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.
