I've just spent all day playing Defiance. Popped for the digital deluxe edition yesterday when it was on super-steam-sale, spent all day yesterday downloading it, and doubled-down today with the season pass which, as yet, has no fruit to yield.

It's kind of hard to put into words exactly what it is. It's not quite an MMORPG, but it's not quite just a shitload of people shooting things at once. One thing it does... interestingly is that the loot treadmill isn't what you'd expect. A white-quality version of the same weapon you can find as gold or purple in the end-game has the exact same damage stat. The shields are the same way, too. You make your increased badassery through other means, but it feels to me like two noobs with white gear are worth more than one high-end badass with all the trimmings.

One thing that does annoy the living hell out of me, though, is that advanced alien energy weapons are worth crap compared to just shooting a fellow full of bullets. Borderlands does this too, and it pisses me off. Finding a gun that shoots freaking blue blaster bolts should be a hell yeah moment. I tried to love them, I really did, but lower damage-per-shot combined with blazing-fast fire speed and poor recoil control means you have to get up in someone's grille to actually deliver the weapon's DPS. And being up in the grille of someone against whom your DPS actually matters is a bad idea, because they almost all have monumentally more HP than you do, so you're really going to want to play a longer-ranged firefight with them. Plus, it also means you're going to burn through your ammo - you'll enjoy higher burst damage output right up until the moment your gun clicks empty and you have no more bullets. Then the other guy injects you with pain and you suffer.


Another thing worth noting is that, while the show and the game do tie-in storywise, they don't... Really seem to be inhabiting the same universe. Some of it could be explained as the geopolitical and economic differences between the places you go in the game and the city of Defiance, formerly St. Louis, Missouri; it comes up in the show that computers are fairly rare thing, to the point that the local mining magnate's record-keeping is all paper-in-boxes. Yet the world has computers aplenty in the defiance game, but that can be explained.

What can't really be explained away is how votan blasters are clearly superior to human weapons in the show, and the only reason you'd choose a human gun over a votan blaster is because you don't have the means to replenish its power supply... However, as I previously mentioned, you're probably not going to want to use any votan guns if you play the game. (Oh, and that really cool energy knife/dagger/short sword that Datak Tarr uses? You don't get one. Your melee is standard rifle-butt-smashing and pistol-whipping. Still does frankly amazing amounts of damage, though.)

One thing I should mention are Arkfall Codes. If you register for the game, it will mail you two or three automatically. Basically, they're six-character alphanumeric strings you enter into a website, and they're supposed to be things you can find all over, if you pay attention to things like the in-game art (such as finding them substituted for the last digits in telephone numbers on pizza adverts and such,) or to related tie-in material like the developers weblogs and such.

However, because of this, these codes are not unique; and they are not part of the advancement system, either. Therefor, it should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that the internet provides. You can just sit there and manually enter all 166 so-far confirmed codes int the web-page to reap the benefits thereof, which include, but are not limited to, +1 to a number of nice weapon skills, +6 inventory slots (trust me, you'll want those,) an assault rifle and shotgun you're going to want to have (I just finished spending roundabout a shitload of ark salvage modding both of mine to have four mod slots each,) an ATV from the get-go (not that it matters a whole lot, you get a better one very soon after you get the first one anyway, but it may save you some time,) an EGO perk which is very helpful, I find (+45% ammo drop from enemies at max level; keep your hungry guns fed all day!,) a lock-box, and a couple of titles you may or may not care about.

I should probably say a few more things, I suppose.

First, about the character generation. It doesn't matter, practically speaking; anyone can use any gun. The only thing the chargen does is decide which gun you start with. You start with a white-quality version of a weapon you won't normally get access to for a good few hours, barring the RNG smiling on you, but that's it... Well, I say you start with it, you have to fight your way through the noob zone to it with a crap pistol, but that's not too hard.

Far more important is your choice of starting EGO skill, that you unlock in said newbie zone. The EGO implant lets you try four skills, then you can pick only one. If you want one of the others, I think you have to unlock your way to it on the grid, which is gonna take an effing long time. I picked the one that increases damage by 10% (which later upgraded to +15%) when it's active. Big woooo. I really, really wish I'd picked the one that makes you freaking invisible, which would be perfect for invisible shotgun assassinations and/or extracting myself from a sticky situation.

Species and gender don't seem to matter. The other characters in the game don't even seem to react to it. "Archetype" is just basically picking the broad strokes of the ethnicity shown on your character's face, which you can then go and alter further on in the character generation.


Now, onto launchers. Why, oh why, do rocket launchers suck so badly in video games? Can someone explain that to me? Let me give you an example: the most devastatingly powerful single-shot rocket I've found deals 1256 damage. The SAW I tend to carry deals about 412. Do you think I can get more than three shots with the SAW on target before I can peg someone with another rocket? Yes, yes I can, and the SAW fires sloooooow. That rocket also doesn't home in or travel particularly fast, if you want any of those features, you're gonna pay for it with a lot lower damage.

And, by the way, normal "Mutated soldier" type enemies, the ones you're going to be facing for most-if-not-all of the game, have round-about 2,500 hit points. I don't think rockets do critical hit damage, which for anyone who's played Borderlands is the same, so they could survive two rockets to the face and keep going. You might think that they do extra damage to really hard enemies, like Hellbugs, who reduce all damage that doesn't get into their critical hit zones by about an order of magnitude. Well, no, they don't. Launchers, except for Detonators, or possibly Votan swarm cannons, are useless.

Detonator? Votan swarm cannons? Well, see, there's some rocket launchers in the game that don't just fire one projectile that does damage once. Votan swarm Cannons fire a projectile that hits for a reasonable amount of damage, and then sends four other projectiles flying out from the impact site which hit whatever, and deal a lot more damage. Those can almost be useful, but the ones you're really gonna find actually useful to kill ordinary enemy infantry are Detonators. They fire one rocket, you press the reload button and wherever your rocket is in-fight, it explodes, sending down a shower of four explosives that will deal about 1,600 damage if they actually hit something head-on. They usually won't, and their damage drops off fast, but if you get one of those mostly in the vicinity of someone's head when you trigger it, the splash from two or more submunitions is usually enough to put down non-badass enemies. Sorry, non-elite enemies.


I'll mention one other interesting aspect of the game before I go: Arkfall. At any given time in the whole game map, there's usually at least two or three big red icons on the map. Those are Arkfall, and what it means is that some big crystalline chunk of an ark fell to the ground. You'll want to go attend these events if you're not johnny-come-lately to the arkfall, because if you put in a good showing (and it is not hard to put in a good showing if you get in early and pour on the heat, I consistently came in in like, the top four of the arkfalls I've attended, and that's with players from all over the map teleporting to the nearest fast travel zone and driving to the arkfall,) you get arkfall control codes, something that otherwise would cost a lot of money, which can be used in conjunction with money to get lockboxes which contain Nice loots, and which otherwise they would sell you for real monies.

Yes, there's a pay store. Unfortunately, you can actually buy guns (or whatever, probably get three mods knowing my luck) from it. However, as previously mentioned, the difference between a super-rare and a white quality gun aren't all that much.

Then what's the advantage of rare guns?

Little things. Little things you'd still want to have on your side in a firefight, but still little things - like an extra-capacity magazine (I found a green-quality flare-gun. Normally they're crap, but its quality bonus was +4 ammo. To put that in perspective, that's +400% of the ammo the weapon normally carries,) or more accurate/less recoil/what-have-you. Some of them might have a damage boost, but it won't be massively significant.

Oh, and the disadvantage is that it costs fucktons more ark scrap to add modification slots to rarer-quality guns.