A 2013 MMO shooter tied to a canceled TV show, revived by fans in 2025 and now down to a population you could count on one hand.
Official art · via Steam
Defiance launched in 2013 as Trion Worlds' third-person shooter MMO, built to run in lockstep with a Syfy television series of the same name, sending players through an open post-apocalyptic Bay Area alongside dynamic "Arkfall" world events. The original servers shut down in 2021. An indie team called Fawkes Games licensed the property and relaunched it in April 2025, running the last patch build off their own client, entirely free, with every DLC pack unlocked for everyone.
The core gunplay held up well even in 2013, weighty shooting with a well-tuned auto-aim that contemporary reviewers singled out, and syncing game events to a television show was a novel idea at the time. The open Bay Area setting gave that shooting somewhere real to happen, and the dynamic Arkfall co-op events remain the highlight of the design. The 2025 revival being fully free with every DLC unlocked is a real goodwill gesture from a small team keeping a dead game breathing.
The original launch shipped monetization that soured its reputation early: pay-to-win convenience currency and a bait-and-switch from a box-price purchase into free-to-play. Quest content repeats and drags longer than it should, and technical instability dogged the game across its life, desyncs, disconnects, whole buildings popping into view late. A round of post-launch reward nerfs made an already grindy structure worse on top of it.
Steam's all-time review score sits at 77 percent Mostly Positive across roughly 12,600 reviews, but that number reflects over a decade of legacy play, not what shows up for a new player today. The current population is close to nothing: SteamCharts shows roughly one to two concurrent players against an all-time peak over 12,000, and the 2025 relaunch itself stumbled through server restarts and login problems on its first day. Metacritic still holds the original release at a mixed 64.
Worth a curiosity visit, nothing more. The gunplay and the Arkfall events still work, and the revival team deserves credit for keeping the lights on for free, but there's almost nobody left to share the open world with.