We already live in a world where every film, game and television show has an app. Mostly superfluous but occasionally interesting, the trend shows no sign of abating. It's nothing to decry anyway, the potential for a more immersive experience is obvious and isn't that why we consume media in the first place? We've come a long way from the world of average novel adaptations and Syfy's new show Defiance could be a step toward the future.
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Defiance aims to show their universe from the perspective of a television show but also support the story with a Third Person Shooter Massively Multiplayer Online Game (TPSMMO, still a mouthful). Rather than an adaptation after the fact, Syfy and Trion Worlds plan to have the story run concurrently between the two. It's an exciting concept, and could easily not achieve the lofty ideas it sets out to reach.
Christian Arretche, the development design manager on the game is a man who obviously loves his job. He speaks with a languorous American twang, but while he lounges on his couch and tells me how the project started you can practically taste the enthusiasm for his work, "The idea for the crossover started with Trion. Normally you get that back and forth where the game comes first and then you want to make a show or a movie, or the other way around," he smiles warmly, "We were like, nah, let's come up with the universe together and do world building. Then we do what we do best, make games, and they do what they do best and make shows and we try and find the natural connections together."
Rockne S. O'Bannon is the showrunner on Syfy's series, having graduated from the brilliant Farscape to fertile new territory, and the show oozes his influence. The question is, can the MMO and television show exist in a satisfying way in the same universe? At least the world of Defiance is ripe with potential and, like the Arkfalls that dot its bleak landscape, the prospective rewards are legion. You never know which shows will be picked up by audiences but Defiance has the hallmarks that define a cult classic. An immensely interesting setting, combined with a cast of fairly archetypal but compelling characters and an excess of mysterious alien artefacts and enemies, it apes the themes of many science fiction classics of the past.
Still, this is unapologetically high sci-fi and may seem impenetrable to newcomers. It reeks of other sci-fi influences too, from Westworld to Earth Final Contact via Babylon 5, but I mean this in a positive way. Earth Final Contact, especially, took a surprisingly deep look into alien/human relations in the wake of a huge, unexpected immigration and Defiance the show has the same feel. The aliens are not inherently bad, as they are often treated in media (some run-off from the latent cultural xenophobia of yesteryear), but just survivors looking for a place to live.
Even after one two-part episode the show has set up some intriguing arcs to be resolved. The town of Defiance, started in the ruins of St. Louis, is a beacon of civilisation compared to the landscape it inhabits. The town lawkeeper, Joshua Nolan, is the crux of the plot. Nolan finds the sheriff badge thrust upon him after saving the town from disaster and none of this really feels surprising. Where the show can succeed is in the characters. But to have a compelling show and game run concurrently there's needs to be some crossover.
The team at Trion have already shown that the show can cross over from the game, "How can we have players affect the show, and feel like they have a stake in it? We talked about different layers of cause and effect, character crossovers, like Nolan's adventure starting in the game. So when you see the pilot, you know where he's come from. If you play the game you know they're coming from San Francisco. We plan for those things to happen, and make sense, to the subtle things like shared species, weapons or flora and fauna."
But the production schedule of a game and a show are vastly different and the challenges of two completely different styles of studio was not lost of Arretche, "So we speak with Syfy every day. We're on the phone with their writing team as they're developing and seeing what we can take from them and what they're taking from us. It's been super challenging, television is completely different from game production but its new territory so that's what made it exciting."
The game already has fleeting missions that players can take on, currently the "show" missions feature Nolan's inevitably troubled attempt at a job before the show begins. These missions won't exist in the world forever though, as they're replaced with new ones to make sure players who follow both stories won't become bored. This is only the beginning though, with more pervasive crossover coming, "We've also talked about having updates with the idea of a player clan doing really well and being spoken about in the show. We like the idea of having a contest where we have players decide something that will end up in the show."
Making players feel like they have a stake in both worlds is where the experiment could succeed or fail. Part of giving the players something to connect to is the show's characters. I would love to see more crossover of the side characters from the show. As it stands, as of the show's pilot, it's too early to tell how the character development will go but certainly the main ones are quite obviously shoehorned into Archetypes. The roguish but honourable ex-soldier? Check. The mysteriously silent and emotionally torn female side character? Check. We've seen these characters before, but it's too early to tell if they will develop past this. Even so, it's pleasing to see that even this early on, there is a self-referential streak in Defiance's writing as characters comment on how disconcerting Irisa's oddly chilly demeanour is. The same goes for Nolan and his attempts to charm the mayor, the ever entertaining Julie Benz, by waggling his vast chin at her, which are met with equal amounts of sarcasm in turn. We've yet to see it, but the characters could transcend their archetypes by displaying some genuinely human traits.
The most obvious of these is Datak Tarr, who is set up like a local crime lord, but acts the pussy cat most of the time. Actor Tony Curran certainly has the chops to play a calculatingly insidious character (as we've seen him do before in Blade II and Underworld: Evolution) but the character doesn't display the menace required to have taken over all crime in Defiance. Some truly unsettling acts juxtaposed with his veneer of civility could make him more Walter White than crime-lord Al Bundy.
The main difference between the two instances of Defiance is that the world doesn't feel the same. Whereas the show feels like a frontier character drama with aliens and it seems to be aiming to focus on the relationships between the characters where the game focuses on shooting mutants and fast-paced adventure/combat. That's not to say the show doesn't have its share of gunfights but, as hopefully the writers are aware, gun battles don't matter to the audience unless you care about your characters. An MMO is uniquely suited to make you care about your character as you spend so much time on them, but the show has its job cut out for it making the aliens feel (for lack of a better word) human.
The vast variety of alien species in the show is also poorly represented in the game so far. The variety of races offer a seemingly huge choice of playable characters, but new players are limited to a choice between human and irathient avatars. This will be quite a shock to players coming from the show, who have already been introduced to most of the civilised races. Still, Arretche promises players a chance to don different species' boots in the future, "Yeah, we want to do new races and we'll have updates for those. For the initial two, the humans and the irathients, we had to choose which were the two natural races for the players to start with. And centralising it with the two main characters from the show, Irisa and Nolan, made sense. Yeah, it's because of a time constraint, because we want to do them justice."
Looking to the future, the show has been confirmed for a second season and Trion have plans for plenty of follow up content to keep players excited, "We have 5 DLCs planned for the year, which is part of the season pass but there's still going to be regular free content updates. Right now, we're constantly patching and updating. Our team's number one priority is stability, but it's a problem that you want to have. A lot of people are trying to get in, so it's hitting the servers and we're scrambling to get that sorted out so we can get people enjoying the game."
It's good to see Trion looking to support the game for the long run, as it would a shame to see an idea with such potential end before it has a chance to shine. Arretche doesn't seem worried, he gives the impression of a man who never let himself become familiar with the word, and happily explains his positivity, "It's larger than just one part. It's two super-products that come together to become this trans-media product. You get this whole experience if you happen to enjoying playing the game and watching the show, and you can watch them build and grow and become even more connected. That's the thing that gets us excited. Nobody has ever been able to do something like that before and now we're in the era that we can. It's forging new territory and that's really exciting for us."
Regardless of your opinion of science fiction television, the idea of a combined and cross-media persistent world is an exciting prospect. We should praise Defiance for taking a risk. We live in a world where only the biggest properties get a chance to try something new and rarely take it, especially in the games industry. For Syfy and Trion, through mutual appreciation and enthusiasm, to try and create something unprecedented is a huge surprise and should be encouraged by us, the audience. If we show the publishers that we are open to new exciting ideas like this, we should expect to see more of the same exciting chances taken in the future.
Twitter: @CalumWAustin
