Defiance Gets A Second Chance To Make A First Impression

Here's my second and most likely last post about Defiance. I doubt it's going to be very long. I don't think I have much to say.

I have played it again, just the once, since last time I wrote about it. It's unfortunate that, as someone who isn't all that interested, I've had no more problems getting onto the servers, when apparently thousands of people who'd really like to play can't get in, but that's life.

I spent maybe an hour, perhaps a little longer, in the game a couple of evenings ago. Having heard from Tyler Edwards in the comments to my last post that there was only one zone - stretch a point and call it two - and that it was all going to look pretty much the same, I can't honestly say I was looking forward to another session but I thought it was a bit early to write the whole thing off as a bad idea. 

Writing a blog does sometimes have the awkward side effect of making me feel like I have some sort of nebulous, ill-defined "duty", either to an equally vague and largely imaginary "readership" or, worse, to the Spirit of Blogging itself. I feel like I have to make more of an effort to penetrate the surface even of games I don't like and don't intend to keep playing than I'd ever be likely to make if I was only interested in playing them for my own amusement.

I ought at this point to make it clear that I don't think Defiance is a bad game. I don't even think it's not fun. It seems like a pretty solid shooter with a neat line in large-scale, hot-join open world events. In that respect, it feels a lot like its Trion stablemate, Rift. It just do much for me.

The environmental graphics, about which I was complaining in the previous post, turned out not to be as bad as I first thought. In that respect, it's highly significant that my first session took place almost entirely at night whereas the second was all in the daytime. The whole place looked more appealing with some sun on it, which is perhaps the most realistic aspect of the entire game.

This might be the first game I've played where bullets make splashes in the water as people try to shoot you.

The gameplay was fine, too. Very straightforward at the extremely low levels I experienced. A lot of missions with clear instructions and map markers. Mostly "Go here, do this, come back", which is just about within my capabilities.

I thought it was nice that you get given a vehicle at a very early stage, although if there's any explanation of how you can summon and dismiss it at a click of a button I must have missed it. The game in general seems quite keen to oil the wheels in such small ways, not worried about sacrificing realism for convenience. 

I never ran out of ammunition, for example, not least because there are handy stores of the stuff all over the place that require no authority or credentials to access. Just click and fill and its all free. Not that ammo management and conservation seemed to play a great part in the game at the level I was playing. I saw prompts to "Reload" my weapons quite frequently and yet I seemed to be able to carry on shooting whether I paid any attention to them or not.

All of which is fine and yet the lack of friction somehow still never made the combat feel much like fun. I don't believe it's because I'm unfamiliar with genre or bad it at it, although I certainly am that latter . I seem to have played quite a few third-person shooters in the last few years (First person too, for that matter) and much to my own surprise, even though I suck at both, I generally have a pretty good time.

It's more that I found this particular example somewhat clunky compared to the rest. The comparisons I kept finding myself making as I played certainly didn't help, especially when I got to thinking about how much better Once Human handles just about every aspect. 

Everything in Defiance felt more awkward, required more forethought and took me more out of the moment. Nothing felt anywhere close to being natural or intuitive. It was hard work at times.

Having to pay so much attention to the mechanics just to get even the simplest things done was off-putting but the whole texture of the gameplay was roughened by the game seemingly not wanting to give me the information I needed to make those mechanics work more efficiently. I had a lot of difficulty at times just figuring out who was shooting at me and even when I did, it was tough to get line-of sight to return fire.

I can see where I'm supposed to go but I still can't get there.

I also had a lot more trouble getting to where the map said I needed to be than seemed reasonable. On several occasions I spent longer trying to figure out a path through the broken landscape to the mission marker than it took me to finish the mission when I got there. 

Other games, specifically more modern games, have conditioned me to expect to be able to grapple, leap, climb or parkour my way smoothly and sometimes thrillingly across all kinds of terrain and past all sorts of obstacles, so this return to painstakingly picking out a path that wasn't blocked by unclimbable slopes or invisible walls felt quite frustrating.

I realize it's very likely that some of this is an artifact of low-level gameplay and that vertical progression will introduce ways and means of moving through the landscape faster and more efficiently. Even so, the low-level gameplay itself would still need to be quite a bit more entertaining and involving to persuade me the wait would be worth it.

Another factor that tended to put me off was the gunplay, something of a problem for a shooter. I had real problems hitting anything I was aiming at, not an issue I've often experienced in other titles in the genre. Despite the UI providing a large, red targeting circle complete with with crosshairs, I rarely saw any impact let alone any damage, even with it placed squarely on the center of the body mass of my intended victim,

I couldn't even figure out if I was doing anything wrong. I'd aim at one mob and fire repeatedly with no discernible effect, then at another and see all the shots land, and yet as far as I could tell I was doing the exact same thing each time. The effect was often reciprocal, with baddies pumping round after round into me as I stood out in the open and yet nothing apparently happening.

There is some kind of technological "Shield" element in play, certainly with player-characters and possibly therefore with NPCs and mobs as well, but if the bullets were being absorbed or repelled by some kind of force barrier, I wasn't seeing any confirmation of it in the feedback the game was putting out. That kind of thing seemed to happen all too often.

I'm a sucker for a bit of lens-flare.

All fighting seemed to take place in a strange, performative, informational void, where everyone posed a lot and ran around shouting, while little of any substance actually happened. I took part in several dynamic events with other players, all of which we won and some of which I even contributed to, after a fashion, but I never really knew what we were doing or why. If there were any rewards or benefits other than the supposed fun of it, I didn't get to hear about those either.

There were other problems. I kept getting pop-ups telling me I needed to upgrade but I couldn't figure out what or how. When I started opening windows to find out, I ended up on a screen that literally would not allow itself to be closed until I'd made an upgrade choice, even though it gave no information of substance about what any of the choices meant. I had to pick two at random because it was that or close the game altogether.

That pretty much put the cap on Defiance for me. It was clearly going to require a lot more in the way of both research and concentration than the gameplay seemed like it would ever adequately reward. I found myself thinking not only how much more fun I'd be having in Once Human but also in The First Descendant, another shooter I was enjoying until I forgot I was supposed to be playing it.

That led me to think of all the other games I could be playing instead, not just shooters, and all of a sudden the whole prospect of playing Defiance at all seemed untenable. I logged out and, while I haven't yet uninstalled, it seems unlikely I'll log in again.

Meanwhile, the game seems to be doing very well on its unexpected return, at least in terms of winning interest. More people want to play than the servers will allow which, while not ideal, is certainly a better problem for the new owners to have than no-one wanting to play at all.

I wish Defiance well and I don't regret the short time I spent finding out I'd been right to ignore it the last two times it came around. If nothing else, its reappearance has put Fawkes on my radar. Always nice to stumble upon a potential new source of MMORPGs I haven't tried yet. Maybe I'll like one of their other titles better.