Defiance
- Thread starter Anomander Rake
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Anomander Rake
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Not to brown nose or anything, but I am pretty sure Draegan or one of the other mods has mentioned that they would like to see a return of dev communication within the site (not just with this game), and breaking an NDA wouldn't be the way to go. Besides, there are plenty of places just a Google search away that you could go on to discuss / read about beta discussion and poo-fling / praise.
Daidraco
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There are some questionable facts to the project - such as an 85 million dollar figure floating around - but iirc, thats mostly from SyFy and other investors. Trion Worlds is actually pretty big, also. Hope Im hitting two birds with one stone with your question?
Don't really care if the series makes a mind-blowing breakthrough in the future of tv/gaming (which would be rad but unlikely) as long as the game itself if fun, and so far minus the beta bugs, it is.
Daidraco
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Tearofsoul
Ancient MMO noob
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It was fun for like 15 mins? then same shit over and over and over... I would rather go play Tabula Rasa tbh with you
this is older article if its been posted forgive me, but just found it.
It answers some the questions many have asked here ok, this appliyes to the game and TV show.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffberc...nd-videogames/
With 'Defiance,' Comcast's Syfy Bets $100M On Convergence Of TV And Videogames
On a sprawling soundstage on the outskirts of Toronto, Kevin Murphy is giving a tour of the alien world he's helping bring to life. As silver-eyed humanoids stroll silently past, Murphy, the executive producer of the new Syfy channel series "Defiance," points out terra-formed mountain ranges, gleaming energy weapons, gooey suspended-animation pods. "And this is. ," Murphy begins, stopping in front of yet another exotic bit of production design. "I don't know what the hell this is."
You can't blame him for getting disoriented. "Defiance," which makes its debut next April, is an order of magnitude larger and more complex than anything Syfy - or any other basic cable channel - has ever attempted, involving scores of actors and writers, dozens of programmers and no fewer than seven alien languages. If it succeeds, it will also be vastly profitable for the network's corporate parent, Comcast's NBCUniversal.
That's because "Defiance" isn't just a TV show. It's also a massively multiplayer online videogame developed through a joint venture with San Francisco-based Trion Worlds. With their long product cycles and multiple revenue streams, MMOs, as they're called, can be fantastically lucrative.
The most popular one, World of Warcraft, is estimated to generate more than $1 billion in revenues per year for its owner, Activision Blizzard. Another Activision title, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, became the fastest-ever entertainment property to book $1 billion in sales when it was released in 2011, seizing a record previously held by the film "Avatar."
But playing in this arena isn't cheap. Trion spent $50 million developing Rift, the hit game it released in 2011. Defiance is an even bigger undertaking, with a budget said to reach $80 million, pushing the cost of the overall project well north of $100 million. "Games with that kind of big budget are not typical," says Brian Blau, a gaming industry analyst at Gartner. "It's a big risk. They'll have to attract a lot of users."
NBC Universal has wanted a piece of the videogame business for a long time. In 2007 then parent General Electric bought a small stake in Trion through the Peacock Equity Fund, an investment vehicle targeting businesses that had potential affinities with NBC's entertainment properties.
At the time, Syfy President Dave Howe was looking for ways to move the channel beyond its core business, which, despite boasting high margins, is in some ways not a terribly attractive one. "'Profitable' is an interesting word when it comes to scripted drama in cable," Howe says.
While the network will generate revenues of $734 million in 2012, according to SNL Kagan, contributing to the $8 billion in annual revenues for NBC Universal's cable networks group, it virtually never makes money on its shows directly. High ratings allow Syfy to charge advertisers and distributors more, but the programs themselves "are loss leaders, for the most part, or a break-even proposition," says Howe. Even "Warehouse 13," its highest-rated series, doesn't make money per se
So when the opportunity arose to partner on a videogame franchise, Howe seized it. But it wasn't simple. What works as a game doesn't necessarily work as a show and vice versa, making true cross-platform hits rare. "You generally have a licensee and a licensor, and whoever the licensee is has to make a lot of compromises," says Nick Beliaeff, Trion's senior vice president of development.
