Before there was Destiny 2 or The Division or most other shared world shooters, there was Defiance. Launching back in 2013, it arrived with a lot of issues and problems that caused it to go from a normal $60 game to free-to-play in its second year on the market. It was certainly ambitious, being one of the only real MMO’s on Xbox 360 (where I played it) and having tie-ins with an actual TV show.
Unfortunately, I was underwhelmed by the uninteresting gameplay and awful graphics that it totally turned me off to Defiance not long after its original launch, and I haven’t gone back since. At PSX 2017 this year, I had a chance to sit down with Trion Worlds and discuss the future of Defiance.
Also: Detroit: Become Human Handles Heavy Themes with Care
Interestingly enough, Defiance is currently in development for PS4 and Xbox One with a ton of new enhancements made visually. As the friendly team showed me around the environment and how it will look on modern consoles, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Everything from the graphics to the shooting gameplay itself looked like a completely different game; one that I wanted to check out.
The higher resolution, sharper detail, and better graphical fidelity all derived from the more RAM packed into the modern consoles, the team told me. In fact, the provided comparison screenshot above doesn’t really do it justice from what I saw on the show floor. According to the team, Defiance still has a consistent audience of around 100,000 monthly players on PC and the hope is that this will breath new life into the sci-fi MMO.
With all of the new content that’s released over the last several years and these major improvements including graphics and frame rate, Trion Worlds can be sure that, if nothing else, that monthly player count will be at least 100,001, because I am excited to return and check out Defiance on PS4 when it launches sometime in the future.
