Defiance Previews and Interview

Since its announcement Trion Worlds’ multiplatform shooter MMO Defiance fell a bit off our radars, so we’ve decided to make it up by rounding up some of the latest coverage, courtesy of the last E3. First, we start with previews.

IGN:

But conceptually, there is a lot going on. For starters, I saw the game running on two separate screens being played by two separate people — one on an Xbox 360, the other on a PlayStation 3. They were playing together, in the same world and on the same server, as players back at Trion Worlds HQ who were on their PCs. This is the first time that I can think of where three platforms — including two directly competing consoles — have been unified, letting players of each platform interact, cooperate and compete directly.

The question is whether this unified experience will persist when the game launches. It might not come as a surprise, but Microsoft and Sony aren’t exactly BFFs. Microsoft is also notoriously protective of their servers, making regular patching (typically a necessity for MMOs) prohibitively difficult. This is one of the main reasons Final Fantasy XI is the only MMO on the 360, one of the other reasons being that the 360 launched with models that didn’t have hard drives. With no hard drive there’s nowhere to install a patch.

Regardless, if it stays multiplatform, it has the potential to unite console fanboys, or allow them to live out their fantasies of blowing each other up in a flurry of lasers and explosives.

PC Gamer:

The art style and gear design reminds me of a cross between Halo, Crysis, and a dash of Dead Space. The setting is a lush, semi-post-apocolyptic earth, where the aliens have come to terraform the Earth, instead of incinerate it which makes this the most green post-apocoltypic landscape I’ve ever seen. The environment design may best be described as Borderlands with plants.

And like Borderlands, you’re playing in a massive open world shared by other players that you can explore and discover quests and remnants of civilization to interact with. Unlike Borderlands, you’re not sharing this game world with a half-dozen other players, you’re sharing it with thousands. It’s a legitimate MMO you will be playing on a massive persistent world with no loading screens that makes heavy use of phasing technology to make the world change in response to the quests you complete.

Strategy Informer:

This Earth isn’t too familiar, however. Taking place in the near future, it represents a time when aliens have arrived and have begun to terraform the planet to their liking, so expect a bizarre melding of indigenous Earth plants and animals interacting with strange alien flora and fauna. Humans are trying to stop the aliens from changing the Earth, so many missions come from, say, preventing terraforming equipment from arriving in one piece.

The other aspect of the game that makes it more unique is that it’s a first person shooter. Only one MMOFPS has ever seen any level of success, Planetside, and that wasn’t a true shooter – it was more like mass battles on various levels (er, planetary regions) with persistant stats and ownership. Defiance promises to be a true MMO through and through, and even if the player isn’t good at twitch shooters, there are plenty of class options to allow them to contribute as support.

Finally, Ars Technica offers an interview with Rob Hill, senior producer on the game. Here’s an excerpt:

Both the game and the show take place in a near future, post-apocalyptic version of Earth. First an alien race came to Earth intent on colonizing the planet, and then their arks massive ships loaded with alien plant and animal life crashed on the surface. At the time of Defiance, the world is in a period of re-growth, but has been significantly changed thanks to the newly introduced alien species. The game is centered in the remains of San Francisco, while the show will take place in St. Louis.

“They exist within the same universe,” Hill told Ars. “And primarily where we’re going to be different is the fact that things that happen in the game will occur in the show and things that happen in the show will occur in the game. From a global standpoint this could be a large political change, a big environmental change, and they’ll happen simultaneously on both.”

As an example, Hill said that a character from the show could leave for San Francisco, show up in the game and go on adventures with players, before returning to St. Louis to discuss everything that happened while they were in the game world.