Defiance

Rating: 1 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: MMO; Sub-genre: Third Person Shooter, RPG

ESRB: M (Blood splatter from machine guns, but mostly profanity)

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): n/a

Developer: Trion Worlds

Wiki page

This is an ambitious undertaking. A video game and TV series launched simultaneously? The video game is an MMO? The MMO is an action shooter? And they're backed by small potatoes? Man. Some of the largest games in the world have difficulty with launching on multiple platforms at once. How did these guys do it all? We all assumed it would just be a broken, unplayable train wreck. To our delighted surprise, this game actually works. And it works far better than I expected it to. That still doesn't make it a good game, though.

The ambition caught my attention. But you have to do a good job to keep my attention.

A fair assumption would be that the shooter controls wouldn't translate out. MMO's are known to involve things like targeting and hit chance, while shooters only go off manual aim. Not only that, but latency is a constant issue in an MMO. Most of them skate away with it because the game design doesn't require the pinpoint precision of a tense action game. Somehow the shooting in this game is almost spot on despite the reliance on servers and the loads they bear. I noticed some discrepancies here and there when it came to landing shots- sometimes generous, sometimes denied- but mostly these issues I could attribute to having the aim assist turned on. Normally I turn those off, but I figured, "It's an MMO!" I regret that. If you're a shooter fan, turn it off. The biggest problem I ran into were choppy framerates in high traffic fights. But I was playing on XBox 360, just to test the game's mettle further! And... also because I'm very comfy with the XBox's controls. Which leads me to another compliment: the game is stupidly easy to get into. Yeah! It just uses your XBox Live sign in. Creating an account for the game is optional! And even that process takes about two less steps than I thought it would. Astounding, since even the most technologically advanced studios make this process as irritating as possible. 

If only the whole game was this intelligent. For all these pluses, the game boils down to being an MMO grind in no time flat. Sure, there's plenty of questing and even a good helping of cutscenes with recorded dialogue. But every quest is so similar: go click on three things, waves of guys attack you at each step. Next quest? Go click on four things, waves of guys attack you at each step. And every other activity is approached the same way. Like Arkfalls. Holy crap, those are constant! A big rock falls out of the sky and you fight waves of guys to claim it. The enemy design almost seemed competent, being that you do have to use different tactics to fight hellbugs than humanoids. But too quickly a pattern is noticed. Either you run in circles for days or you are hiding in cover and abusing long range weapons. 

The classless system feels unique at first. But it is problematic in important ways. You get a "skill point" for each "level" you earn. And each perk can have three points sunk into it. But you have to equip each perk into a perk slot; unequipped perks do nothing. Perk slots unlock very slowly, and many perks have to be acquired to unlock farther perks. The end result is that you go many, MANY levels where you spend points that do absolutely nothing to your character. And even when you are spending points on something you want, you probably can't equip the perk you just got yet. The idea is that you can eventually level so much that you can buy every skill you want for several different builds of character because the game allows you to swap between different builds at the character screen. An interesting idea, but not a good one. This makes alternate characters pointless, renders each individual build less deep, and only benefits people who want multiple builds while the more single-minded player (which I believe is the majority of people) gets less out of his/her character.

One last thing: there are no auction houses, no banks, and no major cities. MMO's are about community, and the lack of these things really hinder the player base from becoming that.

It just isn't an MMO if you can't idle around on an epic mount around hundreds of other players.

Here's a question, Defiance: do I HAVE to watch the TV show? Because I don't know what in the flying frick is going on! With zero introduction, my character got in a plane crash and was then told to go explore. Something called an EGO, which is half Cortana from Halo and half Angel from Borderlands (and all Navi from Ocarina of Time), continually tells you what to do. Whether its basic gameplay (things like telling you to defend yourself and to "keep doing what you're doing") or pointing out what the icons on the User Interface mean, it's just too blatant. And it never stops, no matter what your level is. It seems like a minor thing, since it's basically like having a Quest Helper add-on in World of Warcraft. But this is 100% of the story, man. This dumb AI acting like some oddly emotional "emotionless" girl and telling you what to do and think. Your character can't talk, so this is the only thing you get to listen to after quest NPC's do their little dance.

