What Would You Change About… Defiance?

September 22, 2015 15:05 ( Articles, F2P News ) 0

Defiance is a free to play MMO Third Person Shooter where players step into a near future Earth where alien invaders have left only pockets of humanity alive and now, after the dust has settles, players rise as Ark Hunters seeing out remnants of salvageable technology. The game offers PVE and PVP content and coincides with a SyFy channel TV show of the same name, where cameos and linked story-lines can be seen throughout the game. With a promising start, and still lots of potential, there are many things that plague Defiance and stop it from being a truly great MMO.

• Lacking in Variety - Whatever the area, it’s lacking. Whether it’s environments, character customization, costumes or actual content, the game just completely lacks in variety and feels like most of the time the same content is just regurgitated and recycled and very little is added that is new (or if it is then it’s paid for DLC). The problem is that this gives the entire game a very limited shelf life, unable to keep players interested they soon trail off and look for a new MMO. Quests are hit and miss, fairly grindy and a little lacklustre, but most of all the story content is extremely short and then leaving you in a world where there feels like there’s very little to do, at least nothing that is particularly engaged and is scarce on moments that have you gripped. Spending more time adding in new content is a must, keeping the game fresh, keeping players wondering “what can we expect next?” The moment a game rests on its laurels is the moment it’s on the slow decline to shut down.


• Updates - The game seriously lacks in updates. Following on from the lack of core content, the actual newly added stuff is always extra gear, weapons, crates, caches and other stuff to spend money on. Scrolling back through the news feeds of what’s happening in game then the only “news” aside from the new items are Q&A streams with developers and updates on what’s happening in the TV show… the game doesn’t actually have anything new to report on and even the news updates are a constant recycle of the same old thing.


• The TV-Game Divide - Not quite as much synergy as promised. When the game launched alongside the SyFy channel TV show players were promised big ideas of how the shows events would affect the game, and even events in the game could affect the TV show. It didn’t take long to realise that the demand on time, resources and… well… effort on the part of the developers would soon make this a promise they couldn’t keep. For a while now the devs have said that the TV show and Game are two separate identities, they’re going in slightly different directions (again, more than likely because the developers just can’t keep up with the changes of the TV show where even key characters integral to a lot of quests in the game have already been killed off). The whole point for a lot of players was having this cool symbiosis between the two medias, to see how they would translate between, and it’s just not something that was ever really delivered other than a handful of seasonal DLCs to add in a some new stuff from time to time. The Game really should have focused more on keeping up with the show, which may in turn have helped the show whose future is already questionable.. a good job that the game didn’t connect itself too much, but will probably be a slow demise without it.


• Rocket Launchers - The PVP is like Quake. Anyone who remembers playing Quake back in the day knows how the combat revolved around players using Rocket Launchers and jumping around everywhere like crazed rabbits making them hard to hit. Fortunately MMOs have come a long way since then… unfortunately not in the case of Defiance. PVP is still HEAVILY dominated by Rocket Launchers, wrecking groups, the biggest issue is that there’s no restrictions to weight to players wielding Rocket Launchers aren’t hindered, they can throw these things around and jump around like they’re made of balsa wood, even worse there’s no friendly fire so as your allies are engaged with a target in melee… doesn’t matter, fire away! Restricting movement with Rocket Launchers, adding in friendly fire, you’re either going to get a lot fewer people using them or lot more team kills!


• PVP In General - There are a lot of problems with PVP. A lot. There’s plenty of glitches, aimbots, wall hacks and the rest that already ruin a fairly bland PVP system, with only two modes, and combined with the same issues we’ve mentioned with weapon imbalancing, there’s just not much fun to be had with PVP and a lot of frustration. Bugs such as being able to log out during battle to avoid being killed, or logging back in to appear behind enemy lines, things that can really affect the result of a battle but the bigger problem is that a lot of these issues are well known and are pretty persistent, a lot of them existing since Alpha but seemingly not much is being done about it. Solution: listen to the players and deal with the problems that affect them the most.

These are some of the things that we would change about Defiance, but what do you think? What would you change about this game? Would you add anything else to the list? We await your opinions! Let us know!!!!!

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