Last week, Fawkes Games put out a trailer for Defiance hyping up its return. When we ran it, you may have noticed the trailer didn’t actually have any noticeable game footage in it and indeed was mostly a promotional voiceover with shadowy art in the background. That’s apparently because it was made with genAI.
“Some parts of the video were done with AI, like the previously ones,” wrote Fawkes operations manager Charly in Discord. After player pushback on the vid, he acknowledged that gamers generally don’t want that noise. “Less AI more game content for future videos, noted,” he says. “Just to be fair, the intention was to provide some visual material to the voiceover.”
In fact, the indie team appears to have taken the feedback to heart, as it’s launched another video today to announce a stress event – a video packed with good ol’ janky Defiance cinematics (and a crapton of filters – Grant Bowler’s face never looked so smooth, bless his heart).
Anyhow, the stress test runs this Saturday, April 5th, from 5 p.m. EDT to 7 p.m. EDT – just two “chaotic hours,” the devs note. Preloading will begin the night before; this version of the game will have all cash-shop items set to 0 gems and will run only the Hellbugs Go Boom stress test event (not other events expected at launch). The team is hoping for even more feedback on performance on modern machines and controller support.
“All downloadable content (DLCs) are deactivated during this test and are intended to be deactivated on release. You’ll experience the game in the final version as left by Gamigo, with all the free content in place. This current content status is the intended close-to-final version.”
