My thoughts and observations on Defiance
Wanted to post my thoughts and comments on the game collected all in one spot. Might seem a little long winded, but want to cover everything. My frame of reference is as a free-to-play player (didn't buy the game, just downloaded the game on PS3 and PC and am playing it that way), so keep that in mind.
Pluses
Good game (could be better with less lag issues), decent graphics (I turned mine down in an effort to resolve some of the lag issues), a well rounded game in the fact it has PvE, PvP, group, solo events, and so on.
Decent explorable map areas (scope and size), have seen some with more, but with what you can do within those areas, it works well.
Well thought out range of weapons available, and for some this is more important than others, different "outfits" so you can customize the look of your char a little more than just a stock appearance.
Same goes for the vehicles, good range of types as well as colors.
Now for the minuses. For me this is sort of 2 sections, bad stuff that adversely affects game play, and some is just a "why the hell did they do that this way?" type of thing.
First three problems (in order of importance), lag. It is so bad sometimes that it has earned 3 complete spots just by itself.
- Issues I have seen, that I believe are directly caused by lag.
- Loadout screen and map screen taking up to a couple of minutes sometimes to completely load.
- Vendor selection not showing for the same as above, even so bad as sometimes not even changing the shimmer on it and letting you walk away, and then the "window" finally showing up.
- Vehicles and road items either invisible or blacked out due to not rendering yet. This has resulted (again I presume) to make it appear as if the player just gets booted off of the vehicles (runner in my case) with nothing at all showing on the mini map circle.
- Landscape either invisible (so your char can appear to be walking in mid air) or not loaded yet so where there would be let's say a bridge or something, you walk onto where it would normally be, and fall in the water underneath.
- Enemy mobs only showing up on the map with the red arrows over their heads that normally appear. I am unable to attack them or cause any damage at all, yet that same enemy is able to damage and potentially kill me. This has lasted for a couple of seconds all the way up to almost a minute. (This has happened on my PS3 as well, which is designed for graphics, so I am 100% sure this is not a system caused issue.)
Now on to my other issues, still game problems if you will.
- Aiming: To put it politely, the aiming "system" in this game SUCKS! On various occasions I have had issues with the aiming such as it is. For example, when you are aiming at the target that is right in front of you, another mob walks between your char and your target, the focus goes to that other target, or sometimes it doesn't. No rhyme or reason apparent. When your cursor/cross hairs are right over the enemy mob right in front of you, and you press the aim button, the game shifts the "aimed at" target to one well back from the one you are trying to hit. On many occasions, during missions and such, if one is near, it will target a non-functional, powered down, as in not an active threat, gun turret, even though your cross hairs were very certainly placed on the enemy mob right in front of you. Pretty much anything but the enemy right in front of you you are currently trying to help find the afterlife.
- When an event is happening, during "normal" operation, the character that is there, their level is shown in white, the mobs are comparable to that char level, the difficulty is about the same. However, when characters from differing levels join in on that event, the level shown may change for most of the people there, to a yellow number, presumably the char level(ish) of the highest char there. I do not think it is their level exactly, because every single time it has been an even 250 count progression, like it will be 4250 or 4500 but not 4273. This usually results in the difficulty level of the mobs being ramped up to be appropriate for that level. Why this is an issue is because the lower level chars there do not also get a temporary boost to be able to compete at that higher level, nor are the rewards/drops equivalently adjusted for the lower level players. What this basically results in is if you see that number change to yellow during an event, depending on how much a difference there is, you might as well go somewhere else and come back later, because the fight just got a crapload tougher and you will just get what you got if you were the only one there, with a TON more work for the same, or maybe even fewer (dying a lot and having to pay to extract repeatedly if no one helps you) results.
- Leveling, for many different reasons, seems to be a pain in the ***. Some of this is because of what parts of the game I choose to use and what parts I do not, so some of this is on me, but the parts that I do work with, some of it I again blame on the lag (the more people on the screen, the more the game seems to bog down on my end). This also applies (minus the lag) to leveling the weapon skills. There does seem to be a smooth, if snail paced, progression to the weapon skills.
K, now on to the "why the hell did they do this" section.
- Downloading the game/client/whatever you want to call it. When I did this, the game had already been out for at least a couple of years, but this has nothing to do with the length of time. It took a long time to download (15+ gigs worth), and if it got interrupted, you had to start all over again from the beginning. Pain in the ***! Also, on the PS3 it was not something that could be done in the background like some other downloads can do (not a problem on the PC, but it did eat up a lot of bandwidth for the other people in the house trying to watch Netflix. On another game I have played (will not mention it specifically so as not to give free advertisement, as this is one of few things lately they have done right with the game), they have the download broken up into individual smaller files, so that, if you get interrupted on the download, or can only do it during certain times, your progress to that point is not lost, and you can just pick up where you left off last time. You may or may not be able to play the game before the entire download is complete, but you do not have to start over from the beginning if you cannot complete it all in 1 sitting.
- Ammo drops during a fight: When your ammo supply is full (not including what is in the weapon(s)), you cannot pick up dropped ammo. Fine. You get a message on screen telling you you do not have the room to pick that up. Also fine. Where it gets to "what the hell" is if your current weapon is full (as in cannot reload) and fire off one shot, and then reload, so your reserve ammo is no longer full, you are then able to pick up a ton more of those dropped ammo caches, but apparently only the ones that you walked over and got that "ammo full" message from, even if you have 1 round missing, and you pick up WAY more than 1 ammo drop.
Edit: Another "what the hell" I forgot to put in is when you are picking up those additional ammo drops in the manner stated above, not 1 round is added to your "reserve" AT ALL.
- The on screen display showing the keycodes: My "why did they do this" thing is why not put something a little more useful there, like current/total inventory space. If you are out running a bunch of arkfalls or incursions, you might want to know how much space you have left for drops, instead of having to go to the loadout screen (and wait almost 2 mins for it to load and die while waiting) just to see how much space you have left. Don't get me wrong, the keycodes being there is useful, but if it came down to one or the other, I think the inventory space would have been the smarter choice.
That is my thoughts on the Defiance project Trion has put forth for us to play. You can agree with the entire list, only part of it, or none of it. Any and all are fine, but I am curious what your thoughts about it are.
