.hack nostalgia, it's a good thing.Originally Posted by Rusty Spoons
~
I had wanted to try Defiance for a while, as I had some co-workers who are roughly as casual as myself recommend it. However, the buy-to-play model with a $60 price tag on an untested IP was enough to prohibit me from taking a stab at it... but then they did this free ‘weekend’ on Steam. What follows are a filthy casual’s rambling impressions of it.
Over the weekend I probably dumped about 18 hours into the game across 4 characters who were each geared to a different build on the game’s skill grid. Your starting point on the grid is basically determined a choice you make during the tutorial, a choice you have to make from a menu while you are taking live fire. I’m not sure who made this decision but I have to say it’s a pretty poor choice in tutorial design. So if you happen to choose something you decide you don’t care for later on, your best bet is to pay in-game currency to respec your grid. This is a nice way around a class-based system and may function as a small counter to inflation. No need for alts.
So there are 4 main Powers which are active-use and the remaining items are known as Perks and function as passive bumps to your stats, etc. Powers have 5 levels whose purchase are restricted by you overall ‘level’, while Perks have 3 levels which are unrestricted. In essence, by the time your earn your fourth grid skillpoint (the first always goes to your Power, chosen during the tutorial), you could have capped out a single Perk. The grid is also laid out so that purchasing a Perk unlocks the Perks which are adjacent to it, so at higher levels there is probably some planning involved to min-max your build.
Powers are: Decoy (Tactical, creates a double to attract enemy fire, you can swap with the double); Blur (Offensive, increased speed and melee damage); Overcharge (Offensive, increased damage and crit %); and Cloak (Defensive, gives a brief period of invisibility). Each Power influences the available Perks around it on the grid, which are more-or-less keyed to a type of gameplay. For instance, the Perks available to a new Cloak character tend to focus on sniping (+3% damage when 2+ meters above target, +3% damage from a crouched position, etc.), or those available to a new Decoy character tend to focus on squad support (+30% damage resistance while reviving another player, 5 seconds of +45% damage resistance after reviving another player).
Speaking of reviving, there's a lot of that going on for both PC and NPC. When you’re ‘Incapacitated’ you get one free self-revive (with a cooldown of ~2 minutes) which instantly puts you back in the fight. While incapacitated, you have a small timer (around 60 seconds) and you can crawl to try to find cover. You can also wait for another player to revive you. If there’s no one around to revive you and you have already spent your self-revive, you can ‘Extract’ from the combat which takes you back to the nearest Binding Point which usually has free ammo and is some distance away from encounters. Extracting costs money though. At one point I tried to get through a nasty Main Story solo mission, I spent about 25% of my total bankroll just extracting, grinding through a few more enemies, dying, and repeating until I could finish the mission.
There are different types of tasks you can try to tackle which chiefly revolve around shooting things. There is the Main Story mission arc, there are Episode missions (I suppose tying into the TV show), there are Challenges which include survival runs and speed runs, and there are Side Story missions. Missions appear all over and tend to blend into the open-world roam fairly well. Also, as you wander the world there will be two types of interstitial activities: Active Random Encounters and Arkfall incidents. The random encounters are pretty much what they sound like, and they occur all over the space between settlements. Arkfalls are not really explained very well, other than they are some kind of byproduct of alien terraforming technology which carries with it a nasty alien fauna colloquialized as ‘Hellbugs’. Arkfalls seem to be the bread and butter of co-op play, as they can affect large areas of the map and can thus attract hundreds of players to a single fight. I also had dozens of random encounters where I happened upon other players in the midst of a fight, or they happened upon me, and we were able to hammer out a quick victory. That, to me, was the most enjoyable aspect of the game: running from mission to mission, bumping into other players in the middle of some nasty kind of battle, and jumping right in to assist. Regarding Main Story missions, I’m not familiar with the TV show and didn’t uncover much about the main storyline, but from what I understand you can power your way through the entire thing in a couple days.
The game has a number of weapon types, 4 or 5 gear tiers which are increasingly rare (unless you want to spend real money or a shit-ton of in-game resources to guarantee yourself high-tier drops), and a modding system which allows you to make basic improvements to your guns such as increased melee damage or clip size. Probably pales in comparison to games like Borderlands in that regard. Weapon types are pretty situational, though most people seem to stick with Assault Rifles for overall utility. I got lucky and got a Tier 3 SMG pretty early which came with near 0 spread, it’s a joy.
Character face models are not particularly good looking, though you do get a number of customization options which lends some potential for uniqueness. All characters start with one of 4 outfits, but more can be purchased with in-game loot, real money (from around 40 cents to 8 dollars for you ballers), or can also be unlocked by completing missions. There is a lot of attention to detail in the outfits, and I was impressed by the look of most of them. They have no effect outside of cosmetics.
Also, there are PvP modes which I didn’t even bother touching.
Ultimately, I had a lot of fun playing this title, but I am not a connoisseur of shooters or of games in general. Defiance is flawed, make no mistake. While it controls fairly well, and does a decent job of balancing weapons, most encounters are not very challenging. Even mid- and large-scale Arkfall bosses will succumb to simple circle-strafing, even if it takes 20 minutes of it. The best challenges seem to come from a) variety of enemy and b) proximity. Most mobs have an attack type (melee, minigunner, sniper, rocket launcher, etc.) and maybe a special attack of some kind (i.e. melee mutant soldiers get a very-short-range acid-coated hatchet throw which lowers defense temporarily, hellbug archers can bomb you with a viscous black goo which slows your movement dramatically). If you put enough of these varied types together in a finite space, you’ve got a nice tapdance ahead of you. Sadly, only a couple of missions do this, like the one Main Story mission where I died 20 times.
There are other problems as well, such as most of the menu UI, virtually non-existent Chat tools, and lack of any explanation of much of the in-game features.
I will continue to play the game as I am one of those weird guys that enjoys playing network games solo, but without a change in the business model or a serious discount in the B2P buy-in, I can't give a blanket endorsement of purchase.
TL;DR
Pros
- Quick and accessible shooting gameplay
- Very engaging co-op mission structure
- Deep skill grid which provides lots of playstyle options and enhancements
- Plenty of weapon classes and customizations
- Open world with cool environments
Cons
- Production value not reflected in price point
- Buy-to-Play model from a company with a mushy reputation
- Lack of serious PvE challenge in many missions
- Half-assed story elements make for a less immersive game
- Inaccessibility of basic elements like Chat and Menus
Reply With Quote
Connect With Us