http://www.tgdaily.com/games-and-entert ... the-bridge
New TV show by Syfy, and the game seems to be being developed by the same people who did Rift.
I signed up for the beta on the website defiance.com
There's a lot of games based off tv and movies, and a few tv and movies based off games. This is the first time they seem to be trying to tie the two together a bit stronger than in the past. Not sure if they'll be able to pull it off, but it's an interesting concept.
Defiance
Moderator: Officers
Re: Defiance
Picked up a beta spot. It appears they are doing the "play for a weekend" thing that swtor did so well, so I'll let you know how it plays this weekend.
WRA Grim: Duskheron
Re: Defiance
It was actually pretty fun. Kept me up till 3am Saturday night and didn't even notice the time.
Graphics were similar to Secret World. Character customization was similar also. You get a choice of 4 body types, a skin color slider, limited modification of the eye, brow, nose, and mouth shape, limited tattoos, and limited hair styles and colors.
There's two races, humans and Irathient that your character can be, and 4 "origin" stories that give you your first set of gear, but otherwise are irrelevant, as they can all use all weapons and choose from the same abilities options (talent system).
The quest system was done a bit differently than I've encountered. I assume it's setup more like a single player 3rd person shooter (which I never play, so I don't know for sure), where there is a main mission that you start with and can follow without doing anything else. The training mission lets you get use to the interface and the weapons. Then you get to kill mutants and alien beasts. You have a NPC buddy with the personality of Kaliyo, one of the imperial agent companions of SW:TOR if you played that. However, the NPC really isn't a fighter. She has a gun, and she shoots things, but don't rely on her to kill stuff, I think it's just an animation, or if she does damage, it's like she has a BB-gun. The NPC seems to be more of a guide as to where you are supposed to be during a mission than a "pet".
Once you need to travel, you get a little 4 wheel off-road thing whose controls reminds me of old racing game control systems. The longer you hold down W, the faster you go, the A D has a delay and/or dependent on speed, so it took me a bit to get use to it. I was running into railings and big rocks all over the place. So it was actually fun to get to the next area, where you could take the road, or go off-road and ride the hilly, alien and mutant infested countyside. I saw some players with jeeps/hummers, but didn't get far along enough to get one.
Along the way, there are side missions that you can take or ignore. Some are simple, save the good guys being overrun by bad guys ("I thought I was a goner! Sure glad you came along!) where you just get xp and scrip (gold), and some are repeatable mini-games in themselves, where you get a score for how well you did and there's a scoreboard of which characters did the best. I found these useful for improving how you play, because if you just run in barrels blazing, you die REALLY REALLY fast. So you have to use the terrain, plan your reloads, and be really good at aiming. There's even a few timed runs where you have to ride your vehicle along a path, again with a scoreboard at the end of your time versus the ranked players' times.
I died. A lot. The first time you die you get the option of self rezzing where you are, or being extracted to a spawn spot "close" to where you are. The spawn spots were mostly just outside the mission area, so it wasn't that much of a trek to get back into the fight. Some of the spawn spots were pretty much in the middle of the fight though, so you had to careful not to kite the beast back or you wake up in the middle of them again.
Some of the missions seemed to be in a single player zone, as I didn't see anyone else around while I was doing them, but most of them were free-for-alls where a group of other players could come in and kill everything letting you sally up at the end and talk to the NPC and be done (you got credit for what the other people did). This felt a little disconcerting, but I definitely prefer this to it being a competitive quest environment where everyone is stacking on mutant#1's spawn trying to get the kill.
There are also ark events, where there are larger aliens and streams of mutants which have little mini-objectives (go here, kill everything, go over to this other area, rez some NPCs, go over here and kill more aliens, finally go kill the big baddie in the middle). This is again a free-for-all, although the game tracks who contributed the most to the event (felt like GW2 area events).
The more you use a weapon type, the better you get at it. I didn't really get that part till after I was done Saturday. I kept trying to figure out why this "pistol" that seemed to have better numbers wasn't doing anywhere near as well as my machine gun.
Their spawn timers seemed a bit off, although I'm not sure if that was just me being bad at 3rd person shooters or if it was an actual game issue. Like one of the missions was to keep them off the NPC while she repaired a radio tower. At first they were just streaming in, but then I died, and the room was full of them (and the NPC died, oops). Once I cleared the room, they didn't start respawning again so I ended up having to go out and do a previous step, at which point they all respawned immediately. At least that time she was ablel to fix the radio.
