Why The Return Of Defiance May Be The Most Confusing F2P MMO News Of The Year So Far

In the current era of "classic" servers spinning up for almost every MMORPG out there, it isn't all that surprising that we've also seen the return of some games from the past. The licensing of City of Heroes to the Homecoming team, an updated version of Blade & Soul in NEO, the "reborn" version of Heroes of Newerth coming, and even the sneaky patching of "dead" game Heroes of the Storm all point to a bit of a "nostalgia" renaissance in the genre.

There are many games gone by that we see people calling for reboots of in comments, on forums, and on social media. If you've played MMOs for a while now, you've likely seen calls for the return of Wildstar, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, or the long-remembered Star Wars Galaxies. (I refer to "official versions" of these games, of course.) Even brand new games are seemingly capitalizing on some of that nostalgia with updated versions of some of the older systems in those games. Hell, just look at the recently Kickstarter-funded Stars Reach and its parallels to Star Wars Galaxies. Sure, some of the team also worked on Galaxies, but that's certainly not the ONLY reason they're revitalizing some of the MMO's features in Stars Reach.

Reporting on all of these means I'm usually not surprised by a new announcement touting the return of/update to an older game. However, the recent announcement from Fawkes Games heralding the return of Defiance truly caught me off guard.

Defiance started as a very expensive proposition over at the old Trion Worlds studio. Having had some decent success with MMORPG Rift, Trion Worlds attempted a cross-media experiment. Defiance was going to be a science fiction shooter MMO tied to an episodic show airing on the defunct SyFy channel. The idea was to create a new sci-fi world complete with unique races, Mad Max looking vehicles, a kind of post-apocalyptic setting, and to have that world cross the game/TV boundary. They even touted that events on the show could happen in game, and that events in game could determine how storylines on the show played out.

Both the game and the show debuted in April of 2013 and while certain moments on the show did play out as events in the game, the promised cross-content didn't really play out as advertised. Even with massive amounts of money thrown at the project, the show received middling reviews and only lasted three seasons. The game itself also received mostly middling-to-low review scores and went F2P on PC just a little over a year after launch in June of 2014. A "Defiance 2050" version was released in 2018 and provided the same story and characters, but included new reworked player classes.

When gamigo purchased Trion Worlds' assets, they slowly closed down various console versions of the shooter and eventually shut every remaining version down in April of 2021.

Defiance itself was kind of neat for me. I'm not personally into the ultra-realistic shooters and I love science fiction. I loved the idea of the show and actually really enjoyed the first season of Defiance. Season 2 and 3...not so much. It became clear very quickly that this project wasn't going to make the cash it required to keep the course they charted and production started to suffer...on both the show and the game.

Enter Fawkes Games, a company that licenses a few other titles from companies, like gamigo, and publishes them to make a little bit of scratch. Given that gamigo seemed to have no plans for the Defiance IP, Fawkes entered and gave a spark of hope to long-time players still yearning online for a chance to revisit an alien-invaved Earth.

Defiance is coming back in April 2025.

Neat...but why?

I mean, I'll certainly play it for a bit, but with the game not receiving new content and being the original version that had coding issues due to both a rushed development and having to code for the PS3, it isn't even the best version of itself. It'll be a nice hit of nostalgia, sure, but I honestly can't imagine spending substantial time in it and I would be REALLY hard pressed to shell out any cash. The return will keep the free-to-play model but will ditch some of the later, more pay-to-win items that Trion Worlds added in later DLCs as the company was slowly dying. The launch will only be through their own launcher, too. Defiance won't be on Steam this time around. No new content is planned, but there could be a possible console return or a launch of Defiance 2050 should this first version do well enough.

I wouldn't hold my breath for those last two, though. I just can't imagine this doing all that well. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's a group of people that saw Defiance as their "main game." That group wasn't big enough for gamigo to just keep the original online, though. If it was able to make a profit of any type with little to no work, believe me, gamigo would have left it online. That's kind of their whole MO, right?

Defiance didn't fail due to some easily adjusted singular issue. The addition of some pay-to-win elements late in its life didn't help the situation, but it wasn't the reason that the game died. You can't just remove those few elements and expect it to now succeed. To be fair, it doesn't look like Fawkes expects it to be a gangbuster title. They've spoken about how they don't need to make a lot of money to keep things open, but they have made it very clear in their FAQ that future new content, the addition of controller support, or anything else requiring even a modicum of development will be absolutely dependent on how the game is received by the community (i.e. how much players spend).

I'm excited to jump in and at least play through the main storyline again. It's been a while and I look forward to hearing some of the jank voice acting that ended up in the game. Being able to run all the way to the end of the story without having to wait for patches will also be nice. After that, though, I don't think Defiance offered enough "end game" to keep me playing without new content coming.

Defiance failed for a whole host of reasons. The split focus on making a show, a bit of a rushed development that made certain aspects of the very expensive project seem low budget, a failure to address many performance issues, and more all combined to slowly strangle a project that could have had potential. Simply relaunching the title likely won't lead to long-term success.

However, maybe it doesn't need to have long term success. I don't begrudge those that loved Defiance a chance to go back and stay there. There's games I wish would do the same thing. However, I also wouldn't be surprised if by next year we're talking about the game closing yet another time. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised and enough players will fund new development, but I'm not holding my breath yet.

They did kind of NAIL the whole vibe of the project with a live action trailer, though. I'll give Fawkes that much.

Now...about that Wildstar return...