Defiance is one of those games that I find complicated to review, because I keep going back to it and having a good deal of fun despite the fact that certain features leave me bashing my head on the desk in frustration. On one end, you have a pretty solid shooter set in a persistent post-apocalyptic world that contains regular events, a living story, and more. On the other hand, I have to sit back and wonder if the people who approved certain features have ever played, let alone developed, a video game before. Defiance’s high points are quite high indeed, and while all MMOs have bugs that will be patched out overtime, the real depression comes from knowing that certain issues with the game were intended “features.”
In the epic struggle between RPG and shooter, the shooter element is the clear winner in Defiance. There is no hotbar at the bottom, you won’t be mashing numbers, and your active abilities roll down to your main power (shield, overcharge, decoy, or invisibility) and a reloading grenade cooldown. While leveling up gives you points to invest in equipping and upgrading passive skills that offer a range of benefits, like the ability to obtain ammo by meleeing NPCs to death or taking half damage when you shield breaks, your ability to stay alive on the battlefield is primarily linked to your skill in aiming and shooting, as well as your ability to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge. EGO investment helps incrementally along the way, and there are enough skills to choose from to suit any style, but it’s important to get out of the way right now that Defiance is a shooter in a persistent world. If you are looking for a deep RPG, look elsewhere.
You wouldn’t be too far off by describing Defiance as something of an open world Borderlands. Much of the content revolves around easily soloable missions that are simply drive to location and either kill things or kill things while collecting something or defending something. These side missions surround two main plots: One following your personal character’s story and the other which follows the television show. Defiance also includes some features you’ll recognize from other MMOs, including cooperative dungeons and player vs player fights that take place in instanced matches as well as open area shootouts in specific locations.
A lot of the progression in Defiance comes from the massive number of varied weapons that drop from monsters or are rewarded from quests. Pistols, shotguns, submachine guns, LMGs, BMGs, infectors, grenade launches, rocket launchers, shields, and thrown grenades, and more are waiting to spill out of your fallen enemies like a busted and bloody pinata, and they all come with their own special elemental effects. While the base weapon stats themselves don’t heavily progress over time, the elemental effects do and they can put quite a difference between guns you find at the start of the game vs guns closer to end-game. Each weapon can also be customized with mods found on the battlefield, offering scopes, extended magazines, etc.
That said, it is impossible to find a specific weapon to love and hold onto it forever, as Defiance employs something of a love-em-and-leave-em system. If you took part in the EGO rewards, you may have wondered what the +1 weapon skill bonuses were for. Every character has an overall level in each of the weapon types, including the base vehicle types, which progresses as you gain experience while using a particular weapon or merely driving your car around. Each weapon as an item has its own experience bar which, once filled, stops contributing toward your skill in that category. The experience bar fills slowly enough that you never get the feeling that you are cycling through guns too quickly, and the rate at which new guns drop that are similar to the one you are using is fast enough that by the time you need to retire your shotgun, you already have fifteen more waiting in your inventory plus the ones you had to break down to make room.
I’ve seen some other people criticize that the gunplay in Defiance doesn’t pack any power, and I have to disagree. For whatever faults Defiance has, whether or not the guns have power isn’t part of it. Shooting packs a real wallop and while the frequency in explosions may try your patience, both guns and explosives have a real feeling of weight behind them. All Points Bulletin at its original launch tried to combine shooter and MMO and ended up sacrificing the quality of both. Defiance is like a shooter cake that is frosted with persistent online world and decorated with RPG candies. I think it’s time for a cake break.
Defiance also has about as much text talk as you’d find in your average PC shooter. I want to pin this equally on the fact that the chat system is awful and incredibly unfriendly to the user, but I feel like the other half is simply that Defiance isn’t exactly friendly to chat in. Defiance is set up on action sequences, and as such the game isn’t exactly friendly to chatting unless you are sitting around doing nothing, which I suspect isn’t the case for most players. So if Trion does improve the chat window, I hardly see Defiance becoming a bustling social center unless the players modify their behavior to suit.
The AI that you fight against is inconsistently stupid. NPCs like the mutant riflemen or the 99er cyborgs are surprisingly intelligent in their use of grenades, able to perceive when player characters are hiding behind cover and using the grenades to flush them out. I say surprisingly because the rest of the time they are pants-on-head morons. Mobs with rocket launches regularly kill themselves or each other because they shot directly into the wall that they were hiding behind, repeatedly. Sometimes it seems as though the AI is managing to use real tactics, flanking the player and covering each other, while other times they just run about aimlessly or stand still with no cover in sight. Unfortunately most of the time Defiance simply relies on the old quantity over quality, choosing to up the difficulty by taking the same stupid AI and just throwing a lot of them at you. A single mutant might take a bit of health off of you, but shovel an entire platoon in without any breathing room, and eventually those little knocks will kill you.
