Invisible Gamer Review of Castithan Charge Pack

[nathanpbutler]

As one of the few sites to actively keep reviewing every new update to Defiance (not just the main game and DLC, but the weekly and bi-weekly content updates), this is our new Invisible Gamer review of the first DLC. I'd be interested in your feedback. I think it's fair:

http://www.invisiblegamer.net/review...e-pack-review/

[Notturno]

PVP fans will be excited to see...

Not true for many of the high level players I talk to. I guess it depends on who you ask?

The problem with this update is that it removed all of the diversity of PvP matchmaking. Instead of people queuing up for a mixture of the four available competitive maps, everyone is now queuing for Shadow Wars all day because it has the smallest queue amount. This has the added side effect of causing every competitive map to struggle with queues - including the brand new map I've played a total of three times since the DLC was released.

Shadow Wars are arguably the worst form of PvP in this game.

• Capture points have incredibly varied spacing - I've seen points as close as 150 meters, and some over 400 meters apart. It's such a ridiculous variation for adjacent points that it forces you to spend more time traveling than shooting, which is not fun.
• Open world was not designed for PvP. There's a stark contrast between the mostly sparse open world environments, and the cover-rich areas of competitive maps.
• The open world is full of nonsense PvE content interrupting PvP. Trying to capture points with tons of hellbugs on it slowing you is annoying, trying to kill someone when you have six Volge chasing you is not fun. I queued up for PvP, not PvE. If PvE players had PvP disrupting their content, you know there would be a huge uproar about it.
• The often two objective Shadow Wars discourage competition. The leading team has no reason to attack, and the trailing team will always struggle to push a point. Even numbers of objectives discourage strategy and comeback scenarios.

Anyone who actually enjoys competitive PvP will be completely disinterested in this update. The only positive outcomes were the changes to nano effect triggers (omitted from the article) and dueling.

I'm not sure how much the writer actually plays PvP, but this article really fails to capture the actual situation with PvP.

- - -

As for the review as a whole, I get the fact that it's one person's impressions, but there's a lot of things that don't make sense to me. The article doesn't really cover the fact that over the two and a half months of extra delays (from early May to mid August), content was actually removed from the update. The Raptor lost its turret, arenas became single player content instead of group content, and the "story mission line" is actually touching a data recorder to trigger the arenas (instead of actual story content). The PvP portion of the update sounds like it was written by someone with limited PvP experience, but I covered that specifically above.

I think my biggest gripe is how many bugs and issues you guys cite in your review, then you give the update an "A+" rating? That makes no sense - there are some really bad bugs that were reported in alpha testing that were never fixed. That alone should result in dropping at least a whole letter grade.

• There is one siege location that regularly bugs out at around stage 5, which forces players to wait approximately ten minutes for credit.
• Military Academy has invisible walls that you should be able to traverse through, the lighting breaks and turns your screen black in several locations, and the floor likes to randomly disappear.
• Multipliers and scores disappear in arenas. It makes achieving high scores very difficult when you cannot see your current status.
• Scoreboards for arenas are constantly being deleted and erased.
• Charge Blades can have their melee animation canceled with a specific move (I won't share), which allows you to attack as fast as you can click your mouse. I can attack with the Charge Blade about as fast as most people shoot their VOT Pulser (not Tachmag, I can't click that fast!) The fact that the animation is the limiting factor for attack speed makes me wonder what other animation cancels have such a huge impact on the game.
• Plus all of the bugs covered in the article.

I feel like you may be on par with the "C" rating for the paid portion - it was an okay update for $8, but nothing spectacular. I've certainly seen worse things for that price (horse armor!)

Overall I have to applaud you guys for at least covering the game. I think this is a good overview of the update for casual players and people on the fence about the update, which is probably who it is aimed at. I don't think I'm the target audience (played since release, hardcore PvP player), but I felt like interjecting some additional thoughts may provide some feedback for improving your future content.

