Defiance Review (PC)

Defying no one's expectations.

→ April 17, 2013 I didn’t hate the dozens of hours I spent shooting generic aliens and mutants in Defiance, but I know I’m not going back to it, either. Rather than the addictive, "Where did the day go?" sort of experience I had when I started out my adventures in World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic, Defiance doesn’t do anything special enough to hook me, even for the short term.
Decent story missions and well-designed dungeons are too few and far between, and the vast intervening stretches are filled with some of the dullest and most repetitious quest design I’ve experienced in an MMO, punctuated by polish issues in the form of a poor mouse-and-keyboard UI, occasional broken quests, and crash bugs. The competitive multiplayer entertains for a while, but that and a few other redeeming features ultimately aren’t enough to make Defiance worth spending more than a short time with.
One of those redeeming features is the story, which actually managed to be interesting. It doesn’t provide a good backstory about the world – that's seemingly left to the companion SyFy TV show – but the story-driven missions are the most enjoyable of the PvE content. These missions have fully voiced cutscenes that do us the courtesy of providing a stronger justification for why we have to collect three of something or rescue four ranchers. Some of them even manage to mix things up a bit, going against Defiance’s otherwise trite, largely fetch-quest-driven design, and introduce a couple of likeable, if totally clichéd, characters. I like some of the implications it makes about the Defiance universe -- specifically, that some of what we're told about the history of the human-alien conflict might not be entirely true.

If you do just power straight through the single-player content you won’t boost your EGO all that much, though that doesn’t matter as much as you might think. EGO is

Defiance's substitute for the traditional leveling system, and though its numbers go into the thousands instead of capping at the usual 50 or 60, it bothered me that I never felt substantially more powerful as I progressed. I might unlock a new perk to put into a loadout, which changes up minor stats, but I could only ever equip one of Defiance’s four active powers at a time, and the earliest enemies were still potentially lethal. (Or they would be, if the AI weren't terrible.) The upside to this system is that anyone can group with friends or strangers and feel on mostly equal footing. Though don’t expect to easily do quests together, since there’s no good way to share them, and if you do a story mission while grouped it just cuts everyone else out and treats you like you’re playing solo.
Instead of making your character feel uniquely yours through abilities, Defiance puts a bigger emphasis on the guns you choose. For example, I play extremely aggressively most of the time, so I tend to focus on equipping shotguns and heavy machineguns. If I’m in a dungeon I might equip a beam weapon that allows me to heal my teammates. It’s nice to have flexibility to change up my playstyle with weapons, but I do wish Defiance did more with its active powers – or gave us more than one at a time – to mix things up a bit more. With no traditional classes there’s really no reason to ever make more than one character, especially since they are going to experience the exact same story no matter their species or which background you pick for them in the basic character creation process.
Picking the guns you want in your loadout is probably the most important choice you can make in Defiance because you’ll be doing a lot of shooting. It’s a mechanically competent third-person action game, but the barely functional enemy AI makes most battles a breeze. Things get tough when they throw a swarm of mutants, monsters, or bandits at you, but, with rare exception of enemies who have a gimmick (like only being vulnerable from behind), they aren’t very engaging to fight.
It’s really a shame that the encounters aren’t more fun, too, because it would have helped make it easier to look past the side quests, which range from mediocre to awful. Most boil down to the most derivative sort of fetching – find and activate three generators, locate three clues, kill 10 enemies... the stuff MMOs are frequently made fun of for. Others break things up a bit by introducing time-trial races or tasking you with using a specific weapon to wreak havoc or survive as long as possible, but even these became a bit tiresome as I progressed. The absolute worst was when I hit a bugged one and had to abort and restart it in order to complete it. But they do pay out good experience, making it hard to overlook them if you’re aiming to up your EGO.
Defiance has some more entertaining ways to get experience, including some pretty good dungeons. Seriously, it feels like the dungeons were designed by a totally different team, because while they often have fetch quest-y components, they also have some of the cooler bits of story to make them feel less pointless. Moreover, they almost always feature a boss battle that actually requires skill and involves enemies that are much more challenging than those in the world at large. They’ll get old if you just repeat them over and over, sure, but experiencing each for the first time feels like a treat compared to most of the regular quests.

The dungeons also provide a chance for some much-needed social interaction, because those were pretty much the only time other players wanted to work together. Defiance doesn’t have any major cities, nor does it have other things like crafting to create a player economy and foster interaction. And the obviously Rift-inspired Ark Fall events don’t help all that much, either. While people gather up to take part in them, they’re usually so packed with players that there’s no threat or reason to communicate and coordinate. This action is set in a world that’s gone to hell, but it’s a shame that it feels so lonely. It almost makes the fact I couldn't easily disable voice chat forgivable – almost.
You can also avoid the grind of side quests – and potentially get some more social time in – with Defiance’s decent competitive multiplayer. Both the deathmatch mode and Shadow War (large-scale, capture point missions) end up as some of the better gameplay Defiance has to offer, mostly because shooting players is a whole heck of a lot tougher than anything the AI has to offer. And because Defiance doesn’t follow a typical leveling scheme you can jump in immediately and put up a fight, though it can feel a bit unfair because higher-EGO players will have somewhat better equipment and a potentially greater number of perks. It's a good thing these modes are reasonably fun, because it's the only thing to do in Defiance after you've burned through the content.
At least, it's reasonably fun when it works smoothly. With rare exception, performance on PC has been pretty great since launch, largely due to the fact that the graphics don't really seem to be trying to do anything fancy. But there have been occasional lag spikes, which are more annoying than in a typical MMO because of the fact that this is a shooter, and I’ve had an annoying recurring issue where my shotgun fails to reload correctly. Plus whenever lots of players gather, half of them appear as the default male player model until eventually popping in their actual customized character. Shadow War typically has long queue times, too. Every MMO I’ve ever played has issues at launch, but Defiance would be just okay even if it were working perfectly. It can't afford hiccups like these.

The Show, Game, and Where They Meet

Given the way Trion and SyFy have been building up the "trans-media" tie-in, I'm disappointed by how little Defiance the MMO intersects with Defiance the show. Sure, they’re set in the same world, but since the game takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area and the show takes place 2,000 miles away in St. Louis, the connection is already loose. Main characters Nolan and Irisa appear in the game in a few missions that serve as a precursor to how they end up around the town of Defiance, but that's about it so far. I can’t say that playing the MMO improved the show, but watching the show definitely gave me a better introduction to the universe in two hours than the game did in 20. For more on that,