Syfy + Trion = Defiance MMO Action Shooter (PC 360 PS3)

[Signe]

I do that a lot.  Wander off and leave the game on.  I forget which, maybe EQ2 or something else old, I accidentally left myself running in a corner for days.  A lot of games log you off after no activity for a while, but not always. 

[Malakili]

I noticed this morning the number one Defiance player is a guy on the 360 who's racked up 108 hours. That must include beta weekends (because if not, he's been playing 18 hours a day), but it still seems like an awful lot of time. Pace yourself, dude.

It's a lot, but it doesn't seem like it is impossible for the very highest ranked player in a brand new MMO to have played that much the opening week.

[Surlyboi]

It's like those guys that hit the level cap the day after an expansion launches. Catasses gonna catass.

[Hawkbit]

IGN on the Defiance crossover:

Overall, there’s what feels like a general lack of cohesion between the two projects that does not bode well for future collaboration.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/04/09/defiances-game-tv-crossover-is-disappointing

[Ghambit]

For once a decent IGN article, despite that they're stating the obvious.  A ball was definitely dropped somewhere along the line during development, taking Trion vast distances away from the original concept.  So for the most part the 1st season will relegate the game to nothing more than an IP-whore; since the two really won't coincide. 

Once again, producers not putting their two best feet forward for fear their golden parachutes will develop holes.  Spineless fucks.  God I hate SyFy.  And Trion, as much as I like them they're really turning into the "smartypants Cryptic."  They play within the numbers and try best not to make mistakes, nor take too many chances, etc.  Kinda lame.

Still having fun ingame though.      Nice lil' pop in/out shooter.

[Stormwaltz]

Said this elsewhere, repeating here: apparently "Syfy" should have gotten Icarus to do Defiance-the-MMG instead of Trion, since Fallen Earth's designers did post-apocalypse with shooter mechanics and horse travel JUST FINE. (In fact, FE is the only MMG I've played that made actual horses, and not horse-shaped pants you put on for a run buff.)

Which is not to say I don't enjoy the vehicles. It's certainly the fastest I've ever tooled around in an online game.

EDIT: In reference to the following quote:

“Around 75-80 percent of the show has nothing to do with the game, so perhaps only 25 percent has to crossover,” Nankin says. “Originally, we were rooting for horses, because it made sense to us in a post-apocalyptic world that people would get around by horse, but the game designers said ‘no we can’t do horses, sorry.’”

[Nija]

This seems like a ridiculous statement, but I just want to make sure.

This game has been out a week or so. I've yet to see a single line of player chat.

I got the invites last night and joined the clan, but clan chat doesn't work either does it?

What the fuck is going on at Trion? It's an okay single player game, I guess. That's how I'm approaching it now.

[Stormwaltz]

I've seen maybe one or two lines of player chat, and a couple cases where someone used the canned statements. There's a few reasons why I don't use it:

It's small and shoved off in a corner.
I haven't seen any popup "word balloons" over chatting PCs in the main view.
Messages only last a few seconds before scrolling/fading out.

Take the last three together, it means when someone chats, I don't notice until minutes later.

Also, using the chat system means you're doing nothing else. You can't move, shoot, or look around. Coordinating tactics in an arkfall? No way. you'll die. I think they expected everyone to be using voice comms. Considering how difficult it is to use the friend, team, and guild functions, and that they don't seem to have integrated voice chat, that's a hope in hell. You bring your existing friends and voice chat to the game, or you're in a cone of silence.

[Fabricated]

The game definitely has some sort of built in voice chat but I didn't see any options for it...I did one of the "dungeons" and some guy on the other end was definitely speaking into his Mic, talking to his other friends who were also on skype/TS/whatever.

[kildorn]

The voice is always on if you have a mic. Everyone is turning it off because that is the worst voice option ever, and you just hear everyone's background noise and speakers. From a quick run around the menus, I could never find a push to talk option.

[Stormwaltz]

I don't have a mic, so I hear nothing at all. An... equally odd choice.

[Ghambit]

Even if you shut it off, it takes some time before the system knows to do-so and you can still hear people talking; and with only one person having their's active, that means everyone's is active.

[Kanglor]

Not sure if it's been fixed but I know last week if you turned off the voice chat it would mute your text chat as well, so that could be why some aren't see any chat at all.

[Surlyboi]

Hasn't been fixed.

I still dig it though. It's definitely got a Tabula Rasa feel, which I like. Plus, running around a destroyed SF is almost as cool as running around a destroyed NYC. I'm just sad that it took them so long to let us go back to NYC in TR.

Now, if they'll let me drive down to Cupertino and Palo Alto...

[Riggswolfe]

The clan I'm in is using something called Evolve which is an odd-on chat client. It works ok. Still can't use it for coordinating very well but it is better than the built-in chat which is probably the worst part of the game and the worst chat I've seen in an MMO.