I tried looking through the knowledge index to no avail. But even then, why should I? Clever writers would make a world I can understand just by experiencing it. And the setting they've made is no help at all. It's supposed to be Earth. The city of Defiance (which the game oddly does NOT take place in, it takes place in San Francisco) is actually Saint Louis only renamed after some battle or something. That's all I know and that's from some extracurricular reading. I have no clue what happened to the Earth, how bad the damage was, why there are all these different kinds of aliens and mutants, where this Ark came from, WHY the Ark is important, and on and on. Unfortunately it makes me understand why things like a zombie apocalypse are a popular setting: people understand that concept already. Whatever the hell is going on here needs an entire 2 hour movie to explain, if not more. And it gives us nothing. Maybe if I watched the show religiously and read the Wikia AND read every little thing I found in the game I would eventually piece it all together. But... MAN. That is a lot of work just to be able to understand the basic setting, nevermind all the other details!

None of this even matters, though, because the characters and dialogue are so bad that I can assume everything is just random cliches and ideas hobbled together. The story of the "main" missions and the "episode" missions both involved a maguffin. Each one could fit in the palm of your hand. Literally, one story featured an item that looked like a Christmas Tree-shaped ornament and the other was an ash tray. And each mission just involved trying to find the damn thing with non-stop steps to get to it. Intermixed with this are the stories of the NPC's you are helping, which are completely lazy and nonsensical. For example, I ran a quest where I met some genius mechanic. After enlisting her help, her assistant gets kidnapped off-camera by a man who also happens to be the same person who killed the mechanic's father. Once this villain is killed, she almost verbatim gives a speech about how revenge doesn't make her feel any better that you can probably quote before seeing it. Everything comes out as some sloppy cut-and-paste from everything else you've ever seen with some awful acting behind it. In particular, the Nolan character (who seems to be some kind of main character in the show) couldn't be bothered with putting inflection in any of his lines.

Keep shooting. That's the plan. No, I'm not a robot.

I did try the multiplayer briefly. 

I did all but one of the co-op maps (I already decided to stop playing by the time I unlocked the last one). Those were functional, at least they were congruent with the single-player experience and met my expectations for what a group would be like. My biggest complaint on those was that I didn't see a point to doing them. In MMO's, generally the group activities are the most rewarding. While I can appreciate doing something just for fun, that doesn't work in an MMO. The reason being is that people will stop doing it if it distracts them from important grinding. 

The PvP was equally as messy as I expected it to be, but also as functional as the rest of the game. While everything seemed to work, there are only four maps total: two deathmatch, one where you hold capture points, and one that was labeled 64 vs. 64 that I couldn't fathom being anything less than a choppy nightmare when played on console. The capture points one had lost me after only two games. I think maybe people who play Battlefield could get into it, but being an item-based game might still ruin it. It's far too large, open and hectic to become any kind of strategic battle of wits. And the team deathmatch is just victim to less-than-great map design; the one that supports more players is too confined and both maps have strange spawning habits. Regardless, the game is "leveless." Players' level of power is displayed as an "EGO rating." Because of this, PvP matches will feature everyone from 1 rating to 5 million rating (or whatever the cap is). 

Even though the game goes to great lengths to normalize items and talents, you are still subject to playing with extremely powerful players at every turn. The amount of knowledge and careful character crafting someone can do by the time they reach a rating of 2000 or so makes them ridiculously more powerful than a newbie. This normalization affects a great deal of the game, since MMO's are all about progressing your character, and it is almost completely ineffective. What a waste!

Blur: useless in PvE, godlike in PvP.

Conclusion:

As an MMO, this game offers none of the things MMO players want other than an infinite grind and mostly functional gameplay. As an action shooter, it only offers a mountain of MMO features that slow you down for days/weeks/months just to get to lazy and 100% repetitive sequences. An interesting game to talk about, but that's it. But hey: no subscription fee!