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Defiance Beta Opinion
Started playing the beta yesterday after the login server SNAFU got fixed. For the first 6 hours or so, I really enjoyed it. I was pretty much going to pre-order when I was finished playing. But then it all went terrbily wrong....
I won't get into too many details about anything specific, not because i can't, but because it seems like a lot of these things were covered in other posts and reviews. One of the things that really started to irk me was not having much information on what anything meant. I would see stats on weapons that didn't really tell me what they did. Even some sort of a tooltip would have been nice. The compare items was a nice feature, but again... what exactly is bloom? It's not a big deal, but it was a little frustrating.
Not sure what happened, but I started having a ton of problems after going through the first few hours of play. The quests/found events were becoming very, very difficult. I would snipe a mob, and then 10 dudes would come running and just tear me a new one. Yes, I was upgrading my ego abilities and yes, I was upgrading my gear. I was doing just fine without any problems and then it just seemed like I was killing things that were WAY too deadly for my gear, or that I was doing content that should have been done in a group. Before the flames start.. no I am not an idiot. No this is not my first shooter, or MMO. I've been gaming a very long time. I was mostly curious if this was just something I noticed, or that someone could confirm that the content does indeed require at least a partner after the first 6-8 hours of play into new areas.
I didn't find any sort of bank storage anywhere. I am wondering if this is because there is none in the game, the beta doesn't have it, or that I needed to get to a bigger town. I would think that there would be storage somewhere as I found lots of the little metchant places and things like that, but nowhere did I see a place to store items. I also didn't see any sort of player auction house or something, and I wonder if this too was just something that wasn't in the beta.
As I saw mentioned all over the place, the UI does need a lot of work. If you have to go to google to figure out how to exit the game from the UI, that's really not a good start. The chat window being pretty much non-existant was also a problem for me. I don't do a lot of socializing, but I do like to see what questions people are asking, and what the answers are. It's a good way to learn new things, and to get information from people who have been playing the game previously, or just happen to know certain things from their own research. This was a major drawback for me.
I was also getting a lot of lag during a lot of my fights. Not sure if it was the server, or my own internet, or a combination. I also don't mind death penalties of some sort, but due to the seemingly overtuned mob packs I had to contend with, I took a LOT of deaths. Now, I know that this is a shooter, and that is expected, but really.. a LOT of deaths. I spent about 20% of my cash on hand just from a couple of quests. Seemed a little much to me, but again, maybe I was doing content I shouldn't have been doing solo. I'm also playing on the PC, and the default controls do seem a little off for me. Maybe I'd have had better luck playing on the xbox.
--Sagorn
Comments
I assume by "he" you mean me, and it is my understanding that the NDA was lifted yesterday when the beta weekend started. If misunderstood that... then I assume someone will delete the post.
--Sagorn
Yea I gotta say I hit a brick wall on one of the side quests that you get either just after or before taking Von whatever to the pretty white haired chick. Thats after the Law guy. Up until then it was ranging from easy to about medium difficulty. Then BAM... you better have 1 or 2 people helping you or expect a few deaths. I honestly could not get many gear upgrades. I think I got 1 Assault Rifle that was an upgrade, 1 sidegrade. That was my main weapon. I switched between snipers, pistols, and shotguns for secondary.
i7 3770K@3.9Ghz Intel Extreme/Z77 8GB Corsair Vengeance Radeon 7970 3GB Black Edition
The lack of decent tooltips is eventually what did it in for me. That and I couldn't tell if it was all the factions against the aliens or whatnot. I also didn't care much for the weapons/armors after a full overnight of playing it. I was hoping for a space-age version of COD or something like that...whereas I had the same raggedy clothes as before. I hoped to see more "tech" like gear not just cloth or metal.
But, that's my honest little review and I've uninstalled. =
I will never support freeloaders, no more subsidized gaming.
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u guy wont believe how retarded pvp is in defiance. everyone figured it out by now and runs aroudn with grenade launchers and 1shot 1kill shotguns.
also WTF i didnt know how to get into pvp until i was powerlvl 110!! this game tells u nothing.
those 8h i played really werent worth it.
u do the same sidequest allover again..go there..use that...protect this n that.
and the main missions are more of the same..not good.
in general this game really lacks something that makes it special and stand out.
the world feels dead .. controlls..ugh i dont care its obviously made for console.
graphics..pretty horrible maxxed out but that isnt a problem really..the very low view distance is..for me atleast.
this should be free to play..lets be honest here.
i7 3770K@3.9Ghz Intel Extreme/Z77 8GB Corsair Vengeance Radeon 7970 3GB Black Edition
dont give me that f2p crap. game will cost money as final product . and yes "retarded" sums up pvp perfectly atm.
im just saying what i expiriences in the beta sofar if u have a problem with that..well...
The game is awesome! You can log out writing /logout like in most mmo games. The performance is incredible. The graphics astonishing. The background compelling. The game world so badass. The gameplay amazing. It reminds me of so many other good games when I'm playing it. When I am driving my vehicle I remember Motorstorm. When I'm shooting my shotgun, it reminds me of that game where you were in a tournament to death in places like prisons(don't remember the name)... I'm having a ton of fun. The only things I don't like are the sell option, which by default sells everything you've got, even the equiped weapons, and the pvp, it favors a long-range pvp player instead of a shor-range pvp player like me, who prefers shotguns, melee and ambushing the enemy.