After considering and rejecting a number of scripts, among them the ones that would become "Warehouse 13? and "Sanctuary," says Howe, "we realized that we really did need to create something from scratch together - to cocreate something that was designed to live on both of these platforms, as opposed to retrofitting something."
The result is "Defiance." It's part frontier-town Western, part science fantasia - think "District 9? meets "Deadwood," with a dash of "Avatar" for good measure. The show, wholly owned by NBC Universal, is set in what remains of St. Louis after an alien crash landing sparks a worldwide ecological catastrophe; the game, a 50/50 joint venture, takes place outside San Francisco, to avoid continuity problems.
While neither is a spinoff of the other, that doesn't mean there were no compromises involved. Some were aesthetic, like the look of the bad guys; the game developers preferred easy-to-target bright colors, which the show's special-effects supervisors rejected as cheesy-looking. Some were commercial, such as the backstory that explains why the policemen of the future drive 2012-vintage Dodge Chargers. (Dodge is a sponsor.)
Even the timing of the launch required negotiation. Syfy pushed for September, January or June, when viewers expect new seasons to start. Trion argued for the runup to Christmas, when game sales peak. In the end both settled on April, with the game going live on PC, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PS3 two weeks before the show's premiere.
Since the game represents by far the larger investment, and since successful MMOs can last for years, if not decades, missing the Christmas rush shouldn't be too big a handicap for Defiance , says Gartner's Blau. It's on a more macro level that timing could be an issue. Like all big tech companies, gamemakers are coming to grips with the inevitability that consumers will soon be spending more time on mobile devices than on PCs or consoles. The CEO of Electronic Arts, John Riccitiello, went so far as to call it "the end of an era" in a recent investors call, previewing plans to cut back on developing for consoles.
But there's a parallel trend, one that Defiance may be uniquely positioned for. As TVs, computers and game consoles increasingly adopt one another's features, with everyone from Apple to Google to Microsoft striving to make the "one screen to rule them all," the idea of a story that can be experienced both passively and interactively comes to look less novel than native. "All of a sudden, you have a single device where you can both watch the show and play it," says Blau.
"People talk about transmedia and cross-platform," says Howe. "This is the real deal because it was conceived that way from the ground up. No one's ever done anything like this. We refer to it as the holy grail of convergence."
It answers some the questions many have asked here ok, this appliyes to the game and TV show.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffberc...nd-videogames/
With 'Defiance,' Comcast's Syfy Bets $100M On Convergence Of TV And Videogames
On a sprawling soundstage on the outskirts of Toronto, Kevin Murphy is giving a tour of the alien world he's helping bring to life. As silver-eyed humanoids stroll silently past, Murphy, the executive producer of the new Syfy channel series "Defiance," points out terra-formed mountain ranges, gleaming energy weapons, gooey suspended-animation pods. "And this is. ," Murphy begins, stopping in front of yet another exotic bit of production design. "I don't know what the hell this is."
You can't blame him for getting disoriented. "Defiance," which makes its debut next April, is an order of magnitude larger and more complex than anything Syfy - or any other basic cable channel - has ever attempted, involving scores of actors and writers, dozens of programmers and no fewer than seven alien languages. If it succeeds, it will also be vastly profitable for the network's corporate parent, Comcast's NBCUniversal.
That's because "Defiance" isn't just a TV show. It's also a massively multiplayer online videogame developed through a joint venture with San Francisco-based Trion Worlds. With their long product cycles and multiple revenue streams, MMOs, as they're called, can be fantastically lucrative.
The most popular one, World of Warcraft, is estimated to generate more than $1 billion in revenues per year for its owner, Activision Blizzard. Another Activision title, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, became the fastest-ever entertainment property to book $1 billion in sales when it was released in 2011, seizing a record previously held by the film "Avatar."
