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Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Defiance, where a large group of players take on the Hellbug Matriarch. At 8:30am. The coffee must be spiked with something.
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Arktech Revolution is the fifth and final DLC installment for Defiance’s first season pass, and one that I welcome with open arms. It’s been a month since this DLC launched and a few people speculated that the sudden lack of a review here at MMO Fallout was me signaling that I was done with the game after my previous reviews. This is not the case. As it stands, Arktech Revolution is more about quality of life improvements over all else, I wanted to be completely sure that I took enough time to fully digest what had changed to understand how it affects day to day gameplay.
First off, let me thank Trion Worlds for fixing what I consider to be the most poorly executed update in Defiance’s short history. Several DLC’s ago, Trion introduced stims and spikes, as well as consumable grenades to Defiance. The concept was great, you had stims that boosted power/defense/healing as well as spikes that granted an area of effect boost that restored ammo, increased damage, etc. The implementation left a lot to be desired, as replenishing your stockpile of stims/spikes was entirely dependent on either going to a merchant or hoping that the correct type was dropped. With Arktech Revolution, enemies drop generic refills for stims, spikes, and grenades that make it much harder to run out in the middle of an invasion.
It is also possible to gain experience on weapons that have already been mastered. This sounds like a small update, but it means a lot when you previously would have to decide in the middle of a battle whether to switch to a new weapon or continue on at the cost of not making any progress. The armor nodes are interesting, but I haven’t noticed much of an effect on the overall experience.
The boost to both the EGO level cap and enemy abilities has made the game very difficult for new players and veterans alike. Where the game was often times far too easy before, has now become difficult to the point of impossible in certain settings. For instance, I took part in a Volge invasion that rather quickly capped out at the highest difficulty and began spawning top-tier Volge mobs. Many of us couldn’t even make a dent in their armor, which isn’t so much difficult as it is frustrating when you have ten of them spawning in the same area.
Looking back, Defiance is an infinitely better game than it was when it launched one year ago. Ignoring the fact that the game can be purchased for pennies on the dollar nowadays, Defiance is set to go free to play next month on PC with the console versions to follow. The game still has many more improvements to make, like how the world feels so cramped with all of the events going on at any given time. According to forum posts, Trion plans on increasing the size of the game world following the introduction of free to play.
Overall, though, if you were to bottle up all of the paid features from the first five DLC packages and put them up for $30, would it be worth it? I’d like to say so. With the second season of Defiance coming this summer and more tie-in missions on their way, I’m looking forward to what Defiance has to offer for the future.
Trion Worlds has announced that Defiance is shedding its box price and going completely free to play later this year. The PC version is set to make the switch on June 4th, with the PS3 version following on July 15th, and the Xbox360 changeover to come at a later date. New players will have access to the Bay area, including original endgame content and future missions for free. Players who pick up a copy of the game will receive a number of perks, including inventory space, ark keycodes, character slots, and more. Existing owners will also have these same perks.
More on this announcement in the coming weeks.
(Source: Trion press release)
Trion Worlds has announced the fifth DLC pack for Defiance, Arktech Revolution, which seems to be aimed at improving quality of life features in the MMO shooter. Set for release this April, Arktech Revolution will see an increase to both the EGO rank cap and point cap, as well as the introduction of new perks to invest those extra points in. In addition to the increased level cap, players will also find that higher EGO rating makes a big difference on your abilities including damage, health, and shield functionality. To keep the game balanced, the population of NPCs are similarly seeing an overhaul with new abilities and designs. Events will scale dynamically based on the number of players present, with the promise that new players will not be left out.
Finally, some long awaited improvements to damage output and grenades. With DLC #5, weapon types will become more pronounced in their abilities, such as incendiary weapons being more effective against flesh or radiation being able to penetrate armor. There is also a new damage-mitigating buff called armor which does not recharge passively and must be recharged at an extraction point. And finally grenades, stims, and spikes will be receiving an overhaul to hopefully be less tedious to obtain. Enemies will now drop universal “charges” that refill specified items.