I CONSIDER THIS GAME AN AAA TITLE. 12 OUT OF 10! AVEMUS VICIUM!
The weapon stats are odd, and in some cases (accuracy, for instance) exactly the opposite of what you'd expect. A dev did go into some explanations on what each of the stats meant, but unfortunately that was on the alpha board (thus still under NDA) so I don't believe I can quote them. Hopefully they'll either pipe up on the regular boards or, better yet, manage to explain things better in the game itself, because a lot of the system is rather counterintuitive.
Of the many things the UI could use, explanatory tooltips is high on the list, IMHO.
I never really noticed any major difficulty jumps, at least in what's avialable in beta. The biggest thing for me was just getting used to the way the rudimentary AI works and the "just throw wave-after-wave at the player" system they use in a lot of the missions. Unfortunately the latter can lead to situations where you're just kind of screwed. I generally find that if you get behind and too many melee mobs get to spawn you can get stuck in a "die, kill a few, die, kill a few" loop until you whittle down the pack enough.
As far as I've been able to tell, mobs are 'linked'. Overall it reminds me a lot of GW1, no matter how far one mob is from the group and no matter what's between him and his friends, attack one and they all come running. This makes sniper rifles and sniping... Well, of somewhat dubious value.
There's no banks, no mail, no AH, and no 'bigger towns' -- or any towns at all, really.
To exit you can either just hit ctrl-Q or hit escape, space, wait for radial menu, and I think it's under options there.
Aside from some annoying UI lag, I've never really experienced much in the way of game lag -- the occasionaly spike, but that's to be expected. I haven't played this beta much, though, I'm both sick of running the early misisons (one leveling path, not good) and finding that with the first zone so crowded a lot of fights have gone from occasionally entertaining tactical encounters to a bunch of chickens with their heads chopped off running around and good luck telling which kind of chicken you're supposed to be shooting in time for it to matter.
Bleh.
I agree unfortunately. I think there is potential here and would like to see this game be a success. For how long have we been voices in the wilderness for something different...something new. Now a company is trying to do just that, not with a shooter thats been done, but with a multi-aspect game enviroment. If this is an epic fail will anyone else try? I wont support a bad game, no one should. But we should give them the chance to make this work.
i7 3770K@3.9Ghz Intel Extreme/Z77 8GB Corsair Vengeance Radeon 7970 3GB Black Edition
I found the AI to be quite awkward at times. By that, i dont mean the mobs "intelligence", but the overall behaviour.
I wrote in another thread that the AI leaves little room for a tactical approach, which made sniping very odd for me.
- the visibilty of mobs seem to differ, as i've been in areas in which i could do some real long range sniping, while elsewhere i had to get so close to i.e. a compound to get the NPCs appear on screen that i could as well use the assault rifle instead.
- firing a single shot usually you'll get the whole pack allover you right away, no matter how well you are hidden. Once aggrod, even if i was sitting silent and motionless on rooftops i had mobs firing at me from within the building below, so mobs seem to be able to detect you through obstacles, albeit they dont hit you.
Also, mobs spot you on long range within a split second once you engage them. Only way to outmaneuver them would be to use cloak or run so far off location that they de-aggro and run back.
I dont know if there are silencers in game, i hope there are and that will make a difference.
Finally got in Friday evening. To me it feels like a franchise tie-in. There is nothing at all that wows me.
My Opinions:
As a shooter it's a mediocre shooter. It handles fine, sure, but the advances in combat mechanics and AI that have been made in shooters over the last seven or eight years are absent. The mobs are an utterly unmemorable mix of thugs, mutants, and bugs. I'm sure there are differences between the various types besides the weapons they carry (and melee vs. ranged), but I couldn't tell you what. IOW, if I want to play a shooter, I'm way better off playing a full-fledged modern shooter.
As an MMO (and a PC game for that matter) it's stripped down to essentially the bare minimum: a shared world. The other features that make an MMO what it is are absent or severely downplayed. Not suprising for a console game, but if I want to play an MMO, I'm way better off playing MMOs that puts greater emphasis on the social gaming features. If all I want to do is play coop and shoot stuff, there are shooters out there that let me do that.
As an RPG the character building and gearing systems have some interesting things going on, and it has some ties to the lore of the setting which is always a nice touch. But it's lacking the little things that make RPG worlds come alive. The starting zone feels like the type of giant combat sandlot I expect of a multiplayer shooter environment, not a part of a larger world with characters living in it like I would expect from an RPG. Many other games do a better job capturing the spirit of the RPG.
While I do believe there is a "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" thing going on, I still feel like Trion struggled with the integration of the shooter, MMO, and RPG elements into a game where they all support each other. There's potential for the idea to take off (if the rumors of Titan being an MMOFPS are true, Blizzard saw this as well), but I think there are obviously some things that need to be worked out. The game feels to me like Trion was content to not think about things too much and wants the players to do the same.