appear, eventually it all culminates in a siege. All in all, incursions are about an hour to an hour and a half of recycled content, except you have to do a lot of them if you want any reward.

Also included is access to the 7th Legion faction and the obligatory faction grind which, in this case, has slowed to a near halt thanks to its reliance on those sporadic incursions. There is a set of 7th Legion guns which seem to be specialized in one category or another. You might come across a shotgun that holds more shells, or a sniper that reloads faster, but if you’ve made any headway into the game, you probably won’t be dropping your arsenal for these. There are seven new outfits to find in the 7th Legion lockboxes, purchased with reputation points obtained through incursions.

The 7th Legion is wholly disappointing, and not because of the $10 price tag or how most of the content is recycled events and reskinned weapons. It is because the game’s official DLC packs have become smaller in scope and content than the free updates that were being pushed out when the television show was still running through its first season. Updates like the Volge and Afflicted brought in new enemies, new types of events and emergencies, brand new weapons with serious changes, storylines that despite being short gave a minimal introduction to the events, and more.

And yes, 7th Legion once again continues Defiance’s legacy of mediocre QA testing and bug fixing. Back in November, I wrote that the constant denial of progression thanks to fatal game breaking bugs that go unfixed for months was enough to stop me from buying any further DLC, had I not already purchased the season pass at launch. With the launch of 7th Legion, said bugs are back. Forget the fact that even before the DLC launched, Defiance went for some time with a bug that caused a majority of the gun varieties to simply not drop. In this pack, you get the luxury of waiting around for an incursion to start only for one of the events to break and bring the incursion to a halt.

There are two DLC packs left in the first season pass and, at this rate, we’ll be lucky if Defiance still has anyone working on it afterward to create a season 2.

Review: Path of Exile

Path of Exile is quite possibly the most difficult game by far that I have reviewed here at MMO Fallout. Up until now, I could probably review most ARPGs with a single paragraph since fans of the genre already know whether or not they’re going to play it. There isn’t much story, you travel through randomly generated dungeons, kill a nation’s worth of minions and bathe in the oceans of loot that they drop, slowly leveling your character and improving your equipment and abilities, chugging potions while taking down giant bosses, and playing cooperatively with your friends. You are either a fan of the genre or you aren’t, and tastes may vary depending on feature changes or art style. To sum up Path of Exile in this fashion wouldn’t do the game justice, so let’s dive in and see what it has to offer.

Let’s start with story: Path of Exile takes place on the grim, dark, and gritty continent of Wraeclast, the land of the doomed filled with nothing but evil. You are an exile who has been sent to this land for varying reasons, and wash up on shore after your captors lovingly throw you overboard with the simple message of “sink or swim.” Each class has its own personality and a story that is both simple and rather endearing. The Witch, for instance, was exiled because she murdered several children in retaliation for their parents burning down her house out of fear that she might, oh say, murder their children. The duelist murdered a lord who threatened his honor, and intends on staying true to his beliefs. The ranger was exiled for living off of the land, and sees Wraeclast as just another land to live off of. My favorite class personality, the Templar, truly believes that his betrayal by the other members of his order and subsequent exile is part of God’s greater plan to use him as a tool to cleanse the world of evil. So strike that down as positive number one: I never thought I would see an ARPG with a story that I would find moderately interesting.

Path of Exile seems to have taken the best of all worlds when it comes to gameplay mechanics, with enough left standing that players from the Diablo and Torchlight games should be right at home. The game is full of your standard fare, you go around slaughtering thousands upon thousands of mindless shambling minions for experience and loot to upgrade your character and level up. There is your standard and hardcore modes, as well as temporary races and leagues set up with additional challenges. In place of the usual gold system, Path of Exile trades in items like identification scrolls and augmentation gems. Much like its predecessors, the vendors in Path of Exile don’t have much worth buying that can’t be easily replaced with something found in the field, so the game essentially does away with the accumulation of useless wealth entirely. So far, my only use for the vendor has been to purchase higher tier potion flasks.

Which brings me to another positive about Path of Exile: No health orbs. Path of Exile offers up five slots to fill with potions of health, mana, speed, etc. Being able to fill your potions through the simple process of laying waste your enemies is a massive improvement over Diablo II’s system of chugging potions and Diablo III’s system of mostly relying on health orbs. In this system, the potions are only as good as you are, although the idea of suddenly finding yourself with empty potions and low health can be mitigated by opening a portal, stepping back into town, being instantly refilled, and popping back. Overall you need to give in order to receive, and skillful players should find that they still allow for a brutal massacre, each kill fueling the next.

