The Defiance Thread - News about the Show and Game

Discussion in 'Science Fiction & Fantasy' started by PlainSimpleJoel, Dec 14, 2012.

  1. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    A triple cross could be fun, if she's already anticipated the tars slaughtering her family.

    Although she's not going to inherit shit if Christie buries her inlaws, the Mob doesn't work like that.

    Apart from removing a threat, how does she benefit from decapitating these people?
     
  2. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Daddy's approval.
     
  3. Zod

    Zod Captain Captain

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    I don't think this show is very good. Its watchable and I believe that I give it more of a chance due to the lack of Sci Fi on TV in general. I record it and watch it sometimes weeks later.

    It got renewed but this show seems to be trending down the Stargate Universe path. Its their premier show and its ratings are slowly dropping. I think the most recent had a 0.6 rating in the prime demo and 1.6 million viewers. I don't think this show goes beyond a second season.
     
  4. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Shows on Syfy get significantly less ratings, and need significantly less ratings to stay profitable. It's a smaller market with smaller overheads. That and the show is an advert for the game. But what the real clincher is going to be is dvd sales. Scifi nerds buy dvds. A million people might be watching this show, but TPTB (dellusionally) think that they can sell 30 million dvds in the first month domestically and double that internationally.
     
  5. Zod

    Zod Captain Captain

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    You can forget about the game as its widely perceived as a flop among gaming circles. By the time a 2nd season begins that game will be a wasteland. If things stay this way I would be shocked if this show gets a third season.
     
  6. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    That seems to be the danger in this new strategy of trying to create a multimedia franchise from the word go. Defiance tried it with the series/game tie-in, while After Earth built this whole universe of tie-in books as background for the movie. But it's jumping the gun to try to do so many things at once when you don't know if any part of the whole will succeed. I guess you can't manufacture a multimedia franchise. It only works the old-fashioned way, when one work in one medium is enough of a hit to create and propel interest in tie-ins.
     
  7. Hartzilla2007

    Hartzilla2007 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Meh, I heard the same stuff about Star Trek Online and its been going strong for 3 years now.

    You don't really know how well a MMO is doing unless you can go in there and count the number a players playing over a 24 hour period and sometimes all it takes is a good new update to draw people back and get new players. Especially if it majorly improves the game

    Not to mention if the competition sucks enough people will go back.

    So I would right the game off just yet.

    Plus the show is getting into the time of the year when there isn't anything else on.
     
  8. Zod

    Zod Captain Captain

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    I don't think you can compare this to Star Trek or Star Wars because of the name recognition. There are people who will play Star Trek regardless of the quality of the game.

    There is no doubt that they recovered from a TERRIBLE launch and actually turned the game into something that's fun and playable. Of course going FTP did it wonders.

    This game gets no such built in fan base. Can it recover? Sure- Will it recover? Possibly- It has no monthly sub right? I wish it well- not for the game as I could give a damn but would like it to help the show.

    As to the show- Has potential but I can't put a finger on why it hasn't hooked me yet. Maybe some of the writing has been a bit weak.
     
  9. jayceee

    jayceee Commander Red Shirt

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    I suspect the clincher will be whether season 1 of Defiance will be actually released on bluray in America. (There's a listing for a UK bluray version with a July 15, 2013 release date). Or whether the bluray version gets canned at the last minute.

    If season 1 of Defiance is only released on dvd and not bluray, one would guess Universal doesn't have much confidence in the dvd set being a hot seller.

    In recent years, there's been quite a few Universal released sci-fi tv show season sets which didn't bother with a bluray version in America, such as: Caprica, Alphas, Eureka, Warehouse 13, The Event, etc ...
     
    Last edited: Jun 8, 2013
  10. intrinsical

    intrinsical Commodore Commodore

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    The problem with the game is 3-fold.

    1) Lack of desireable items being sold in the cash-store. Defiance's store primarily consists of only two things, fancy costumes and xp-bonus. Fancy costumes are nice, but they simply don't sell. Just ask Star Trek Online's devs, they've totally stopped putting up new uniforms because very few players are buying. Now, if they put some cool and unique weapons, that might keep them afloat for some time.

    2) Features that kill social interaction and community building. Part of this is due to having no social hub for players to gather and mingle. Part of this is simply bad UI assumptions; they assumed everyone will be using voice chat and made the text chat UI totally invisible until you wanted to chat which is a really bad idea. The end result is a player base who totally don't interact, don't make new friends and don't keep each other playing the game.

    3) Lack of content. Admittedly, this is the same with almost all newly launched MMOs and Defiance has actually filled the world with enough pre-endgame content. Its the end-game that's currently lacking although this week's plague sieges does alleviate this somewhat. Also, players assumed that there will be a lot more tie-ins with the show itself and were greatly disappointed when only half the episodes had tie-ins with the show and the tie-ins were a measly 5-minute "find data recorders" type missions.

    If they can improve on these three aspects and if the tv show continues beyond season 2, I think there's still a good chance for the game to be successful.
     