You can check out the entire announcement at the link below.
(Source: Defiance)
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.
Trion’s latest DLC pack has released, ushering in new arenas, new missions, new weapons, and more. What it also brought is a new cash shop item that has members of the community in arms. The Legendary Weapon Kit comes packed with one random legendary weapon and a set of random epic mods for said weapon. All for the low low price of roughly $100.
Defiance’s community manager Evan “Scapes” Berman responded on the forums to explain that the price.
This wasn’t a number we pulled out of thin air. It was based on analysis of store use data and existing lock box prices and functionality. An Epic Mod Hoard is 700 bits and grants four random mods at epic rarity. A Tier 4 Lock Box is 400 bits and grants four random weapons at random rarity between rare and legendary. The Legendary Weapon Kit is 10,000 bits (currently discounted 20% to 8,000 bits) and grants a one of each type of mod at epic rarity matched to a random weapon at legendary rarity. This price is based on the average cost of purchasing Epic Mod Hoards and Tier 4 Lock Boxes to get the same value: a legendary weapon fully loaded with epic mods.
One hundred dollars for a weapon that there is no guarantee will be useful? Are people really buying this kit? Of course they are.
Simply put, we were seeing purchases of it the moment the servers came back online. If it wasn’t moving at its current price, we’d change it. And agreed, the Legendary Weapon Kit isn’t intended to be “content” per se, but instead offering a (premium) convenience for players who elect it.
Trion’s latest DLC pack has released, ushering in new arenas, new missions, new weapons, and more. What it also brought is a new cash shop item that has members of the community in arms. The Legendary Weapon Kit comes packed with one random legendary weapon and a set of random epic mods for said weapon. All for the low low price of roughly $100.
Defiance’s community manager Evan “Scapes” Berman responded on the forums to explain that the price.
This wasn’t a number we pulled out of thin air. It was based on analysis of store use data and existing lock box prices and functionality. An Epic Mod Hoard is 700 bits and grants four random mods at epic rarity. A Tier 4 Lock Box is 400 bits and grants four random weapons at random rarity between rare and legendary. The Legendary Weapon Kit is 10,000 bits (currently discounted 20% to 8,000 bits) and grants a one of each type of mod at epic rarity matched to a random weapon at legendary rarity. This price is based on the average cost of purchasing Epic Mod Hoards and Tier 4 Lock Boxes to get the same value: a legendary weapon fully loaded with epic mods.
One hundred dollars for a weapon that there is no guarantee will be useful? Are people really buying this kit? Of course they are.
Simply put, we were seeing purchases of it the moment the servers came back online. If it wasn’t moving at its current price, we’d change it. And agreed, the Legendary Weapon Kit isn’t intended to be “content” per se, but instead offering a (premium) convenience for players who elect it.
Trion Worlds revealed Defiance’s next DLC pack: Gunslinger Trials, and if you haven’t finished the campaign or season 1 and don’t want to see any spoilers, skip the next paragraph. Set for release in March on PC, PS3, and Xbox360, Gunslinger Trials will include three new mission lines, nine new cooperative arenas, and will also open up the Thorn Liro arena to groups of players rather than the original solo.
Now on to the story. Gunslinger Trials picks up where the main campaign in Defiance ended, where we learned that Von Bach had survived his fall from the Golden Gate Bridge. The Earth Republic on the other hand continues expanding its terrestrial forces.
These stories are told with eleven new cutscenes and over three hundred new lines of dialog. Ark hunters will uncover a conspiracy to steal EGO implants, the revival of the Biodyne project, and even the rise of a new political power in the Earth Republic.
Players who take part will be rewarded with, what else, new guns to shoot things with, each tailored to the fighting style of its creator. More information to come in the weeks ahead.
(Source: Defiance)
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.
MMO Fallout 