I still cringe when I have to refer to the SyFy Channel in its written form, but I digress. I'm here to talk about Defiance, a fairly unique Shooter/MMO hybrid that also happens to be part of a trans-media effort to establish both a virtual world and a television show. SyFy tried something similar with Red Faction to limited success, so they're trying a little harder this time around, and have partnered with Trion Worlds to provide the game side of the bargain.
It's the somewhat near future and an alien collective of refugees known as the Votan have come to Earth. Between the inevitable war breaking out and a terraforming disaster, things got pretty hairy. The debris from their Ark ships keep falling to earth, bringing scrap material (yay!) and Hellbugs (boo!), and as an Ark Hunter it's your job to salvage the good stuff while taking out the hostiles. You'll cruise around a terraformed Bay Area on one of many types of vehicles (my hunter preferred her 2013 Dodge Challenger), and generally interact with everything with bullets or explosives.
Defiance uses a class-less system. Your character can choose from one of four special abilities to start with (Cloaking/Damage Buff/Speed/Decoys) and you spend your EGO points to unlock perks for your loadouts. While the special abilities change how your character might approach a certain situation, in the end, most characters end up playing quite similarly. You can set up several loadouts, and specify whether or not they're for cooperative or competitive play and switch between them as needed, though I tended to find myself sticking with one playstyle.
My biggest worry about Defiance was whether or not the shooting mechanics would feel solid. MMOs are usually built on autotargeting and command queues, with very few successful variations on the formula. Thankfully, hitting your targets and popping off headshots works much, much better than I expected. It's not going to replace your Halo and Call of Duty games, but it gets the job done. Impressive.
As an MMO, Defiance is inherently co-op. While you can group with up to four other players and quest to your heart's content, the public questing and Arkfall events let practically any number of players work together. Generally, any non-storyline quest in the game is open to anybody in the area who wishes to contribute, which is great. Taking a cue from recent MMOs such as Guild Wars 2, everybody who assists in a kill or a quest will get credit. I for one welcome this as an MMO trope.
The main storyline missions are fairly well done - you'll get some dialogue or even a nice cutscene to set things up, then you'll participate in a scripted setpiece. They start out being fairly basic, but eventually lead to lengthy multi-part quests and investigations. The variation is nice and keeps you engaged. I also enjoyed that they're not as thinly spread out as "main" quest missions tend to be in other games.
Conversely, the sidequest design in Defiance feels very cut and paste. Walk up to a sidequest marker and you'll receive some generic canned audio about getting mercenary work, and then proceed to walk into an area and click on 3-5 control points to win. Since they're all "public", you might drop in right as one of the quests is ending, which can be confusing the first few times it happens. They're a step up from "Kill X Monsters", but almost feel dropped in to fill a content void.
Challenges also litter the world, and come in several varieties - Rampage, Hot Shot and Time Trials. Rampage and Hot Shot are combat challenges, while Time Trials have you hopping in your chosen vehicle and racing through a set course to earn medals. They're an interesting diversion, but I was usually eager to move the plot along rather than try and challenge the leaderboards.
Arkfalls are where most of your co-op time will probably be spent, as they're easily the most impressive event type Defiance likes to toss around. Taking place in the open world, any number of players can band together and complete an Arkfall to earn experience, currency and keycodes, which help you purchase lockboxes, something that'd otherwise require you to pay a microtransaction. Save your hard-earned dollars.
Minor Arkfalls require players to simply destroy an Ark crystal while fending off waves of Hellbugs/Scrappers, and tend to be over in a matter of minutes. Major Arkfalls are a combination of a series of Minor Arkfalls ending in a huge boss fight. The boss fights usually have a trick to them, such as taking out a number of enemies to lure the main baddie out into the open, and take quite a long time to complete. Arkfalls scale with the number of players who show up, and each time I engaged in a Major one, there were at least a hundred players working together by my estimate.
No MMO would be complete without some sort of instanced dungeon, and Defiance is no different. As of right now, there are seven "Co-Op Missions" which players may queue for. In the Co-Op Missions, up to four players team up to take on various objectives in a private instance. Usually, these will follow a similar pattern to the Main Story missions - you'll get some quick setup, such as rescuing some captives, then kill your way to a series of simple objectives, culminating in a boss fight.
The boss fights are fairly simple, but do require players to watch each others' backs and focus fire when applicable. If you're looking for highly tactical fights, or at least tricky mechanics to overcome, you'll probably come away disappointed. As is, the Co-Op Missions are a nice change of pace, and the queue times are quite short, if you feel like spending as much time doing them as possible.
Personally, I didn't find much to the co-op beyond adding more players. With the exception of the BMG weapons which let you heal other players, there's next to no interaction beyond reviving a downed player or necessary synergy between players' special abilities. To me, a game that bills itself as an MMO should at least offer a compelling reason to not Lone Wolf everything, and Defiance simply doesn't. There's nothing *wrong* with the co-op implementation, but I feel like the class-less system really hurts it. I know that the standard "holy trinity" of roles in an MMO has received a lot of flak, but it forces a good deal of teamplay. Perhaps that'd be harder to translate into a shooter.
The 360 ExperienceFor the most part, my experiences were similar to Mike's. The 360 version suffers from a few technical issues. The menus are a little cumbersome, and at times it's a guessing game when you're trying to figure out weapons stats, pursuits, and contracts. It's not too bad, but it's not newbie friendly. The game does suffer from some pop-in and slow down. When a hundred players are all in the same Arkfall the gameplay still holds up, most of the time.
I particularly liked the fact that it's easy to switch between loadouts on the console version. I could change between my Cloaked sniper to my Overcharged shotgun stud, then to a Decoy-using support character with the press of a few buttons. The weapon variety improves as you advance in the game, and high-level mods can greatly impact weapon performance.
I think there is room for nuanced play and class synergy. If you really want to get the most out of Defiance, you'll want to group with three other players. You can go on missions and co-op instances together, and it's easy to designate roles, or even change roles on the fly. Several perks are focused on reviving allies and there are weapons that can root enemies and lower shields. But like Mike said, most people are simply using Overcharge and blasting away while a few players use their healing BMG guns. Defiance is a good attempt at a shooter/MMO hybrid, but it feels mostly like a shooter, and a decent one at that.
- Andrew
Defiance the TV show recently aired and it's actually decent. The story centers around St. Louis which is now called the town of Defiance and an ex-soldier turned "law man" and features some pretty high production values for a cable TV show. It's easy to get a Firefly meets Battlestar Galactica type vibe from Defiance, though as of now, it falls short of their quality. It'll be interesting to see how things in the show tie together with the MMO.
- Nick
The framework for a solid MMO is here, but it feels like the game's content was rushed out to meet the launch of the TV show. To fix the content issue, Trion's got a combination of free and paid content updates, as well as quests that tie into episodes of the show. $40 gets you the season pass which promises five downloadable content packs in the near future. If updates to the game help increase player synergy and keep a steady stream of content coming, it'll be easier for me to recommend. As is, I'd probably wait and see what happens.
As Defiance is an MMO, the state of the game will constantly shift. This review was written based on two weeks of experience with the game post-launch, and playtime after the first major patch. Trion Worlds provided us with a PC code and a copy of the 360 version.