Perhaps the most significant annoyance in Defiance is encountering servers that are too busy. When this happens, you are given a queue number and an approximate time when the game will let you jump onto a server to start playing. It’s a major bummer when this happens, but their is a silver lining. First, I’ve only experienced this issue once since the game’s full release–it happened semi-regularly during the beta. Secondly, my wait time to hop on a server was only about one minute–which is exponentially shorter than what I experienced in beta.
Menus
Next up, we have menu navigation. Every time I’ve fired up Defiance I’ve encountered a situation where the in-game menu will freeze in place. I experience this the most when trying to cycle through my equipment to sell it, equip it or customize it. No matter how much I jam on the D-Pad or the Left Analog stick, the menu would not move until it got good and ready. This doesn’t affect gameplay as you would never access this part of the menu during a fight (unless you wanted to die). However, it is annoying and time consuming when you are trying to customize and develop your weapons and gear.
As a side note, the weapon modification system needs some work. From what I can gather – and I admit my issue here may be my own dumbness – there’s no good in-menu explanation for why certain weapons cannot be modified or sold. The game just doesn’t let you do it for certain weapons and gear. Also, certain mods cannot be applied to weapons even if the weapon meets the modification criteria. Defiance needs to patch this with a more intuitive interface.
Hit Boxes
Last, I’d like to cover hit detection. In my beta impressions episode I actually praised Defiance for having fairly accurate gunplay. This is still true for the most part. However, as of late I’ve noticed some issues with hitting enemies at longer distances. A good assault rifle should let me hit a target fairly accurately at 300 meters–500+ meters if I’m a cold beast. However, I’ve tried to hit mutant enemies at less than 50 meters at times and had trouble registering the hits. What’s strange is that it’s very clear that I’m hitting the enemy, but for some reason, the hit and subsequent damage does not register. So again, my comments about accurate gunplay still apply, but there is some general glitchiness with the game registering the damage from my hits.
These are the major issues I’m having with the game as of right now. I’m still really digging Defiance, but I wanted to balance some of my praise with information about some of the mechanical problems you may encounter.
