Post-Review Regret Disorder (Defiance)

There have been a few reviews now posted for Trion’s Defiance. Having posted one of the first, I now want to warn players that I may have jumped the gun.

Please keep in mind that my review was based entirely on my Beta Test experience since I intended to post the review before the game was released live. And I will stand by what I wrote about the game that I played at that time.

WHAT THE JEK?

Since April, Defiance has had several major patches, a number of server crashes and some new frustrating issues are occurring. Aren’t updates and newer versions supposed to be better than the original or the Beta? I would have thought so. But, in their rush to not only improve the game (Trion did update the chat and voice but it’s still awkward) but to also add much more material.

Defiance is intended to be a living, breathing creature with new challenges, new episodes and new quests loading up as the TV shows progresses. Many of the new issues have sprung up around this new content: incomplete Arkfalls, overlapping arkfalls and random events, events resetting for odd reasons, etc.

However, it is very cool that our enemies are also changing as the variety of Hellbugs evolve and other enemies become more varied. But, it’s a little sad that Nolan and Irisa are only in the game until their story took off in the show. I do hope other series characters pop into the cinematics or give quests to keep the crossover going.

IF I HAD TO DO IT OVER

Were I to review Defiance out of the box today, I would be rating it a 6, not my original 8. And I say this reluctantly. I want so much for it. I’m still playing, almost nightly. I even created a second character to try different things. But, all that love can’t get past the current baggage.

The glitches and hiccups are irritating. The updates take a long time to install. Voice chat for me lags terribly, so I turned it all off. And I get that they wanted to add more random events, but good God you can’t walk 10 meters without wandering into random enemies or another abandoned vehicle scene. Trion, no worries guys, there’s plenty for us to do – you don’t have to overwhelm us with the trivial. We’re willing to walk or drive that extra 5 meters to find a bad guy to kill.

WITH ALL THIS SHTAKO

Like I said, I still play Defiance and I don’t plan on stopping just because it’s having growing pains. I stay positive that as the patches progress, the kinks will be worked out and a balance will be achieved. I don’t plan on making amendments a habit, but I felt in this case it was needed.

If you’re on the fence about Defiance, I would still say its a fun experience if you like first-person or in this case slightly third-person shooters and it will only get better.