You sir, got everything confused. You are not thinking about MMO, your are thinking about MMORPG.Originally Posted by Roscoe Wallace
A massively multiplayer online game (also called MMO and MMOG) is a multiplayer video game which is capable of supporting large numbers of players simultaneously. (by wikipedia).
/thread
I will try to keep my answer as neutral as I manage to do, because I got banned from the forums three times already for speaking up my mind.
Very good post OP. You pretty much nailed it.
All the issues you raised are the very reason why so many people are frustrated with this game and quit playing.
The biggest problem I see with this game is, that they made wrong advertising. Like you said, they advertise Defiance as an MMO.
I know that I bought the deluxe edition with the seasonal pass package blindly before even knowing what I was getting into, just because I saw it advertised wrongly.
This is of course my fault and my fault only, and no one else but me is to blame. At least I learned a lesson...
Trion could have saved itself a lot of troubles though if they would not have called it an MMO. If you browse the forums, every 2nd post is about how Defiance is not an MMO. If you look at reviews it is one of the big negative things always being pointed out.
There already are many threads with "haters" and "fanboys" (let´s call them that for the sake of the argument) going back and forth about what MMO actually means. In the end I think that we can all agree, that MMOs have characteristics and features which are expected, just because they have been implemented in any and every god damn MMO ever since MMOs popped into existence.
As you pointed out correctly, Defiance is lacking so many of those features.
It is just a shame really, this game could have been so great!
The absolute biggest problem for me is the following:
Yeah, sure you can patch and implement some features to make it feel a little closer to an actual MMO, like chat for example. I am really amazed and baffled, that they just won´t add a proper chat into the game. It has been 3 months now. I just cannot understand it.
Other things though, won´t ever be implemented. Things like character progression (as you pointed out, one of the biggest feature in any other MMO out there) won´t ever come. It just doesn´t work within this game and it´s philosophy. They would have to redo everything all over, and that is not going to happen.
So yeah, I for one finally gave up on trying to post constructive feedback a long time ago, and on hoping that this game will ever become a proper MMO. The way the game is built, it is just never going to happen.
I am sitting here anyway and typing this all down, just because I spent so much cash on this game and I am hoping to see a patch or a DLC coming, which lets me get at least some more enjoyment and playtime out of this game after the 1 week it took me to plow through it´s little content - havn´t touched the game since, just because there is nothing to do in my eyes. Oh wait, I could go find a couple of data records :S
And from time to time, I respond to threads like yours, sometimes I get banned for doing so, but it feels good to get some of the frustration I have with this game off my chest. I really do regret having "lost" all that money; and when it comes to people saying and thinking that, you just know that your game failed to live up to its potential.
Defiance is most definitely one of these cases.
Personally I found ME3 rather easy but thats me. But I do agree the entry lvl isnt that high (to me, unlike you I DO acknowlage this fact), then again most shooters are fairly simple to me, every single one uses some kind of AI that when you figure out the gimic they may as well just blindfold themselves stand against the wall and fall over.
PVP I fully agree there definately are ballance issues though funny enough, stealth shotgun, detonators and infectors arent even that hard to counter.
But the OP revers to this game as skill-less parcially because the game rewards people even with lesser contribution, opposing to not even having to be present at your keyboard to be fully rewarded for just being there pvp and pve wise (unfortinately WoW is the best excample of this) Not to mention those games are hard?? 1-2 macros or if you feel ballsy press 1 2 3 4 maybe 5 and start over again and you may have to do 2 steps back or forward on occasion.
No sleep, no dreams.
No pain, no joy.
In this state of unbeing I ask myself..
Was I ever innocent?
To be honest, yes.
This is one thing I seriously don't get about the whole "skill based" thing. Defiance is easy, terribly so. But shooters in general aren't exactly rocket science. You point, you click, even in a good shooter it's not like there's a ton you have to do or keep track of.
Compare that to playing a good raid healer in WoW or Rift? There is no comparison. The number of things you have to keep track of and the amount of knowledge and skill required is multiple orders of magnitude above any shooter I've ever played -- and I've been playing shooters as long as there have been shooters.
Put another way, anyone can reach a reasonable level of proficiency in Defiance, the minimum floor is so low that I'm not entirely sure my cat couldn't do it. Only a small percentage of the population can learn to adequately fill the harder roles in most traditional MMOs. So how is it that shooters are somehow "skill based"? Being able to point-and-click is a "skill", but keeping track of half a dozen cooldowns, the position of status of anywhere from four to twenty-four other people, and keeping yourself out of trouble is somehow not?
Because, what, you honestly think your gear does all that for you?
Then again, I don't get the whole "It's a shooter first!" crap. Fallen Earth is a shooter, overall frankly a much better one than Defiance. It also happens to have one of the, if not the most sophisticated crafting system that exists in an MMO. Somehow it even manages to have real progression. In a shooter! Unpossible!
The whole need to constantly repeat the "You don't understand, it's skill based!!!111!!" and "You don't understand, it's a shooter first and since it fills the literal meaning of MMO that's all that counts!!!one!!!" is a symptom, one that sounds depressingly like "You're holding it wrong.". People leaving aren't going to give a rat's arse about whether or not it's "skill based" or a "TPS first", the subject keeps coming up, you have to keep repeating the same lines, because there are glaring lacks that are hurting the game.
Badly.
No amount of what is no more than making excuses is going to change that.
I agree, there is another MMO out there which manages to put progression into a shooter MMO: The secret world!
For me Mass Effect took surprisingly long to get my playstyle perfect with Fury and other adepts that I could handle everything if I was last man standing on platinium. Ofcourse there was super easy characters like Turian ghost etc. I really like Defiance and I hope that volge update and coming dlc kicks up the difficulty level.
Xbox 360
EU Server
Secret World is an action MMO, not a shooter MMO.
I'm Era (Account name: Strifera) on PC-NA. Friend me if you'd like in game or on the forums.
You're right, but again... I wasn't saying it was a shooter first, MMO second. I was saying it was a shooter at its core, not an RPG. So it doesn't have so many of those other things people are accustomed to having as part of the MMORPG experience.
Now that puts a different spin on things, and I can better understand where you're coming from, since you've said that. We do have a lot of MMOs to choose from on the PC, and I like that this game is 'different' from most of the others. But I'm a console player too (both 360 and PS3), and you're exactly right -- true MMOs of any kind are still way, way too rare on the consoles. I never played the Final Fantasy MMOs on the consoles, but I do play DC Universe Online on the PS3. I would say that it is a true MMORPG (albeit an 'action-RPG'), and a fairly traditional one at its core, but not without its share of problems and shortcomings. But it's also not a buy-once kind of thing -- in order to enjoy the whole game, I have to pony up $80 every 6 months to keep playing it.
But yeah, I can understand your frustration better when you put it that way. I'm honestly not sure they ever really claimed that Defiance was going to be the kind of MMO to rival games like WoW or anything. It's just not that kind of game, and I wasn't expecting it to be like that, once I heard there would be no subscription. But I can totally see where you'd have extremely high hopes for it, given how few MMOs do show up for the consoles. Hopefully game devs will finally start putting more MMOs of all kinds out for the consoles, and we'll all have more to choose from.
Am hoping to see true MMOs on the next gen consoles and I hope other game devs won't be put off by the poor sales of this game
Personal definitions are irrelevant. You bought an MMO when you wanted an MMORPG. That’s on no one but you.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
