In Defiance players get to jump into the role of Ark Hunters, trained mercenaries seeking out alien technology after a war that has near levelled Earth, salvaging these artifacts to help rebuild mankind. The game ties in to the Defiance TV show, with characters from the series and big storylines finding their way into the game. The game had a promising start and still boasts lots of potential, however, many pitfalls along the way have tarnished this promising title…

• Variety is Lacking - Every area of the game feels like it is lacking in variety. Exploring the vast world it doesn’t take that long until places start feeling the same, the other players you come across look and dress extremely similar with not much individuality, game content and quests feel like the same running from one NPC to the next. The game suffers from a lack of variety and overall makes everything feel like a grind, the content whilst shinny and new at first quickly dims as you start to realise that there’s not much new in the way of content that will be appearing any time soon and everything has a recycled and regurgitated quality to it. The result is that the game doesn’t have much to grip players, to keep them involved, or even keep them interested and ultimately having a short shelf life before players move on to the next new MMO. The content needs to be more diverse, give more options and not feel so linear, at least if players are to believe that this isn’t just another MMO on the decline trying to milk the final few dollars from players before shutting the game down.


• Lack of Updates  As well as bland content, there is rarely anything new. A trek back through the “news” updates on the official website gives players an idea of just exactly what content and updates are added; among the extensive updates of what is happening on the TV show, occasional mention of Q&A Dev streams, the only stuff being added into the game are new cash items, bundles or discounts of cash shop items. There’s no new content other than the occasional paid for DLC that invariably adds nothing to the core game, the content is there also seems to be on the same endless cycle that the rest of the content suffers with the same “updates” coming around over and over.


• Remove the Divide Between Game and TV Show - The game lacks the symbiosis with the TV show that everyone was promised. One of the big things about Defiance when it was launched was that it has a TV show to go with it, launched alongside it, which is completely unique for an MMO. The problem is that other than the initial quests from the standard game having a link to elements of season one, as well as some of the same characters to show the crossover, the “shows direction will change the game” was quickly proven to be false. Things have come and gone in the shows, BIG things, that have barely been touched in the game and it didn’t take long for the developers to start saying that the two medias would have their own identities; ie. what happens in the show doesn’t always affect the game. Realistically we think they bit off more than they could chew, that to keep the updates coming in the game would take up too much time and resources, or perhaps the TV show wasn’t as successful as they’d hoped and it just didn’t make financial sense. Either way we think they missed a trick, instead of having a constantly updated world with new content, the game ended up in purgatory being left behind as the show headed off into exciting new directions and players could only watch on and wish. Bit late in the day to make these changes now as the future of the show is pretty questionable as to whether it will be renewed, and in turn it makes us wonder how viable the game is without it.


• PVP Content - PVP is a broken mess. The number of glitches, invisible walls and bugs that hinder PVP is bad enough, but throw in hacks with aimbots and wall-clips, known issues such as logging out mid fight so that you don’t take a kill count… there’s lots of problems. If PVP was amazing then it might be easier to overlook, but it’s not, it’s fairly bare bones and doesn’t impact the world half as much as the video clips and developers have implied in the past. So many of the bugs have been persistent since launch and nothing has been done, game/PVP breaking bugs; to be left for so long then it once more brings into question how much the developers really care and the future of Defiance… if they do then they need to do something about the clear issues it faces.


• Rocket Launchers - Rocket launchers are ridiculously imbalanced. Following on from PVP one of the biggest issues for us is the imbalance that some weapons, most notably Rocket Launchers, have on PVP. Back in the day we played a lot of Quake and Unreal Tournament where a player favourite was picking up a rocket launcher and jumping around like a mad idiot, well the nostalgia has taken form in Defiance as we have to suffer the same mechanics. Bunnying all over the place in PVP is bad enough, but the overpowered nature of Rocket Launchers (with very little in the way of penalty) means you can wipe out players with ease, and using a Rocket Launcher realistically is the only viably consistent way to keep ahead in PVP. Furthermore there’s no friendly fire… I mean at least Quake got that right, you can literally fire a rocket at an enemy surrounded by your own forces and they’re the only one to take damage. Add a little more realism to the weapons so that some of them aren’t quite so overpowered; increase the cost of rockets, make jumping around with them IMPOSSIBLE (as it should be) and we’ll either see a lot more team kills from friendly fire or more people using alternate weapons.

So that’s what we’d change with Defiance, but more importantly what do you believe should be changed? What do you think could/should be added to improve the game? What would you add to your own personal wish list? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2015 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.