With the TV show raking in 2.7 million viewers during its premier on the SyFy Channel last week, SFL decided to ask Ian Abbott to take a break from Defiance The Game and reflect on what he’d encountered so far and what we can look forward to when the game comes to this year’s festival.

I’ve already clocked up nearly 50 hours in the game which has logged more than 6 million hours of gameplay since its worldwide launch on 2nd April. As I land in any open world game, my first stop is to peek at the map and see what treasures lie ahead. My heart fluttered immediately as I saw huge swathes of territories waiting to be explored, conquered and looted; all were immediately peppered with side missions, supply depots and oodles of other activities alongside the main and episode missions. The possibilities were endless and boundaries were nowhere to be seen.

Cycling through the menu, I found I had instant access to my own personal ATV (All-Terrain Vehicle) a.k.a. my own pimped quad bike, and so I gleefully ignored the large exclamation marks winking at me on my map to try and seduce me into the main and episode assignments. Instead summoning my wheels, I spent the first three hours simply tearing about the hills, lakes and facilities getting to know the world I know I am going to be spending a lot of time in. The freedom to slowly get to know and get a grip of both my vehicle and choice of weapons during early side missions of time trials and rampages experiences of the game was such a player friendly introduction. Rather than dumping me in and forcing me to fumble through my initial missions, I’ve been able to hone my driving skills, build my EGO rating to over 300 whilst sharpening and personalising my weapon choices (shotgun and infector combination) to help build my confidence in the game. Let us not forget, Defiance is going to continually develop and grow over the coming months so there’s plenty of time to discover everything it has on offer.

Defiance presents an altered planet Earth which is occupied by the human and alien survivors of a global disaster who are forced to live and work together to build a new society from the wreckage. I play as a fully customisable Ark Hunter (a human female outlaw; aliens, men and other permutations are available) whose main purpose is to track and obtain, through fair means or foul, alien minerals and technology using all skills, weapons and tactics at my disposal. There is a repetition and rhythm that could be easy to fall into: mission, drive, shoot, collect, return but dynamic events like Arkfalls or citizen rescues regularly appear where you can join other players which breaks up the pace and flow in a positive way. Coming together with dozens of others to contribute to the destruction of a larger enemy over the course of 15-20 minutes feels great. When A. N. Other joins me on a quest, their presence, represented by a little dot of purple on the map aids the killing spree, without bearing an overbearing presence. We are together but we are also alone.

Considering the complex and remote invisible plumbing needed to maintain a seven year old Xbox 360 playing an always online, massive multiplayer and co-op experience is hugely ambitious and inevitably, there were reports elsewhere of server issues. It is with happiness that I have not had a single server drop, kick out or signal fluctuation in my single player experience. However, there was an initial patch that took around 70 minutes to download and install when I first started up and I have had multiple problems with the four co-op maps that I’ve unlocked but been unable to play. The Trion team though are taking this seriously and continue to work on, improve and communicate with the Defiance community, as seen recently when Executive Producer Nathan Richardsson explained in a recent blog post “Like in all relationships, it’s give and receive. We’ve asked a lot of you lately, going through some difficult times during our launch. While you’ve been very understanding and patient with us, we still feel we can do more; more than addressing the issues with servers, improving the client, deploying patches and preparing a long road of massive free (and paid) DLCs, more than evolving the future of Defiance with you. You might have had disconnects, unable to log in early on, long time to patch, wrong keys, pre-order items missing or simply had to read through my blogs while waiting for the servers to come up after code deployments. It’s been rough, we know. So your account now has a gift from us, to you - to make good, to show you that we really appreciate what you’ve gone through with us. We hope this shows you that we do appreciate you on this journey of Defiance, trying out something new, trying something different”.

There is also an additional mode entitled Shadow War where teams are pitted against each other to capture and hold special arkfall pieces that have fallen from the sky and deliver the kit to wealthy clients with the team reaching the goal total first victorious, but I’ve decided to concentrate on the rich and satisfying single player experience for a while, powering up my EGO to 300, donning Ark Hunter uniforms, finding quirky characters with wily intentions, traversing new frontiers in my constant quest to retrieve lost alien relics and continually exploring the world, which looks better with every patch.

Defiance is no doubt an ambitious undertaking and has had some initial technical teething problems, but also has a certain raw magic about it where I can just lose hours of happy time playing. I’m genuinely intrigued to see how this immersive TV/game world will work over a long period of time. There has been a limited number of episode missions (with some stereotypical dialogue), introducing a parallel storyline which sits alongside the main missions which I quickly completed and hope more pop up soon. Until then, it’s back on the quad bike in search of treasure!

We’ll be coming back to Defiance over the coming weeks and months to see how the world is evolving and how it becomes interwoven with the TV show whilst festival goers will be able to get hands on with the game at the end of the month.