The Defiance Thread - News about the Show and Game

No one knows but the Arks were absolutely massive and there were a lot of them. So they probably got hidden in cargo holds labeled as containing other things

 

I'm pretty sure one of the descriptions I read specifically said they were smuggled aboard.

 

First off: there's no subscription fee, so factor that into your price calculations. So far the transactions don't seem to impact gameplay in any sort of "pay to win" fashion - cosmetic items, inventory space, 10% boosts to XP/money earned, or a random loot box (that can also be purchased with in-game resources).

It's an MMO third-person shooter, not an MMORPG. There's a definite main story to drive you forward (unlike what I remember of leveling in WoW), as well as side quests you can do. Loot is only visible to the player it dropped for (no rolling). No world PvP (only instanced, like battlegrounds). There's world boss fights (no grouping - everybody participating gets rewards at the end automatically) and group instances (with a group finder - something TOR screwed up royally).

Asides from the TPS-versus-RPG aspect, I would say it's very similar to WoW. How that's typical versus other MMOs I can't speak to.

If you have more specific questions, I can try to answer them.

 

An odd choice for the MMO is that only humans and Irathients (the species that Irisa, Nolan's daughter, is) are playable. One would have at least assumed the Castihans would also be playable given the attention the pilot gives to Datak Tarr and his family; while Indogene are likewise humanoid enough to work (and the Sensoth and Liberata fit standard MMO body types).

I suspect that if the game is a success they probably plan to add some of those races in expansions, similar, again, to Warcraft's model.

Spoiler

Well the <i>original</i> conspiracy could not have involved humans, but the point is the presence of the Volge does not necessitate the existence of a ninth species.

 

Tarr and McCawley are rivals because they're the two richest people in town and each wants what the other has. There's probably a racial element as well, with McCawley not being too fond of the alien interlopers (and if so, that makes it interesting that they cast a Native American actor in that role).

Reposting my comments from another forum:

I think it makes sense that the players would be mostly Humans and Irathients. For one thing, those are the two most numerous species on post-Arkfall Earth. We've seen that Castithans can be fighters, so they could be a third player category. But as for the other species: Indogenes are more thinkers than fighters; Liberata are diminutive; Gulanee are rare and incorporeal (though I gather that one does appear as a "level boss" or something); and Volge seem to be pretty much everyone's enemies, so they couldn't play the same story role as a human or Irathient player character. Sensoth are big, strong, and capable of aggression as we saw with Tarr's henchman in the pilot, but they're rather slow-moving, and from the demo, there's a lot of running in the game.

I wouldn't be surprised if Biomen showed up as a playable category at some point, though. They seem to be just the sort of thing that would be created for the sake of the game more than the show.

 

More player races will be added in the DLC. (Not quite full-fledged expansions, as you posit, though I guess if you buy all of it, the price will be the same.)

So far Indogene, Sensoth, and Liberata exist as NPC character races. Castihans could exist too - I may have mistaken them for human. It's also possible the game decided to stay away from them for now because of all the attention being paid in the show proper.

 

Hmmm?

This game had to have been rushed.

They probably bought the half finished platform to something else, unless the game came first?

It's possible that the further species are planned for expansion packs which the players have to pay for with real money or earn through excessively loyal game play?

 

There is no ''which one was developed first'' here. Defiance was developed specifically as a cross platform media production. Meaning everything about everything Defiance was developed to be both a tv series and game simultaneously by the same group of creators.

 

After the script/pitch is bought by a producer it takes weeks to months to get a show off the ground and running.

How long does it take a few hundred nerds to write the scripts for this game in a code monkey dungeon? A year or two?

The video game side would have needed a huge amount of lead time, or to have cheated some how, or to have produced a significantly inferior project.

 

My guess is that the engine is the same as rift, the world is random seed with clutter and the story quest stuff dynamic. Look at the website for the game and that is what it sounds like.

 

http://gamerlimit.com/2010/01/trion-and-syfy-announce-one-earth/
http://trionworlds.com/en/news/press-releases/2011/06/trion-and-syfy-reveal-defiance/

The first announcement came in 2010 (different title, sounds like the same project) and Defiance the game was teased at the 2011 E3.

The Defiance TV series went into production April 2012.

 

Don't tempt me with this mmo.. is there a trial thingie you can do for free?

I would think the Castihans would be a natural race choice for popularity so perhaps there is something about them that would be too early revealed if they were in the game.

I'm watching gameplay vids on youtube now.

 

So the Volge.. are those big Evangelion type robots they have with them living? Or did they build them somewhere off in their Volge hide out?

I looked through the website at all the races and couldn't help thinking it works more as an MMO than a show. But early days. I want a female Liberata warrior to play.

 

The Volge are only in the pilot for 10 minutes, if that. They look to be giant robot type things. The Mayors assistant is/was something else.

 

The Mayor's assistant was an Indogene. The Liberata was the fur servant of the mine boss. I wasn't connecting them to the Volge in any way.

The Volge are listed as a race. We see them climbing and they appear to be creatures/humanoids in shape but they also have big robots with them. Just wondering if there are Volge driving the big robots or if the big robots are some subspecies of bio-mechanoid Volge?

 

Not yet. (There was a series of betas pre-release, which is how I got my "trial" and decided to pick it up.)

 

The show and game have been designed together though they would have licensed an engine instead of building it from the ground up. More races will be added as DLCs

 

That doesn't seem to have been established yet in the available reference materials.

 

So, what did everyone think of tonight's episode? Nice seeing them explore the remains of old St Louis and all that.

 

Tonight's ep was really good. It had a distinctly different, more intimate feel to it than the pilot, but there's nothing wrong with that. I liked getting to see both Nolan and Irisa 'on the job', as it were, as lawkeepers, and the backstories we got for McCawley, Stahma, and Nolan were neat.

Speaking of Stahma, I love her benign ruthlessness and control over things. It makes her a more dangerous and interesting character than Datak, and it's neat to see that type of HBIC dynamic juxtaposed against what is essentially a classic Western backdrop.

The end of the ep with Datak pulling a 'Believers' and killing that other Castithan was predictable, but it nonetheless worked well and did what it was designed to do.

I said that I got a distinct Tombstone vibe from the pilot, and while those elements were certainly still there, this ep also reminded me very much of the short-lived series Vanished and Wolf Lake.

BTW, for anyone who might be interested, there's a feature on the official show website that outlines/highlights instances of connectivity between the series and the game. The link is http://www.defiance.com/en/series/news/where-game-meets-show