Also, on the 15th they're putting in a mega-patch which supposedly has 8 pages of patch notes. Hopefully "Chat no longer blows" is among those notes.

[Surlyboi]

That mega patch is also adding more content that may tie into the show as well as adding more storyline for you to play with if you've already beaten the Mai storyline.

[Venkman]

For once a decent IGN article, despite that they're stating the obvious.  A ball was definitely dropped somewhere along the line during development, taking Trion vast distances away from the original concept.  So for the most part the 1st season will relegate the game to nothing more than an IP-whore; since the two really won't coincide. 

Having deja vu. Did we discuss this earlier here? Or maybe I'm thinking something else?

Anywho, this isn't surprising. The TV world is entirely different from game development. I mean right down to exactly what shit gets decided and built and when, especially on live action stuff. The closest analogy I can think of is imagine an agile shop where all the developers are implementing realtime orders during daily scrum all the time.

That's not really the major dissonance though. Trion people seem pretty sharp so they probably realized this going in or right away. I think the bigger problem is that the business models are just so different. They had to treat these as separate but related just to meet any time of realistic launch schedule which are driven by such different goals, different oversight organizations, shit, even different legislation and reporting requirements.

That they have 25% overlap is fucking amazing.

[Ghambit]

Yah, we discussed it here earlier after I'd drudged through a lot of devblogs, old interviews and so forth; the writing was on the wall then.  Hence IGN stating the obvious, though they verified it through a higher profile interview.  But yes, I'd be happy with a 25% overlap actually... but realize, this likely translates into (as said before) simple Arkfalls for season 1 and not much more.

In other news, my fully upgraded Epic Assault rifle disappeared.  I have no fuckin clue how but I'm seriously pissed about it.  3/4 of the way to mastery too.  Sent in a ticket, they better gimme my shit back.  I earned that rifle in a gnasty arkfall I won.  No really, I'm mad.

Also, I'm at the point where I have to decide which weapons to really focus on, because there's just not enough inv. space even with all those pre-order bonuses and EGO codes.  Christ there area a lot of weapon types... even before considering types for those weapon types (like, there is actually quite a few different types of BMG even before considering dmg element - some link, some dont, some heal, some dont, etc.)

[satael]

Aargh, was doing the scrapworks co-op and on the final boss with both of the forges down when someone in the group was blasted thru a fence back to the area prior to the end fight.
That reseted the boss and left the one player outside the fence and the rest of us inside and unable to even restart the boss 

[Riggswolfe]

That mega patch is also adding more content that may tie into the show as well as adding more storyline for you to play with if you've already beaten the Mai storyline.

It is? Where did you hear that? I haven't found much information on the megapatch except rumors from other players.

[Nija]

I guess they have to push out some content to coincide with the release of the first episode. They are rolling in a bunch of technical fixes with it. I guess since the content is already cooked, they might be working off that repo or something along those lines. Don't want to merge anything before then.

In chat related news, last night I saw exactly one line of clan chat and I was able to send exactly one line of clan chat. This is 2 more lines of chat than I've seen the past week in game!

[Riggswolfe]

I'd sure like to see a preview of their fixes somewhere...

[Pennilenko]

For reasons I don't want to discuss I wanted to get my account primary display name changed. So I contacted customer service, and was friendly and willing to accept them telling me no for any number of reasons. However what shocked me severely was when the customer support rep told me that he would have been more than happy to make that change for me except that no tools existed to manipulate that type of account data.

After some more questions I found out that the only accounts they can change account display names for are console display names that have personal information in them, and in order to do it they make a new account with a new name and then apply the old accounts last backup logs to the new account and once that is done they delete the old account.

[Numtini]

It's really hard for me to reconcile that this and Rift come from the same company. I know Rift isn't for everyone and I agree it's setting for whatever reason just isn't all that compelling, but I always got a vibe of competence from the company.

I'm not getting that here. I really enjoy the game, but it all comes off as more than a little half baked.

[Riggswolfe]

It's really hard for me to reconcile that this and Rift come from the same company. I know Rift isn't for everyone and I agree it's setting for whatever reason just isn't all that compelling, but I always got a vibe of competence from the company.

I'm not getting that here. I really enjoy the game, but it all comes off as more than a little half baked.

I've never played Rift. How was it at launch? I'd think that this game has three things complicating it for the company:

1) Utterly different style from Fantasy MMO Wow-Knockoff #27
2) It had to tie in to the TV show which put it on a deadline that couldn't be moved.
3) They decided to put it on consoles as well as PC. That last one strikes me as pretty ambitious and they must've had to divert a significant amount of resources to that, particularly on the PS3.

[Stormwaltz]

Rift had as close to a flawless launch as we're likely to see. Everything worked. There were long-term issues, but the biggest complaints I recall were too-thick spawns in the opening areas and a poorly designed end to their initial live event. (IIRC, it ran once, in a single location, so the majority of players missed it, and those who were there mostly lagged. In other words, everything the Asheron's Call live team learned through their own bitter experience in 1999.)