All of the main-story missions had cut-scene visual/audios (like SW:TOR), so that was nifty too.
Graphics were similar to Secret World. Character customization was similar also. You get a choice of 4 body types, a skin color slider, limited modification of the eye, brow, nose, and mouth shape, limited tattoos, and limited hair styles and colors.
There's two races, humans and Irathient that your character can be, and 4 "origin" stories that give you your first set of gear, but otherwise are irrelevant, as they can all use all weapons and choose from the same abilities options (talent system).
The quest system was done a bit differently than I've encountered. I assume it's setup more like a single player 3rd person shooter (which I never play, so I don't know for sure), where there is a main mission that you start with and can follow without doing anything else. The training mission lets you get use to the interface and the weapons. Then you get to kill mutants and alien beasts. You have a NPC buddy with the personality of Kaliyo, one of the imperial agent companions of SW:TOR if you played that. However, the NPC really isn't a fighter. She has a gun, and she shoots things, but don't rely on her to kill stuff, I think it's just an animation, or if she does damage, it's like she has a BB-gun. The NPC seems to be more of a guide as to where you are supposed to be during a mission than a "pet".
Once you need to travel, you get a little 4 wheel off-road thing whose controls reminds me of old racing game control systems. The longer you hold down W, the faster you go, the A D has a delay and/or dependent on speed, so it took me a bit to get use to it. I was running into railings and big rocks all over the place. So it was actually fun to get to the next area, where you could take the road, or go off-road and ride the hilly, alien and mutant infested countyside. I saw some players with jeeps/hummers, but didn't get far along enough to get one.
Along the way, there are side missions that you can take or ignore. Some are simple, save the good guys being overrun by bad guys ("I thought I was a goner! Sure glad you came along!) where you just get xp and scrip (gold), and some are repeatable mini-games in themselves, where you get a score for how well you did and there's a scoreboard of which characters did the best. I found these useful for improving how you play, because if you just run in barrels blazing, you die REALLY REALLY fast. So you have to use the terrain, plan your reloads, and be really good at aiming. There's even a few timed runs where you have to ride your vehicle along a path, again with a scoreboard at the end of your time versus the ranked players' times.
I died. A lot. The first time you die you get the option of self rezzing where you are, or being extracted to a spawn spot "close" to where you are. The spawn spots were mostly just outside the mission area, so it wasn't that much of a trek to get back into the fight. Some of the spawn spots were pretty much in the middle of the fight though, so you had to careful not to kite the beast back or you wake up in the middle of them again.
Some of the missions seemed to be in a single player zone, as I didn't see anyone else around while I was doing them, but most of them were free-for-alls where a group of other players could come in and kill everything letting you sally up at the end and talk to the NPC and be done (you got credit for what the other people did). This felt a little disconcerting, but I definitely prefer this to it being a competitive quest environment where everyone is stacking on mutant#1's spawn trying to get the kill.
There are also ark events, where there are larger aliens and streams of mutants which have little mini-objectives (go here, kill everything, go over to this other area, rez some NPCs, go over here and kill more aliens, finally go kill the big baddie in the middle). This is again a free-for-all, although the game tracks who contributed the most to the event (felt like GW2 area events).
The more you use a weapon type, the better you get at it. I didn't really get that part till after I was done Saturday. I kept trying to figure out why this "pistol" that seemed to have better numbers wasn't doing anywhere near as well as my machine gun.
Their spawn timers seemed a bit off, although I'm not sure if that was just me being bad at 3rd person shooters or if it was an actual game issue. Like one of the missions was to keep them off the NPC while she repaired a radio tower. At first they were just streaming in, but then I died, and the room was full of them (and the NPC died, oops). Once I cleared the room, they didn't start respawning again so I ended up having to go out and do a previous step, at which point they all respawned immediately. At least that time she was ablel to fix the radio.
All of the main-story missions had cut-scene visual/audios (like SW:TOR), so that was nifty too.
WRA Grim: Duskheron
Re: Defiance
I have been looking at this one for a while and am wondering how they will do with a tv show shadowing the game. Not sure what they will do really but I was worried that their release time of the show might be rushing the game development, but it is sounding good so far. Now I just need to find time to play again.
I do think it would be fun if they make fun of some of the gaming habits in the show, like have some guy perched on some ridge somewhere killing people for no reason in the show just like a Griefer camping some area in the game.
I do think it would be fun if they make fun of some of the gaming habits in the show, like have some guy perched on some ridge somewhere killing people for no reason in the show just like a Griefer camping some area in the game.
