Defiance Free-to-Play

[Sledgstone 8,672]

Defiance will go free-to-play on June 4 for PC. We are targeting July 15 for PS3^™ and currently working with Microsoft on plans for Defiance Free-to-Play on Xbox 360^®.

Why is Defiance going free-to-play?

Free is better! As we head toward Season 2 of the Defiance television show, we expect that many new fans will want to join the world of Defiance, and having a system that allows them to experience the Defiance universe for free is good for everyone.

As a person who actually paid $60 for this game when it first came out, this pisses me off. The game I paid for was buggy as hell, broken missions, had numerous server issues issues and even server queues. Over the past year Trion has finally fixed all the issues and made the game a complete product.. a product that I should have received a year ago. What I really believe is that Trion planned on the game going Free-to-Play from the beginning and everyone that paid the initial $60 basically crowd-funded this game to completion. In the end I look back and I can see that what I paid for was an early unfinished product that was in a beta for a year until they got enough in game purchase options available and DLC out to make the game free to play and still make money off a new possible flood of customers.

If you have not played the game before, I do recommend it. It'll be great to play once a week during Defiance Season 2 as there will be new cross over content, weekly episode missions and the entire core game campaign will be completely free. What I do not recommend is buying any of the DLC. I never bought them, but I know someone who has and its definitely not worth the money. I'll play Defiance again for season 2 and a possible season 3 of the Syfy show, but I will not buy another Trion Worlds, Inc. game. If they ever make another game and plan on charging for it, don't bother as it will most likely be a beta for a year and you'll get it free when its actually worth a damn.

Source: http://www.defiance....w/free-to-play/

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[Myk JL 1,731]

I was going to preorder this with all the DLC that came with it but lost interest once there was news for PS4. Glad I avoided it when it was buggy but I'm still not interested in it right now.
 

Coincidentally I was going to preorder ESO for the PS4, but cancelled my PS4 preorder once Valve had some actual news on their Steam Machines. If I ever do now get a PS4 for ESO it will be after ESO goes Free-To-Play.
 
I also might have to redefine the Khajiit I wanted to make as the crossbow in the game turned out to be a spell called Silver Bolt. The single player quests also sound ruined so I might stick with doing Professions if I ever get into it.

[Strider Hiryu 2,704]

I might start playing it come the beginning of Season 2 since it's free to play. My friend has been nagging me to get it since he bought it last year but I wasn't overly that interested then. Not really interested now but since I don't have anything outside of BF4 to play on my PS4 this'll give me something to do until I finally pick up a copy of Watch Dogs.

[DeathscytheX 9,732]

Thats why its hard for me to justify paying for any MMO game when it first comes out. The success rate of not becoming free to play is so low, its never worth the gamble.

[Sledgstone 8,672]

I never really thought of defiance as a potential free to play MMO when I first bought it. I thought of it more as a co-op game like borderlands.. but with all the micro transactions Trion added it became more and more of a money grab. For everything they want to charge for now it might as well be a free game at this point.

[DeathscytheX 9,732]

Guild Wars 2 is half off until the 11th I believe. A few friends convinced me to buy it. I'm liking it so far. Since its been out a while I was comfortable with paying for it.

[Sledgstone 8,672]

My older brother loves GW2 and recommended it to me a couple times, but I still haven't beat GW1 yet and GW2 seems insanely huge. I've played free weekends a couple times, but seeing as KOTOR 1 took me 5 months to beat, GW2 seems like something unbeatable to me. :/

[DeathscytheX 9,732]

Oh its massive... my only complaint is that you cant turn the hints off I looked it up and no one seems to know how or outright say that you cant. Thats kinda stupid. But I like how there is no kill stealing or loot stealing, You can do what ever you want while in a party... even be on totally opposite sides of a map, and if someone wants to do a part of their story you can join it from anywhere, and go back to where you were when its over.

 

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/manual/

 

It wont let me link the video directly.