    Last edited: Jun 8, 2013
  11. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    That wasn't really a reasonable thing to expect, though. There's only going to be limited overlap between the game's audience and the show's audience; the whole point of doing a franchise in more than one medium is to draw in two distinct, if overlapping, audiences and thus get a bigger total audience base. So a lot of people who play the game won't watch the show, and a lot of people who watch the show won't play the game. Therefore both the show and the game have to be able to stand alone to be comprehensible to those who don't follow both. Not to mention that the needs of a story and the needs of a game are very different. Stories have to follow a certain logic of plot and character, cause and effect, and modern TV series are expected to have strong continuity and coherent season-long arcs. So there was no way the writing on the show could actually have been influenced or changed by events in the game, since that would've made the storytelling too random.

    So really, it was misleading for the game's advertising to claim that the players' actions in the game would influence the show. The best they ever could've done was to give the illusion of influence, by having the players act out a scenario leading to a result that the show's writers had already dictated (like the opening game sequence where you play a mission to acquire a crystal and then have Nolan steal it in a cut scene because he has it at the start of the pilot). Or to have characters who've already played their part on the show, like Rynn, become characters in the game.
     
  12. intrinsical

    intrinsical Commodore Commodore

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    You misunderstood me. I wasn't referring to the lack of tie-in with the show. I was referring to the laziness and sloppiness of the game's "episode" missions. So far the devs have not even been willing to define what an episode mission is or what frequency do episode missions occur. For instance, the show's already at episode 7 but the game is only at episode 4. The lack of clarity is frustrating.

    Worse, episode 2 was just to find a handful of data recorders scattered around the game world with no clues provided to players. I bet that mission took the devs less than a day to implement and certainly it took me less than half an hour to pick them up after scouring the web for their locations. My point is, if they wanted to introduce episode missions in the game, the episode missions should be fun, substantial and doesn't need to be tied with the show. Now, this week's episode mission of plague sieges, that's fun. More epsiodes like the plague and the game wouldn't be loosing as many players.
     
  13. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Okay, I can't follow what you're saying until you explain to me how "episode mission" is defined. Is it a mission that ties into an episode of the show? Or is it a mission that constitutes some kind of "episode" within the game, and if so, what does that mean and how is it different from other types of gameplay?
     
  14. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I Just Wasn't Made for These Times: Bwahaha we should have seen the word "made" in the title and guessed the whole reveal. Anyway, the important stuff..


    [​IMG]


    I was writing a wonderful post about pubic hair in my head during this scene when suddenly it was revealed she was bathing in some flim flam lederhosen thing which is RIDICULOUS. Or maybe she's trying to mitigate her sin of bathing alone? Look here, I'm not really doing this, I have sorta clothes on! Yeah that's it.

    Hey we got the answer to last week's big question.

    Stahma to Kenya: ".. and for a Castithan man wearing a cuckold's horns is a great shaming." So if you're going to cuckold a Castithan make sure you don't knee him in the balls while you do it, keep him close and satisfied. Cuckold, there's the answer.

    The doctor storyline was interesting. It shows you how much they need a doctor that they have to put up with her keeping such a thing from them.

    The whole deal with the astronaut returning to his much older wife.. seriously? The 28 year old wife of a cutting edge hero astronaut who dies, famous forever, and she doesn't find someone else? Of course she finds someone else. She is a beautiful A list woman. That was dumb. Also does he tell her about his silver blood?! Because we are waaaaay past clones here in terms of accepting the dead person is alive.


    [​IMG]
     
  15. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    And does he have to get tied up before he goes to sleep every night?

    More importantly.

    Is he Patient Zero?
     
  16. shivkala

    shivkala Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Yeah, I'm kind of kicking myself in retrospect for missing that one. I thought it was purely a "man out of time" reference.

    I thought in last week's episode Alak made reference to a flimsy piece of clothing that Christie would be wearing while bathing and therefore not be totally naked. That's what I figured Stahma was wearing.

    They hinted at this earlier and it is an interesting line to follow: do you get rid of your healer if you suspect they were a war criminal? Even if it means giving up your best bet at healing people (and she must be damned good if Tommy can go from being in a coma last episode to being up and moving 2 days later...).

    Maybe she found someone new and they died during the Pale Wars, leading her to decide she was better off alone than being with a third person who would die. Maybe she was with someone else and they died naturally. We don't know. What's dumb is the whole cliched "I'm hanging clothes and I sense that my long lost lover is back" trope (maybe he spoke to her, I don't know, I just read it as her "sensing" he was back).

    The whole thing was vague. For all we know, he did throw himself into the mines and what we saw was just Amanda's romanticized version of what she thought happened. I know it was heavily hinting that he did survive and just left Defiance, but it wasn't clear one way or the other.


    With the recent game commercials, I guess it was inevitable the plague would hit the show. I guess it's just frustrating that the show lacks a sense of cohesiveness. While someone up thread mentioned Warehouse 13 being the best it's going to be because they stick to the "artifact of the week" plots, at least it has a sense of what kind of show it is. Defiance, to me, suffers because it's just one plot event after another that distracts from what they set up in the pilot.