As for specific feedback (if you want it):

• If there's something your author isn't familiar with (like PvP?), why not ask an existing player for quotes? That would really add some additional perspective to your reviews, and probably make your case a little better.
• It's a little text heavy. Some screenshots of new content (or even a video) would help space it out a bit better.
• I'm pretty abusive with list making, but some variation in the formatting would help with readability. There's a couple of really long paragraphs in there that could use some pruning.
• Adding a "tl;dr" to your rating may help those people who don't want to read a huge review piece. Just some bullet points with "pluses" of the update and "minuses" covering the issues would be helpful. It would probably help a lot with getting people to stick on your page a bit longer. Essentially, justify your rating, because what I read does not reflect an "A+" rating.

Either way it was interesting to read someone else's opinions on the update. Thanks for the link.

[Frostdrift]

I agree with the implications of lowering the requirements of Shadow War.

Personally, I think it is urgently required that:
- Observatory and Waterfront open with only 4 people, or 1 less on one side if a group queues
- Freight Yard and Military Academy opens with 8 people
- you can queue for combinations of maps (as is the case in Rift, where you can queue all and it matches a variety and, should you not want to play a specific map, you deselect it)

[Ssdmiddleman]

Not true for many of the high level players I talk to. I guess it depends on who you ask?

The problem with this update is that it removed all of the diversity of PvP matchmaking. Instead of people queuing up for a mixture of the four available competitive maps, everyone is now queuing for Shadow Wars all day because it has the smallest queue amount. This has the added side effect of causing every competitive map to struggle with queues - including the brand new map I've played a total of three times since the DLC was released.

Shadow Wars are arguably the worst form of PvP in this game.

• Capture points have incredibly varied spacing - I've seen points as close as 150 meters, and some over 400 meters apart. It's such a ridiculous variation for adjacent points that it forces you to spend more time traveling than shooting, which is not fun.
• Open world was not designed for PvP. There's a stark contrast between the mostly sparse open world environments, and the cover-rich areas of competitive maps.
• The open world is full of nonsense PvE content interrupting PvP. Trying to capture points with tons of hellbugs on it slowing you is annoying, trying to kill someone when you have six Volge chasing you is not fun. I queued up for PvP, not PvE. If PvE players had PvP disrupting their content, you know there would be a huge uproar about it.
• The often two objective Shadow Wars discourage competition. The leading team has no reason to attack, and the trailing team will always struggle to push a point. Even numbers of objectives discourage strategy and comeback scenarios.

Anyone who actually enjoys competitive PvP will be completely disinterested in this update. The only positive outcomes were the changes to nano effect triggers (omitted from the article) and dueling.

I'm not sure how much the writer actually plays PvP, but this article really fails to capture the actual situation with PvP.

- - -

As for the review as a whole, I get the fact that it's one person's impressions, but there's a lot of things that don't make sense to me. The article doesn't really cover the fact that over the two and a half months of extra delays (from early May to mid August), content was actually removed from the update. The Raptor lost its turret, arenas became single player content instead of group content, and the "story mission line" is actually touching a data recorder to trigger the arenas (instead of actual story content). The PvP portion of the update sounds like it was written by someone with limited PvP experience, but I covered that specifically above.

I think my biggest gripe is how many bugs and issues you guys cite in your review, then you give the update an "A+" rating? That makes no sense - there are some really bad bugs that were reported in alpha testing that were never fixed. That alone should result in dropping at least a whole letter grade.

• There is one siege location that regularly bugs out at around stage 5, which forces players to wait approximately ten minutes for credit.
• Military Academy has invisible walls that you should be able to traverse through, the lighting breaks and turns your screen black in several locations, and the floor likes to randomly disappear.
• Multipliers and scores disappear in arenas. It makes achieving high scores very difficult when you cannot see your current status.
• Scoreboards for arenas are constantly being deleted and erased.
• Charge Blades can have their melee animation canceled with a specific move (I won't share), which allows you to attack as fast as you can click your mouse. I can attack with the Charge Blade about as fast as most people shoot their VOT Pulser (not Tachmag, I can't click that fast!) The fact that the animation is the limiting factor for attack speed makes me wonder what other animation cancels have such a huge impact on the game.
• Plus all of the bugs covered in the article.

