Defy Me! Extremely First Impressions

Yesterday evening, after I'd gotten home from work, had tea, walked Beryl and done a few other odds and ends, I grabbed hold of a passing bandwagon and jumped on. 

There was absolutely no reason for me to sign up for an account with Fawkes, a game platform I'd never heard of until a week or two ago and even less to do it just so I could download Defiance, a game I'd had every opportunity to play in the past and yet had never made the slightest effort to do any such thing. Nevertheless, there I was, filling out forms, making up passwords, inventing an imaginary birthday. All the usual palaver. 

Does anyone actually sign up to these things using their real details? I only ever do that at the point where I have to enter credit card details to pay for something, when it becomes more trouble than it's worth not to. I have more birthdays now than a whole pack of queens.

The process was quick and painless enough. Fawkes launcher seems decent as these things go. I like the way they've just called it "Fawkes Hub" rather than giving it a fancy name, like Purple. 

There are four games apart from Defiance on the launcher, none of which I'd heard of before: Shaiya, Last Chaos, Wargame 1942 and Desert Operations. 

Shaiya and Last Chaos are both mmorpgs, PvP and PvE respectively. I'm quite surprised I didn't even recognize the names, especially since one of them used to be published by Aeria, who also published Twin Saga, a game I liked a lot. I wish Fawkes had bought that instead, actually.

There doesn't look to be anything particularly memorable about either of their current MMORPGs, although they were clearly popular enough at one time for there to be multiple private servers for each of them, even now. I might take a look at one or both at some point, the official versions that is, now all I have to do is click a button.

The other two I won't be trying. They're military games of some description. I'm not even interested enough in the genre to check the exact details. Not surprised I wasn't familiar with either of those.

Once the Hub was up and running, it was very easy to patch Defiance and log in. I thought it looked a bit dated to begin with but not especially so for a game that's more than a decade old and hasn't really been revamped or updated in many years. The unattractive font and UI design is more an artefact of Generic Sci-Fi Game Design than an indication of age, unfortunately.

Character creation was fine as far as it went; no sliders, mostly preset options but enough of them to make it possible to get a character that didn't look too bland. Then it was into the lengthy introductory cut-scene, which was pretty good. 

Looked like some money had been spent on it, at least. Voice acting was solid, script well-enough written and the plot, while extremely similar to any number of other scene-setting scenarios I've sat through in other games, certainly had enough hooks to catch my interest.

All of that went very nicely. I was enjoying myself. The game begins with your character on a drop-ship about to land, an operation that, inevitably, goes horribly wrong, leaving you alone, traped in an escape pod amid the smoldering wreckage. Fortunately, one of the locals comes by, looking to salvage something worthwhile from the debris and, almost incidentally, sets you free. 

Immediately after that a ghostlike entity appears. It turns out to be your EGO, an acronym for Environmental Guardian Online, a devive that was "injected into your body" before the mission. 

It's the standard chatty companion NPC, in other words. I guess this is a SciFi game so they didn't think a fairy or a cute animal was appropriate. A little surprised they didn't go for a cute robot, but I guess this is one of those games that takes its back
-story seriously. God knows, Rift did, so I shouldn't be surprised.

All of that was largely out of my control. I just sat back and watched, waiting for the moment when I could take over and do something for myself. I'd literally just reached that point when Beryl bounded in and demanded attention so I had to log out and I haven't been able to get back in since. 

I tried again a few times later in the evening, after Beryl wound down, but all I got was a message telling me either that the servers weren't available or that my connection had timed out. This morning, when the same thing happened again, I googled to see if the whole game was down and learned that yes, it kind of was, although not for everyone. 

Apparently the servers have been under huge strain, thanks to far more people deciding they'd like to play than Fawkes expected. That does seem to happen an awful lot. It makes you wonder if most game devs these days are pessimists. They always seem amazed when more than a handful of people turn up. It used to be the other way around, when they'd lay on enough servers for an army and then have to close them all a few days later.

It seems that if you were in the game already, you could stay, but if you got disconnected or logged out or hadn't yet logged in at all, chances were you wouldn't be able to play. Anyway, the servers were about to go down for a four hour patch that would supposedly fix all the major problems, from lag to server capacity, and after they came up everything would be dandy, so you might as well wait for that.

As I write, it seems this has now happened. I just tried and got in with no problems at all. I played for about half an hour between the previous paragraph and this one. Did the basic tutorial, made a level, got to the base camp, all that stuff. 

Kind of derails the post I was going to write, which was about to switch tracks to start talking about the Vanguard Emulator. Trust me. It would have made sense. Not going to happen now, though. I'll get to the VGEmu in another post. It's coming along really well...

Meanwhile, Defiant. Which I'm playing... why, exactly?

It does puzzle me that I made the effort to try it now, when I was perfectly happy leaving it well alone when it was around. In part it was the unexpectedness of its return, which drew my attention in a way the original release never had. There may also have been some small residue of very mild curiosity, left over from the things I read about various incarnations and iterations of the game as it once was. I did occasionally wonder back then if I ought to take a look at it - but I never did.

Mostly, though, it was a post by Paeroka at Nerdy Bookahs a few days ago that tipped the balance. She apparently played and enjoyed the original Defiance before making the mistake of transferring to the revamped version with the Defiance 2050 relaunch, a switch she described as "really bad". 

I only vaguely remember how that went down but it sounds very similar to the way Funcom split the audience for The Secret World with the introduction of Secret World Legends. Neither game prospered. I wonder if that sort of thing ever works? Companies only ever seem to try it as a kind of Hail Mary pass, by which time it's almost certainly too late to save the game, anyway.

Based on what we cover on our respective blogs, Paeroka and I don't have exactly the same tastes but there's more than enough crossover to make me think that if she'd really enjoyed her time there, I might get something out of it, too. At the very least, I'd get some posts for the blog, whether I liked the game or not.

It's far too early to tell yet whether Defiance is going to be worth more to me than a few thousand words. What I will say is that it really reminds me of Rift in one way, namely the unfortunate decision to open with a very unappealing zone. This is something that happens so often, in so many games, I can only imagine developers believe the bulk of their audience actively enjoy ugly, dirty, noisy environments with people shouting orders at them all the time. Or maybe that's what it's like in their offices and they just think it's authentic.

In the case of both Rift and Defiance, I guess the argument in favor would be that you're in a war and war's never pretty. Given everything I know about Defiance (Which if you pass me a matchbook I'll be happy to write down for you.) the choice makes sense. There does seem to be a proper, existential struggle going on there. 

In Rift, however, the whole two-sides-go-to-war thing never felt remotely convincing and became less and less so the further into the game you went. Also, as soon as you got out of the first, extended tutorial zone, you ended up in a very much nicer, quiter, calmer, more scenic setting, where you could relax and do silly little quests while taking screenshots. It was self-evident there that, even if there were hordes of invading monsters trampling around, at least the views were nice.

I'm very much hoping the same will prove true of Defiance because if there's one thing I don't have any patience for these days, it's games I don't enjoy looking at. They don't necessarily need to be gorgeous, although that would be my preference, but the baseline is not to make me wish I didn't have to look at hem at all. 

Defiant is tottering on the edge as far as visuals go. As I said, the cut scenes are fine and I do like my character, which is a crucial test passed successfully. The darkness, abrasive textures and constant explosions, though, I'm not so keen on.

I'm going to go back and do a bit more, anyway. Which, I guess, is a good sign. I don't imagine I'll hang around for too much longer but I would like to get a little further, before I cross Defiance off my playlist for another dozen years.