But playing in this arena isn't cheap. Trion spent $50 million developing Rift, the hit game it released in 2011. Defiance is an even bigger undertaking, with a budget said to reach $80 million, pushing the cost of the overall project well north of $100 million. "Games with that kind of big budget are not typical," says Brian Blau, a gaming industry analyst at Gartner. "It's a big risk. They'll have to attract a lot of users."
NBC Universal has wanted a piece of the videogame business for a long time. In 2007 then parent General Electric bought a small stake in Trion through the Peacock Equity Fund, an investment vehicle targeting businesses that had potential affinities with NBC's entertainment properties.
At the time, Syfy President Dave Howe was looking for ways to move the channel beyond its core business, which, despite boasting high margins, is in some ways not a terribly attractive one. "'Profitable' is an interesting word when it comes to scripted drama in cable," Howe says.
While the network will generate revenues of $734 million in 2012, according to SNL Kagan, contributing to the $8 billion in annual revenues for NBC Universal's cable networks group, it virtually never makes money on its shows directly. High ratings allow Syfy to charge advertisers and distributors more, but the programs themselves "are loss leaders, for the most part, or a break-even proposition," says Howe. Even "Warehouse 13," its highest-rated series, doesn't make money per se
So when the opportunity arose to partner on a videogame franchise, Howe seized it. But it wasn't simple. What works as a game doesn't necessarily work as a show and vice versa, making true cross-platform hits rare. "You generally have a licensee and a licensor, and whoever the licensee is has to make a lot of compromises," says Nick Beliaeff, Trion's senior vice president of development.
After considering and rejecting a number of scripts, among them the ones that would become "Warehouse 13? and "Sanctuary," says Howe, "we realized that we really did need to create something from scratch together - to cocreate something that was designed to live on both of these platforms, as opposed to retrofitting something."
The result is "Defiance." It's part frontier-town Western, part science fantasia - think "District 9? meets "Deadwood," with a dash of "Avatar" for good measure. The show, wholly owned by NBC Universal, is set in what remains of St. Louis after an alien crash landing sparks a worldwide ecological catastrophe; the game, a 50/50 joint venture, takes place outside San Francisco, to avoid continuity problems.
While neither is a spinoff of the other, that doesn't mean there were no compromises involved. Some were aesthetic, like the look of the bad guys; the game developers preferred easy-to-target bright colors, which the show's special-effects supervisors rejected as cheesy-looking. Some were commercial, such as the backstory that explains why the policemen of the future drive 2012-vintage Dodge Chargers. (Dodge is a sponsor.)
Even the timing of the launch required negotiation. Syfy pushed for September, January or June, when viewers expect new seasons to start. Trion argued for the runup to Christmas, when game sales peak. In the end both settled on April, with the game going live on PC, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PS3 two weeks before the show's premiere.
Since the game represents by far the larger investment, and since successful MMOs can last for years, if not decades, missing the Christmas rush shouldn't be too big a handicap for Defiance , says Gartner's Blau. It's on a more macro level that timing could be an issue. Like all big tech companies, gamemakers are coming to grips with the inevitability that consumers will soon be spending more time on mobile devices than on PCs or consoles. The CEO of Electronic Arts, John Riccitiello, went so far as to call it "the end of an era" in a recent investors call, previewing plans to cut back on developing for consoles.
But there's a parallel trend, one that Defiance may be uniquely positioned for. As TVs, computers and game consoles increasingly adopt one another's features, with everyone from Apple to Google to Microsoft striving to make the "one screen to rule them all," the idea of a story that can be experienced both passively and interactively comes to look less novel than native. "All of a sudden, you have a single device where you can both watch the show and play it," says Blau.
"People talk about transmedia and cross-platform," says Howe. "This is the real deal because it was conceived that way from the ground up. No one's ever done anything like this. We refer to it as the holy grail of convergence."
Tearofsoul
Ancient MMO noob
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Not just this, EoN from Trion isn't fun either...
Don't waste time with these:
1, 5 years-old story line, "Saving 'humanlity' at a unknown planet; But first, you gotta find one guy; along the way, you need to do XYZ"
2, shitty questing system, A to B > back to A > go to C > back to A > to D now! > back to A ...