I feel like you may be on par with the "C" rating for the paid portion - it was an okay update for $8, but nothing spectacular. I've certainly seen worse things for that price (horse armor!)

Overall I have to applaud you guys for at least covering the game. I think this is a good overview of the update for casual players and people on the fence about the update, which is probably who it is aimed at. I don't think I'm the target audience (played since release, hardcore PvP player), but I felt like interjecting some additional thoughts may provide some feedback for improving your future content.

As for specific feedback (if you want it):

• If there's something your author isn't familiar with (like PvP?), why not ask an existing player for quotes? That would really add some additional perspective to your reviews, and probably make your case a little better.
• It's a little text heavy. Some screenshots of new content (or even a video) would help space it out a bit better.
• I'm pretty abusive with list making, but some variation in the formatting would help with readability. There's a couple of really long paragraphs in there that could use some pruning.
• Adding a "tl;dr" to your rating may help those people who don't want to read a huge review piece. Just some bullet points with "pluses" of the update and "minuses" covering the issues would be helpful. It would probably help a lot with getting people to stick on your page a bit longer. Essentially, justify your rating, because what I read does not reflect an "A+" rating.

Either way it was interesting to read someone else's opinions on the update. Thanks for the link.

I think this is a much better review of the DLC.

[nathanpbutler]

Bear in mind that this was written with the following concepts in mind:

1. It is a review for players in general, not "hard core" toward any specific element (yes, even multiplayer, which the reviewer and editor both play quite a bit but are also not "hard core" about, as the concept is the entertainment factor here, not a COD-esque approach). That's why you'll find, for instance, only a brief note on the "meh" factor for the Raptor, since the hard core racing folks aren't the target either.

2. The review is of the new content overall, not what was promised before, which cannot affect the score. The same can be said for the utter debacle of the rollout of DLC #1. The content is what is being judged, not the way it was delivered. As such, that also includes bugs, unless they are an issue across all platforms. DLC #1 bugs have varied by platform greatly, and even by player. Thus, the major noted bug was the inability to complete the Volge Violence pursuit, since that is a cross-platform bug acknowledged by Trion. This would also apply to alpha vs. final release, as the final release content is what is being reviewed, not how well or poorly an alpha affected a final release. (The same is the case with the initial launch of Defiance, judged on its own merits, not on comparing the beta to the final product.)

3. As for the PVP imbalance, I am not seeing what you guys are seeing. I can almost always get into a TDM match within a matter of a minute or two, as was the case prior to DLC #1. I can still get into Capture and Hold, though the wait times are now longer. On most days, though, prior to the DLC changes, it was almost impossible to ever get into a Shadow War on NA PS3. Now, they happen more frequently, though certainly (at least on NA PS3, which is what we're reviewing from - the most stable original platform and the one most screwed by DLC #1's release delay) not nearly frequently enough to suggest that it has replaced standard Capture and Hold matches. If that were the case, one would have to believe that Capture and Hold was relatively rare even before the DLC, given the frequency of Shadow Wars on NA PS3, but that was not the case prior to DLC #1, as (to that point) it only took a bit longer to wait for a C&H match to begin pre-DLC than it took for a pre-DLC TDM match.


In any event, that's the perspective we're coming from, and part of that (not hard core in a particular direction) is by design: we strive to provide honest yet alternate perspectives, or to cover topics (like update-by-update reviews of Defiance) that it seems are ignored by more mainstream, larger gaming sites.

I appreciate the feedback from those taking the time to check out and read the review.

[Gravi7y]

It gets an A+ on a Hexadecimal scale of 1 - 1FF

[thejx4]

SW only sucks when there's 3 caps points spread too far out, or not spread far out enough. Also when there's 1 or two points. It's awful. But yeah, I wish it wasn't just cap and hold. How about some actual objectives?