[Mrbloodworth]

It's really hard for me to reconcile that this and Rift come from the same company. I know Rift isn't for everyone and I agree it's setting for whatever reason just isn't all that compelling, but I always got a vibe of competence from the company.

I'm not getting that here. I really enjoy the game, but it all comes off as more than a little half baked.

Rift didn't have cross platform support ( or even compatibility ) and need to go though Microsoft and Sony toolsets.

[Surlyboi]

That's it. Rift worked so well because it only needed to work on Windows.

This is a ridiculous mashup of systems and all the weirdness that comes with that. The fact that it has to tie into a TV show just throws in an additional wrench that the developers just weren't properly prepared for.

I like it, but the vision exceeded the grasp by a lot.

[Phred]

I think you guys are overthinking this. Changing a player's screen name doesn't require Playstation or XBox programming it requires a tool that works with the server database. If rift's toolset had been designed for portability it would already be there.

[Surlyboi]

Oh. And the Nim fight can kiss my ass. Die already, you fucking Locutus wanna-be.

[Ghambit]

Finally figured out how the hell crafting really works.  
a) if you have something loaded, even in an unused loadout, you cant sell/mod it
b) synergies work just like armor sets in WoW do.  The more you have, the more that may stack depending on synergy.  For instance, most epic faction pieces have 4 mod slots and 4 possible synergies to go with them.  Get all four and stack all of the stats.
c) some synergies are EGO based (so you have to have the perk) but most are based on themselves.  Some are even class-based, so yah... CLASSES do matter for endgame-ish play.  For instance, I just gave up my epic VOT pulser to my outlaw clanmate; which is decidedly melee oriented.  He gave me a machinist autoshot.
d) trigger effect % mods are for DOTs on weapons
e) all mods have tangible effects graphically and functionally.  so if u put a scope on an LMG, you will have a sniping LMG when u right-click (with too much recoil to be of use)  

Seems like the faction grind is an integral part of all of this; and they are ran as dailies.  I have yet to run any so not sure how many tickets you get per run, but an epic piece is usually 200 tix to buy + scrip.

[Stormwaltz]

And I'm done with Defiance. A half-hour long enforced-solo "trick" boss battle where, if you die, you have to start again from scratch? I don't put up with that sort of bullshit design in JRPGs, and I won't put up with it in MMORPGs either. And since you don't get any more side missions until you complete the main missions, that means all there is left is to wander around and shoot random object.

EDIT: Coincidentally, Raptr says I uninstalled at hour 60 of my play. So I did, indeed, get my $60 worth. And I'm sure they won't miss the money I won't be paying for DLC, store costumes, or whatever.

[Riggswolfe]

And I'm done with Defiance. A half-hour long enforced-solo "trick" boss battle where, if you die, you have to start again from scratch? I don't put up with that sort of bullshit design in JRPGs, and I won't put up with it in MMORPGs either. And since you don't get any more side missions until you complete the main missions, that means all there is left is to wander around and shoot random object.

EDIT: Coincidentally, Raptr says I uninstalled at hour 60 of my play. So I did, indeed, get my $60 worth. And I'm sure they won't miss the money I won't be paying for DLC, store costumes, or whatever.

The "final" boss isn't that bad at all. Also, if you make it to his 3rd phase you restart there should you die. It can be a bit rough if you have bad luck or don't move to hide from some of his hard hitting stuff on time but in general it's doable.

[Riggswolfe]

Finally figured out how the hell crafting really works.  
a) if you have something loaded, even in an unused loadout, you cant sell/mod it
b) synergies work just like armor sets in WoW do.  The more you have, the more that may stack depending on synergy.  For instance, most epic faction pieces have 4 mod slots and 4 possible synergies to go with them.  Get all four and stack all of the stats.
c) some synergies are EGO based (so you have to have the perk) but most are based on themselves.  Some are even class-based, so yah... CLASSES do matter for endgame-ish play.  For instance, I just gave up my epic VOT pulser to my outlaw clanmate; which is decidedly melee oriented.  He gave me a machinist autoshot.
d) trigger effect % mods are for DOTs on weapons
e) all mods have tangible effects graphically and functionally.  so if u put a scope on an LMG, you will have a sniping LMG when u right-click (with too much recoil to be of use)  

Seems like the faction grind is an integral part of all of this; and they are ran as dailies.  I have yet to run any so not sure how many tickets you get per run, but an epic piece is usually 200 tix to buy + scrip.

I don't think C is correct. The synergies share names with some EGO perks and classes but they are purely mod based and have nothing to do with your class and/or any ego perks.

[Stormwaltz]

The "final" boss isn't that bad at all. Also, if you make it to his 3rd phase you restart there should you die. It can be a bit rough if you have bad luck or don't move to hide from some of his hard hitting stuff on time but in general it's doable.

This was Jackleg Jack. I didn't get to the "final" boss. I did say that I suck at shooters. :)