3, killing the same type of mobs for the 1st couple hours...
4, oh yes yes, AI pathing is fucked up as well.
5, variety of gameplay, and even items are just NOT there
Don't waste time with these:
1, 5 years-old story line, "Saving 'humanlity' at a unknown planet; But first, you gotta find one guy; along the way, you need to do XYZ"
2, shitty questing system, A to B > back to A > go to C > back to A > to D now! > back to A ...
3, killing the same type of mobs for the 1st couple hours...
4, oh yes yes, AI pathing is fucked up as well.
5, variety of gameplay, and even items are just NOT there
Daidraco
Avatar of War Slayer
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Ok, now Im really intrigued where the money went. (Especially since we have an article predating Beta so we can talk about it 
). I thought a big chunk of the money was going to marketing, distribution etc. But if a whopping 80 million out of the 100+ million was spent on the development of this game, where is it? This is like a case of SWTOR all over again. Being the Theme Park game that it is - Rift costing 30 million less and being a relatively good game makes you question whats going on with Defiances development costs.
-Edited for good measure
-
). I thought a big chunk of the money was going to marketing, distribution etc. But if a whopping 80 million out of the 100+ million was spent on the development of this game, where is it? This is like a case of SWTOR all over again. Being the Theme Park game that it is - Rift costing 30 million less and being a relatively good game makes you question whats going on with Defiances development costs.-Edited for good measure
spronk
FPS noob
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I had fun but there is no way I'd pay a sub for this game. I really hope they are launching f2p, especially with a big exposure from TV and multiplatform (pc/xbox3/ps3). It would be really insane to try and launch a sub-based console MMO, wouldn't it? Not sure how they would make money though if its f2p.
it was fun with a controller, they have Rift-like public event stuff called Arkfalls going on that was cool with stages and big monsters and shit (there are articles talking about this in more detail so its not NDA breaking to say they have it!) Only thing is the game feels like it came out 5-10 years ago, hopefully more polish fixes that.
I wonder if console players will play on the same servers as PC players, that could get ugly if there is PVP involved.
My biggest question is what impact the TV show has on the game and vica versa, obviously nothing we can see in beta. It'll suck if its like every wow clone so far, changes to the world happen slowly or rarely. I'm really hoping for events on TV change the world weekly and the reverse as well, but I am not holding my breath on any company being able to do this
it was fun with a controller, they have Rift-like public event stuff called Arkfalls going on that was cool with stages and big monsters and shit (there are articles talking about this in more detail so its not NDA breaking to say they have it!) Only thing is the game feels like it came out 5-10 years ago, hopefully more polish fixes that.
I wonder if console players will play on the same servers as PC players, that could get ugly if there is PVP involved.
My biggest question is what impact the TV show has on the game and vica versa, obviously nothing we can see in beta. It'll suck if its like every wow clone so far, changes to the world happen slowly or rarely. I'm really hoping for events on TV change the world weekly and the reverse as well, but I am not holding my breath on any company being able to do this
Agree with everything you said.I had fun but there is no way I'd pay a sub for this game. I really hope they are launching f2p, especially with a big exposure from TV and multiplatform (pc/xbox3/ps3). It would be really insane to try and launch a sub-based console MMO, wouldn't it? Not sure how they would make money though if its f2p.
it was fun with a controller, they have Rift-like public event stuff called Arkfalls going on that was cool with stages and big monsters and shit (there are articles talking about this in more detail so its not NDA breaking to say they have it!) Only thing is the game feels like it came out 5-10 years ago, hopefully more polish fixes that.
I wonder if console players will play on the same servers as PC players, that could get ugly if there is PVP involved.
My biggest question is what impact the TV show has on the game and vica versa, obviously nothing we can see in beta. It'll suck if its like every wow clone so far, changes to the world happen slowly or rarely. I'm really hoping for events on TV change the world weekly and the reverse as well, but I am not holding my breath on any company being able to do this