Defiance violates one of my core rules of gameplay: persistent knockback status. This is also known as PSS (persistent stunned status), and describes a fault in the way the game is programmed without a proper cooldown on either the AI or player’s ability to chain a stun rendering the target unable to move or react, with the only option being to sit there and watch your character die. Enemies with rocket launchers can fire consecutive missiles that don’t allow you to recover from the first knockback before the second hits, hellbug archers spawn in enough numbers that if one hits you, the rest will easily cut you down, and the grenades fired by certain NPCs have a knockback effect that seems to affect players that should be out of the blast radius.
The episode and main missions are easily Defiance’s strong point. As I said in the impressions, there are some genuinely strong storytelling elements, and if there is one thing that will set Defiance apart from the competition, this is it. The structure of the missions themselves is just about the same as the other side missions, but are generally longer and of course contain better voice acting, cinematic effect and propel a meaningful story. Jon Cooper has easily become one of my favorite MMO characters of all time, and the major players in the story are a wealth of personality.
It is particularly sad that a lot of Defiance’s faults are “working as intended,” or at least someone thought they were good ideas. The interface itself is workable enough, even if it is a pain to navigate at times, but the map is truly the work of a sadistic designer. Apparently nobody at Trion has ever looked at a map, because the developer never thought players might find it useful to have defining landmarks, or areas, or really anything helpful labeled on the map outside of the fast travel locations, vendors, and mission starting points. Need to go to the “southern radio tower” for a contract but don’t know where it is? Sucks for you, because the game sure isn’t going to tell you where it is.
I’m going to include this other particular annoyance even though it will probably be patched out at one point. Being shot in the back in certain circumstances will spin your character a full one hundred eighty degrees which apart from being disorienting, will likely lead to your death. I can’t count how many times I’ve died while either fighting a group of NPCs on the ground or running for cover, only to have my character spun around suddenly and be gunned down. It’s even worse when there are two snipers at opposite ends and they take turns spinning you around until you eventually die. It is annoying in itself, coupled with the sniper NPC ability to have perfect aim at any range or in any condition, and worst of all: It was a feature that went through the process of concept to implementation and play testing and no one realized how god awful it is.
I have to applaud Defiance on one bit in particular: Lockboxes. Trion is one of the few companies to actually implement lockboxes in a way that isn’t an obvious grab for cash, and is reasonably attainable by the players who don’t want to be treated like walking wallets. Lockboxes in Defiance aren’t items that are shoveled into your inventory by the bucket load and in the sleaziest way possible, like Cryptic Studios does with its games. Instead they are simply another vendor you visit and pay to open with increasing prices based on the tier of the box.
You can opt to pay in bits (real money currency) to open a lockbox, but honestly why would you? With how many guns you find on the battlefield, odds are you won’t even be thinking about lockboxes until much later in the game. Even then, key fragments are insanely easy to obtain. Between the ease of procuring the scrip and fragments to open a lockbox, and the relative unimportant nature of the lockbox, there is no reason any player should be spending real money opening these boxes.
So what is your ultimate conclusion, Omali? I found Defiance to be a very enjoyable game, even though it is held back by the unfortunate understanding that just about every positive aspect of the game leads to a “…but.” It is a solid shooter that takes place over an expansive map, contains a wealth of missions and guns to enjoy, and employs just enough progression to not fall into the sort of mind numbing PvE that plagued Global Agenda, while at the same time not falling into the mindless deathmatch element of Call of Duty. There is a wealth of content and the AI pulls itself off of the fainting couch generally long enough to put up a real fight, and when it is at its prime it is a sight to see.
In conclusion: Despite the fact that I’ve dropped a lot of hatred on Trion and Defiance, Defiance is a game that will keep me coming back. It doesn’t excel in any particular field, but the combined experience of everything put together makes for a solid game with a wealth of content. You’re going to be hard pressed to find a game on the market that matches the style of Defiance. If you fall into the category of people who don’t do well when it comes to an MMO’s launch and the associated bugs, I recommend you stay far away until Defiance has had more time to settle in. Perhaps get yourself acquainted with the television series.
7.5/10 -Not A Must Buy, Enjoyable But Wait For The Demo
MMO Fallout 