Defiance Lock-Ins, Arkfalls and Beta Keys

As you might know from our gaming events calendar (hint, hint), GAME has been running a series of Lock-ins, showcasing various upcoming games in their stores and other venues around the country. I popped down to the Defiance lock-in last night to check out what they’re doing.

It’s quite a nice set-up actually, with free beers available and we each went home with a Defiance-branded USB stick. Multiplay was running this one, the team behind the Insomnia LAN festival and various other gaming events.

They brought down big screens, Tritton headsets and the PS3 version of the Defiance beta was ready to go. Multiplay have been touring the country, showing off the game in Peterborough, Birmingham, Manchester and now London.

The game itself was rather empty, sadly enough. Even though we were allegedly on the closed beta servers and the PS3 beta should have been running for a few days, we didn’t manage to meet anyone that wasn’t in the room with us. As a result, just me and the guy sitting next to me wound up running an Arkfall by ourselves – one of the open world PvE events where detritus from the arks crashes to the ground and (normally) hundreds of players turn up to shoot all the monsters and claim the best loot.

Or in this case two players, and it really showed off how well the game scales. We played the Revolting Hellbugs arkfall, which you can see in my video from the Defiance alpha on Twitch.tv. Bugs everywhere, hundreds of players and your aim is to destroy the giant crystal within the time limit. With two players, we still had the same bugs – hellbug archers throwing sticky stuff all over the place, soldiers burrowing under our feet and skitters biting vulnerable points in the crystal. It was doable, and we finished with 10 minutes to spare but with a couple of deaths. Tactically, we tried with me taking out the archers while my co-buddy focused on the crystal. As the time ran down, the bugs respawned faster and faster, which quickly became a free-for-all punctuated by cries of “Aaagh, rez me, rez meeeee!”

The closed beta went up a few hours ago and will be available all weekend. I’ve just been given another 400+ keys each for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions, so head on over to the Defiance beta key giveaway page for more details. I’ll also be playing it on Twitch over the weekend so drop by and give me a follow if you’re a Twitch viewer.