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.

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.

Nostalgia in Reverse

It's Spring (though you might not believe it if you lived where I do) and new shoots are pushing up all over MMOland.

Neverwinter announced the start date for Open Beta. It's April 30th. Oh no, wait, it's April 27th. No, no it's April 25th! Make your mind up! There are no character wipes past the 25th, so this is an old school F2P soft launch. I'll be passing on the paid options and coming in with the Great Freeloader Horde on the thirtieth. I was mightily impressed by the city itself and I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on The Foundry but how sticky Neverwinter will be I'm not so sure. Find out in a month or two, I guess.

Jostling Neverwinter at the gates of May comes City of Steam, which seems to have been in development forever although it's actually only just over a year since I first wrote about it. The official website now has a prominent, taunting "PLAY" button, frustratingly greyed-out and Cogfather Dave Lindsay commented in a recent forum thread titled "When can I play City of Steam?" "It shouldn't be too long now. Probably about a month, maybe less. And we'll start with some exclusive access as normal"

I love City of Steam. I'll certainly be playing it regularly just as soon as I can make a character that persists, be that Open Beta or Official Launch. Still not feeling the need to pay up front for access, though. I'm not that impatient and anyway there's plenty of other stuff going on keep me busy. Too much, indeed. And then I have this teeny-tiny voice whispering in my ear, telling me maybe I liked City of Steam the best back in its very first iteration, the Sneak Peak. It's gotten a lot slicker and more polished, become much more the full service lobby MMO but is that really where it needed to go? Find out in a month or two, I guess.

 EQ2, which I actually played twice this last week, has a beta going on too. These days they beta Game Updates over there just like they were real expansions. Back when I played on Test as my main server that was kind of what we were supposed to be doing only there were never enough of us. Then they added a second Test server called Test Copy, where you could copy your Live character instead of having to level one up by playing it the old-fashioned way and eventually Test Copy sort of morphed into a general Beta server for Betaing things that don't need an NDA. Or something. No-one really knows.

The current Beta is for GU66 Scars of the Awakened and it looks pretty darned interesting. Cobalt Scar was always one of my favorite Velious zones and I spent an awful lot of time farming Molkors and Walruses (Walrii?) in Siren's Grotto, a zone everyone loved to hate. Thanks to GW2 taking up all our time, we haven't bought the last EQ2 expansion, Chains of Eternity and therefore don't have any characters over level 92. The current cap is 95 with the expansion. What level will the two new zones be tuned for? Will we be able to do anything there or use any of the drops at 92? Find out in a month or two, I guess.

 So much for Open Betas. Those at least we can talk about. I was also fortunate enough to get a couple of invites to closed betas recently, both of which came with fairly draconian NDAs. Do I have anything to say about those? Find out in a month or two, I guess.

 One MMO actually launched this week - real launch, not a beta! I missed it completely until it started popping up in news items. Given my interest in and enjoyment of Rift it's surprising that I haven't payed much attention to Trion's second entry into the MMO marketplace, Defiance, an MMO/Shooter hybrid whose U.S.P. is a real-time development link with a new TV show of the same name on the SyFy channel.

Since I haven't watched television this century I wasn't even aware we had the SyFy channel in the UK but apparently we do and the Defiance show premieres here on April 16th. If the experience of Chris at Game By Night is anything to go by it will take at least that long for Trion to get the servers into a playable state. This appears to have been a traditional MMO launch - half-finished, half-working, lots of potential and not much polish. Will Trion right the ship in time or will it be yet another MMO already holed below the waterline as it slides down the slipway? Find out in a month or two, I guess.

There's more. A bunch of supposed Sandbox MMOs are in some kind of beta; Earthrise, Pathfinder, The Repopulation, Origins of Malu to name but a few of them. I've picked one of those pretty much at random to have a look at but where's the time going to come from? I had invites for all the Firefall beta weekends and never managed to get to one. I don't regret that particularly. Firefall's another one where you can buy into beta if you're that fussed. I'm not.

I do regret missing Otherland, in which I certainly was interested. Again I had beta weekend invites that I didn't take up and now the game looks on the verge of extinction before it's even been born so I may have missed the only chance I was ever going to get to walk in Tad Williams's world. Oh well, I guess that frees up some notional time somewhere in the future, or maybe Gamigo will find a way to keep the game alive. Find out in a month or two, I guess.

Enough talk. Let's go play.