Leveling and abilities is where Path of Exile truly stakes a name for itself. In other ARPGs, you gain levels and receive points to invest in unlocking active and passive abilities on a skill tree. In Path of Exile, you are awarded points to invest in a massive network of buffs, ranging from boosted stats (strength, intelligence), better armor or health, increased damage, resistance, speed, etc. Your active abilities, on the other hand, are determined by gems socketed into your armor and weapons. There are three different colors of gems to coordinate with your equipment and they can be easily added and removed with a simple mouse click. The gems gain experience as long as they are socketed and can be leveled up much like your character. Leveling gems is a task in and of itself as with each level the requirements to carry the gem increase. It is very likely that your gems will occasionally require more to level up than you can give, halting their progress until you raise your base stats (strength, dexterity, intelligence, etc).

The passive tree, on the other hand, is massive to the point that it is intimidating to new players. Take a look at the image below, and then understand that only about half of the full tree is showing. You start off at one end and branch out as you see fit, taking in bonuses along the way. The benefit of this system is that buffs are stacked in an order that the casual player should be capable of finding his way around without gimping his character, while allowing any class to take on any role. Want to transform your witch into a tank? Your Ranger into a healer? There’s an app for that, and a calculator to help you do so as efficiently as possible.

So the game looks great and has enough appeal for the less attuned and the seasoned veterans alike. So now let’s talk about the cash shop. Generally I can rip a cash shop apart in two seconds flat, but honestly I don’t have much to say here. The worst that this game has to offer is extra character slots, extra stash slots, and guild slots (default 30), which I don’t think a large portion of the population will make much use of. Otherwise, everything is cosmetic, and I do mean everything. Vanity pets, cosmetic item effects, alternate animations, and dances for some reason. You can’t obtain any of the cash shop items without paying for them, but you won’t find any detriment to your experience by not buying a vanity item. They are on the expensive side, but they’re just vanity items. This is the system that most players can only dream of having in their games.

And now it’s time to talk about the bad parts of Path of Exile. Before we get to that, let’s look at this turtle enjoying a raspberry.

That’s a happy turtle. In the case of Path of Exile, I tried to ask myself the damning question of what would ultimately be the cause of my quitting the game, and the answer is desync. Not latency issues, desync. I play on a desktop connected via ethernet and my internet service is Fios Quantum, which offers a stable 63ms connection on Path of Exile. Desync in Path of Exile isn’t so much lag as it is your client synchronized with the server, meaning the character locations on your client reflecting their location on the server. This is a massive problem since it can make the game confusingly difficult. At its best, desync might cause you to think your attacks are missing when in reality the creature isn’t actually standing there, at worst it will get you killed.

The worst desynchronization I have seen involves creatures dying a full two seconds after they were hit, other mobs simply vaporising out of existence or into existence, and finding myself suddenly surrounded by a group of mobs only to be hacked to death. Desync is especially terrible in creatures who are capable of blink-movement (teleporting around), and those that either suicide bomb you or explode upon death. I have also experienced the frustration of attempting to retreat from attacks only to find myself randomly yanked back twenty yards with the creatures that had previously been about fifteen feet behind now encircling my avatar. Naturally the problems with desync only seem to affect you considering mobs have no problem targeting and attacking your character while you flail around trying to figure out if the problem is your accuracy rating or if you really just missed a special attack four times in a row.

Final Verdict: 8.5/10

I had a lot of fun with Path of Exile. It is a great looking game with an excellent soundtrack and solid gameplay that keeps the genre back in its roots while pushing it in the right direction. This game has a lot going for it, and can only get better as time passes assuming that GGG doesn’t fall down the cash shop rabbit hole. You won’t find many games that offer as much as Path of Exile does for free, or go as far as getting rid of the idea of pay for convenience. I’m sure Grinding Gear Games could make a lot more money in this genre by selling experience tokens and similar items, so the fact that they refuse to is an excellent sign of the company’s dedication.

That said, nothing hurts like losing a hardcore character to desync, or being booted out of the nemesis league because of some poorly coded anti-hack mechanic. With that in mind, I have to give Path of Exile an 8.5 out of 10 on MMO Fallout’s meaningless point-o-meter. The game is 100% free and available on Steam, you should try it out for yourself.

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Final Verdict: 8.5/10

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