Defiance (MMO) Discussion Thread - Xbox 360

So, whatever happened to this game? Anyone still playing?

I feel like after a handful of reviews the first week, I've seen NO coverage of this game anywhere, like it dropped off the earth.

 
Picked this up for $20 on Amazon and started playing tonight. :lol: Anyone on CAG still playing? Is there a CAG clan or anything?

I saw a bunch of other players while I was playing, but nobody seemed to be doing the same missions as me.

 
Ryuukishi said:
Picked this up for $20 on Amazon and started playing tonight. :lol: Anyone on CAG still playing? Is there a CAG clan or anything?

I saw a bunch of other players while I was playing, but nobody seemed to be doing the same missions as me.
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Yeah the Amazon price is a match of Gamestop's price, but the used copy dropped to $19 so if your store has a copy of it used ...

 
Haven't played this in a couple of months, but I got on last night to check out the new Arkbreaker stuff. There's been quite a few improvements to the UI and some other quality-of-life stuff since I played last. Everybody and their brother is Castithan now. :lol:

 
Anybody still playing this? Picked this up for $3 at a Blockbusters liquidation sale but looking at the activity on this thread, I'm gonna assume most CAGs have put Defiance behind them.

 
So I don't know if this game is still on anybody's radar, but they introduced some major changes with the latest expansion "Arktech Revolution"... Basically everything scales now. It used to be that everything in the game was scaled at close to the same level, and a weapon that you acquired early on might continue to be viable for a long time, against lots of enemies. Now everything scales. Seems like a very weird and drastic change to introduce after a game has been out for a year. I'm sure the difficulty balance is all over the place now, and I'm not looking forward to finding that my inventory of trusty old guns are now severely underpowered compared to my character level.

I finally belatedly finished the story missions a few weeks ago, and I've grabbed all of the achievements that were within easy reach, so I think I'm going to just hang it up rather than try to start over with a totally new system of weapon and enemy scaling now.

 
Defiance is going free-to-play starting next month on PC, date TBD on consoles.

And suddenly it makes sense why the last expansion introduced level scaling and a new pay currency that you have to use to keep weapons upgraded.

 
Ryuukishi said:
...and a new pay currency that you have to use to keep weapons upgraded.
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What?! I've never played this game, and was considering it if it will be free, but that sounds really stupid.

Plus, from what I've read online at least, it seems like the game is mess to play and the it gets worse with each update. Is that true? Your posts made it seem like it's was getting better, minus the latest change, which made me optimistic. I'm still interested, but it seem like it's a mess to try and just get into.

 
I wouldn't agree that the game is a mess that's gotten worse with each update, until possibly the latest one. It definitely has a ton of jank and many of the patches and updates have broken the game temporarily. I would say that all of the DLCs improved the game, some marginally, some a little more substantially. The big issue with the DLCs in my mind has been that almost all of the content ends up being accessible to all players, whether you paid for the DLC or not. Paying for the DLC might get you a bonus outfit or title. Or for instance with the Arkbreaker DLC, players who bought the DLC could use a special currency to summon a Major Arkfall event in a certain location. But once the event started, all players could enter it and play it. So the advantage to actually paying is questionable.

But all that aside the game was fun. Gaining EGO level didn't really amount to much besides getting more points to put into perks for small bonuses. Making it through content was more about skill and having nice guns than about your character level. And the differences between guns wasn't necessarily huge-- an orange weapon, or even a purple in some cases, that you found early on might continue to serve you well for dozens of hours afterward. It wasn't like Borderlands or something where you were constantly getting new higher-level guns that totally outclassed your old ones.

Now with the latest expansion, everything scales relative to your EGO level. Open-world enemies scale to the levels of all nearby players so depending on who happens to be taking part in an encounter, enemies might be impossibly difficult or pathetically weak compared to any given player. And weapon levels now directly determine how powerful the weapon is, so that EGO level 500 sniper rifle that I picked up a long time ago and have continued to use since, is now totally obsolete to me with my current EGO level of 1200. My options are either to discard it and hope for a better drop to replace it, or to upgrade its weapon level with a new rare currency that can be grinded or purchased with real money.

Everything I've read has indicated that the scaling has been a disaster so far, with most enemies becoming tedious bullet sponges, and nothing else being balanced to account for the changes (example: a perk that gives you a shield boost upon killing an enemy is now far less useful since the average enemy takes much longer to kill). I'm sure that with time the devs can tune this stuff to smooth out some of the biggest balance problems for those who are willing to ride it out. But the fact remains that there's been a major change to the mechanics of the game and it's now a fundamentally different experience than it's been for the past year. It's always had a ton of microtransactions for things like temporary experience boosts or random weapon caches (in addition to a costume store and the paid DLC packs themselves), but I didn't care about that since it had little effect on the actual gameplay and you could totally ignore the microtransaction stuff if you wanted. Now it's necessary to level up individual weapons to keep pace with your character level if you want to continue to use that weapon, and that process is tied to a pay currency. I'm not too happy about these changes.

 
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Thank you for the detailed reply.  I assume that if they are making it free-to-play that they would continue to support the game for a long time to come (hopefully), and that you're right about them potentially being able to change, and revert back to, things. 

I wonder if they'll give players who owned the game some sort of thank you bonus, like a weapon or boost to help them through these changes.  It's crazy to me to see a full retail game go free like this.  It'd be like if Titanfall went free-to-play next year, but burn cards and upgrades would cost money or in-game currency.  Oh god...I've given them an idea...

All of the free-to-play games and games from Games with Gold are beginning to overwhelm me. 

 
Yeah they said any player who purchased the game at retail will get 30 days of special boosts after it goes F2P. Free players also don't have as many loadout and inventory slots and can't purchase the highest tier of random loot boxes (with in-game currency).
 
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