I am not much of a TV guy, I usually prefer to spend my leisure time playing games with my wife and friends. But, as luck and $100 million would have it, I get to combine gaming and TV in a cross-media experiment with the new show Defiance and it's accompanying shooter-MMO on the PC, XBox 360 and PS3.
I don't know who green-lighted the idea of a TV show and MMO tie-in, but, amazingly, they seem to have gotten it off the ground with minimal fuss. The show airs Mondays on Showcase and started last week - it's a sci-fi western that takes place on a terra-formed Earth only 15 or so years from now. An Alien collective came to our planet and through some sort of circumstances their ships blew up and released terra-forming technology that drastically changed the landscape, flora and fauna. The falling ships, called Arks, also caused massive devastation in human populations around the globe.
It's pretty good so far, two episodes in, and I've added it to the shows I try and catch each week.
Where the MMO comes in is pretty neat.
So, to explain, an MMO is a Massively-Multiplayer Online game - and there are quite a few different styles of MMOs but they generally stay in the fantasy genre (one of the most popular MMOs right now is World of Warcraft - an orcs vs. humans, swords and sorcery style game).
Defiance is fairly unique in that it is a third-person shooter MMO, which is a style of game that is typically reserved for action games with a strong single-player focus with limited multiplayer options (usually only 16 people can play against each other at once). However, in making this an MMO they've opened the game up to a potentially huge population measuring in the hundreds of thousands to millions (World of Warcraft is hovering at around eight or nine million players worldwide). Now, you won't ever have a million people standing on the same spot in the game, but you could see hundreds at any moment - in fact, I took part in a player-versus-player match the other day which pitted two sides of 64 players each against each other.
Sorry for the lesson on what an MMO is, but it's important to get the basics down to realize how nuts this plan is. MMOs are really expensive to make and a significant number of them fail and don't make back their costs. The fact that they've tied this one to a new TV show is pretty bold.
The good thing for the game is that it is pretty fun. It plays a lot like Borderlands, which isn't a bad thing as Borderlands 1 and 2 are really fun games, especially in co-op multiplayer.
You bomb around the altered San Francisco landscape in ATVs or refitted cars, shooting at mutants, cyborgs and crazy bugs. You can do missions which task you, generally, with heading to some location (a ruined set of buildings, a valley) and blowing up a certain amount of bad guys - pretty basic stuff gameplay-wise but still really fun due to the ways in which you can play it. Want to take it slow and stealthy? Use your cloak ability and snipe from a distance. Want to get in the thick of it? Use the overpower ability to pump up your damage and then jump in with a grenade launcher and a shotgun. Heck, you can even stay in your vehicle and just smash into the enemies.
Whichever way you choose to go about it you will be gaining skill in the weapon your using, it's weapon-class, your abilities and even in the type of vehicle your driving - allowing you to get better at what your doing.
You can even run 4-player co-op missions in pursuit of new weapons and exclusive outfits.
Where it ties back into the TV show is pretty cool too - there are storyline missions in the game that will be available only for a short time before specific episodes during the season and these mission will tie into that episode in some way. There is also going to be some other type of cross-polination of the show coming into the game and possibly players in the game having an affect on the show.
All in all, cool stuff - if you want to check it out, the TV show airs on Showcase on Mondays, and you can check the game out at www.defiance.com or watch a trailer at http://youtu.be/5tkGml5V5Ys.