[Sledgstone 8,672]

I love the design of GW and GW2, but GW2 plays completely different than GW1. They added all the keyboard movement, dodging and jumping into GW2 to prevent bots from farming the game while GW1 could be played completely one handed with a mouse. I like that there is no more need for the monk class because everyone had to have a NPC monk or Hero on their team in the first game. The biggest change to GW2 over GW1 is that the entire game is a true MMORPG now.. wherever you go you'll run into other players while GW1 you could only see other players in the large towns, outposts and mission areas.. you had to make a team with other players or NPCs before you left the towns because the moment you do, the game puts you in your own instance of the world where you had only your team and you'd never run into other players. You could solo most of the entire game with NPCs and your own Heroes. If you enjoy GW2, you could always pick up a copy of GW1 real cheap just for the campaign. Most of that game is empty now except for during the automated holiday events and they only have a few servers running, but I read an article that they'll never have to take GW1 offline because of how little resources it actually uses on their end. If I remember right GW2 takes place 250 years after the first game so its not vital to the story in GW2 but you get to see all the history like the Charr conflict, and how the humans and dwarves met the Asuran and Norn in the eye of the north expansion. They had some good solid story in that game.

 

I'll probably buy GW2 at some point, but I have no idea when I'll get around to it while I have so many other games in my backlog.

[DeathscytheX 9,732]

I like the fact that each class has its own huge realm, so picking another class not only provides a different story, but a whole different environment to explore with different enemies. This actually gives me the desire to make a new character and play thought their story, because it's not the same environment with the same story with just different outcomes like Borderlands and Mass Effect.... all the while you are free to explore all the realms with any character and perform loyalty missions and daily events in each.

[Sledgstone 8,672]

During my free weekend I started off as a Charr Engineer and I was surprised at how the Charr village was setup and the main plot lines about their ongoing war with spirits. My brother played as a human so I wondered if we would have any issues playing online together, but it seems very friend oriented like what you're talking about.

 

What race / class are you playing as?

[DeathscytheX 9,732]

Ever since my female character was fawned over by weirdos in City of Heroes, I've always gone with female characters in most games like this for a laugh . I'm a human guardian. I'm using a two handed sword right now and so far it's my favorite out of the two handed hammer and mace.

[Sledgstone 8,672]

Defiance... I take back recommending this game even as a free to play. Watch the episode missions on youtube in a lets play video. This game has become so frustratingly difficult that I no longer enjoy any aspect of it now. With the latest patch they implemented last month the game now takes all players in an area, combines the total "EGO" rating of all players (their level), averages it, then raises the difficulty of all enemies in that area by raising the area's "Threat Level". To try and help out lower level players, those players get a temporary "EGO" boost to help them against the stronger enemies. Well.. Trion has now made this game only enjoyable to people who have put some serious time into it. I've beaten the game with an EGO rating of 790.. Most players I see in the game have EGO ratings in the thousands. As soon as I see the threat level has increased to 3, I literally don't have a chance in hell of holding my own. Because the threat level is increased in an area regardless if you are in a group or not, you can no longer solo this game. The difficulty is now so insane for my low level guy that an occasional swarm of Hellbugs were just cannon fodder, a fun little kill fest for me.. but now some higher level guy, like my older brother, or any other random person who plays this game, will show up and bam.. threat level 3.. The easiest enemies in the game require an entire clip off my mag to even take them out. Its like I'm shooting a BB gun now.

 

Maybe they planned on this setup for when the game goes free to play? If they get 30+ lower level guys in an area and a few hard core players, it might balance out.. but as it is now, I don't see how anyone new to this game would even stand a chance. And the most idiotic thing is the new season 2 episode 1 mission literally starts at the beginning are of the entire game. The amount of high level players in the beginning area will ensure a constant high threat level for all newbies, thus ensuring a complete massacre of all new players. x_x

 

Its so damn unbalanced now with PVE that the enemies will actually ignore me unless I'm shooting at them because I pose no threat to them at all. When they do realize I'm an enemy, they kill me in a couple shots easily. One of the most rediculous moments happened when I headshot a dark matter enemy 8 times doing critical hits.. I never killed him.. instead he had an assault rifle and killed me with 5 bullets of random automatic gunfire from over 200 meters away.