Defiance: State of the Game

This day has been long coming. Sometimes you hear sayings like “it takes 9 months to have a baby” and “9 women can’t make a baby in a month”. Those more familiar with the matter have pointed out to me that this was closer to “9 months of giving birth”, hit me over the head and said I should stop using sayings I don’t really understand. It’s the Icelander in me, sorry.

This first day of launch of Defiance, a PC-PS3-XBOX360-massively-online-tv-show-connected-third-person-open-world-shooter, has been as awesome as we expected it to be. And by awesome, I mean we’re neck deep addressing all the issues that come up when you scale something up to a million people from a test environment of thousands.

And we expected to be doing that. All our team is here, 150 people, all on it and will be in the next weeks because that’s what you do with massive online games. Keep the team, update, patch, fix, improve. We notice, we listen, we honestly do. Of the issues that we are working on right now, these are an example of the highest priority for us.

• Connectivity – Being able to connect, patch and play. This has a number of things that can be plaguing you depending on platform and what version of the game you have. We’re on it like a shark during winter solstice.

• Pre-order items – WHERE ARE THEY?!?!? We have a number of cases where they aren’t being delivered to you. We know. They haven’t disappeared nor will they. They might pop up suddenly over the next hours, the next time you log on or tomorrow.

• Bosses and Arkfalls – They might be very difficult as they scale and the rewards not in any sane correlation to what they should be, being this difficult. You’re right, it’s not right. On it.

• Chat and VOIP – This isn’t broken, we just believe people should use their psychic abilities more. Can you hear what I’m saying to you right now? Yes, exactly. We’re working on it.

But one thing which you may or may not be accustomed to. We may take down our servers to deploy patches or improvements to them. We do this far more frequently than others. This may be frequent and annoying during the first days of launch but believe me when I say this, we’re doing it to make your experience better.

“You may ask yourself, “where is my issue on this list of yours you inbred viking trying to fool me with humor and shark?” Don’t worry, we have a long list of issues logged based on your feedback through Customer Support, Forums, stalking you in-game and server data. But those four are an example of those that are affecting the largest number of people. You can however comment further here or provide further detail to help us out with those issues.”

At the end of the day – which btw, our day never does, we’re here 24/7 – we reach around each other and are happy. Happy that our voyage is just beginning, from today, with you onboard. We appreciate the trust that you are showing us by coming with us and we will address all these issues.

Ave Arkhunter,

Nathan Richardsson