    The "Romeo and Juliet" plot of Alak and Christie only gets mentions here and there and the tension of the McCauley/Tarr feud is all but gone. All chances of Irisia being interesting are gone for me, because every time they do something interesting with her character, the next episode's plot makes what happened to her a "C" story, at best. The mayoral election they keep teasing (both in the show and the previews), which could have been an interesting "B" plot in a string of episodes (not only giving Amanda something to do, other than fight off sleazy E-Rep people, but also finding a way to make the McCauley/Tarr feud interesting), now seems to be something they're going to shoehorn into a season finale. McCauley and Nolan not liking each other is totally gone, replaced by Nolan not trusting him, but hey, he's got good alcohol and remembers some of the stuff I remember.

    And now, "The Doc was a War Criminal" is going to be snowed under by "Only She Can Save Us From the Plague."

    Oh and then there's the ex-Mayor popping up every once in a while being evil, which leads me to wonder if the people of Defiance knew this about her beforehand. She's pretty open about her plans, even going as far in the pilot to talk about them in a diner. And no one even seems to be shocked that their seemingly kind, grandmotherly ex-mayor has a gaping hole where her heart should be. Rafe wasn't surprised at all by her last episode. The only one who seemed to buy what the ex-Mayor was selling is Amanda. I would love an episode where everyone finds out that she was behind the Volge attack. Then I'd love Rafe, Datak, Doc Yewll, Kenya, etc. all saying, "Yeah, we knew that bitch was evil," while Amanda goes, "But she was always so nice to me..."

    All interesting plots that lead to dramatic tension are undone by the need to keep putting forth new and "exciting" plots in each episode. I was thrilled to hear the plot for last week's episode. I thought the inherent drama in forcing groups to remain in-doors would provide lots of tension. Imagine Rafe and Datak having to spend time together. The ex-Mayor and Quentin playing cat-and-mouse. Christie and Stahma together. Nolan, walking in on Tommy and Irisia, just as they are told not to leave the premises. Or, instead of that, have Tommy and Irisia just finish having sex when the announcement is made and now they have to talk to each other, and figure out what is going on between them. That would leave Nolan free to be with Amanda, stuck together, fueling the "will-they-won't-they" as they begin arguing over Kenya, then over Nolan's predilection for doing what he wants, and his killing Pol Madis, and then realize their feelings, just as the threat ends and they come to their senses.

    Now that could have served to advance many of the plots that were introduced and then left to wither and die. Sure a lot of what I mentioned is pretty cliche, but it's cliche because it serves its purpose, story-wise.

    If Defiance is going to keep me, they are going to have to start addressing some of the plots they introduced, instead of trying for the next and biggest thing.
     
  17. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Why? Even if she did marry someone else, that doesn't mean she wouldn't still be overjoyed to see her old love apparently back from the dead. Besides, how do we know the "someone else" didn't die in the terraforming, or leave her, or get left by her?


    He mentioned beads, which we have seen Stahma wearing in the bath before, in the pilot or episode 2. This was a different garment, more a pair of fabric straps spirit-gummed over her not-fit-for-TV bits.


    Actually that hasn't been resolved yet. Nolan was just confronting her, demanding she account for her war crimes, when the woman came in and fell sick. (And yeah, Yewll must be a hell of a doctor if she can deduce a plague from a single sick patient.) Presumably this thread will play out next week as Yewll's indispensability during the plague convinces the others to excuse her past crimes.


    She could've heard him walking through the grass, or turned enough to glimpse movement out of the corner of her eye.
     
  18. The Wormhole

    The Wormhole Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I liked this week's episode, primarily for all the little character moments. Such as Nolan and Tommy's banter at the beginning about Moby Dick, and Datak making a complete douche out of himself at the brothel. I was going to comment that Kenya refusing Datak was only going to raise his suspicions, but that's something that gets pointed out in the episode itself so I'll let it slide.

    When I first heard the plot description of this episode I was a bit wary. An astronaut from the past. I figured he'd have trouble adjusting to the new world, throw some sort of fit and have to be neutralized in some manner. I wasn't expecting him to be some sort of experimental assassin, which to me was a pretty decent twist and now we get some details about Dr. Yewll's dark past hinted at a few weeks back. However, I could have done without the sappy ending of the astronaut being reunited with his wife. But then, I'm just not a romantic guy.

    Nitpick, isn't the astronaut a bit too young to be a commander? According to IMDB Brian J Smith is 32, assuming the character is around the same age (his wife was 28), this would make him too young to be either a Navy officer ranked Commander or someone who holds the title Commander due to their position commanding a space mission. They tend to be really experienced astronauts.
     
  19. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Maybe this isn't the first prototype to come look her up?

    She could have married another one 20 years earlier, who is sitting inisde her house with a shot gun on his lap willing to direct this johnny come lately back the way he came.

    Whoever was aware of this script must have shat themselves when they saw Oblivion. This is easily the best episode of the series so far but unfortunately Tom ####ing Cruise nutted them to the punch by 3 months.
     
  20. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    What gets me is, given that horrific crash we saw at the end of the last episode, how could the flimsy plastic bag the guy was hanging in have possibly survived the impact?