Because I have too many hobbies and not enough money, I don’t have cable and I’m not a gamer, but this is certainly an intriguing concept. Do any of you better equipped to judge want to offer an opinion?:
… “Defiance,” a new series on Syfy that [premiered] on Monday, and Defiance, the new video game from Trion Worlds that made its debut last week, will face considerable skepticism from viewers and players. But this joint project is worth paying attention to, even if it can’t be deemed a success just yet.
In an unusual arrangement, neither the show nor the video game is a spinoff of the other. Instead, in a process that took five years and three contracts between Syfy and Trion Worlds, the fictional world of Defiance is a collaboration between the companies. The series and the game were developed simultaneously. Each is designed to be a stand-alone piece of entertainment. Yet they also intersect. Events in the show will influence the game. And events in the game will influence the show….
The first several hours of Defiance the game, a massively multiplayer online world set in the same universe’s San Francisco, are less entertaining. Running around and shooting things — bugs and mutants and whatnot — is reasonably fun, but the character animations, acting and dialogue all feel second class. A lot of the game is discontinuous, with scenes beginning and ending abruptly, and a little buggy, at least on the Xbox 360 version that I played. (It is also available on PlayStation 3 and on personal computers.) It’s too early to give up on the game — one of the benefits of a big virtual world like this is that it can be altered and improved over time. As an isolated experience, though, it’s not worth checking out yet.
In combination, however, “Defiance” and Defiance are promising experiments. The first two characters seen in the television pilot — Joshua Nolan and his adopted alien daughter, Irisa Nyira (played by Stephanie Leonidas), begin as characters in the video game. Missions that players can carry out alongside Nolan and Irisa will be removed from the game when the series begins next week. The goal, Mr. Murphy said, is for the show and the game to pass characters back and forth freely.
After each of the first television season’s 13 episodes, a similar series of missions will be introduced into the game, and then retired by the time the next episode starts. After an episode about a plague, for instance, players will have to figure out how to cure the pandemic…
And Nick Beliaeff, the senior vice president for development at Trion Worlds, added that there were lots of ways for players to be represented in the show without turning it into what he called “a choose-your-own-adventure story.” Syfy and Trion are discussing, he said, an in-game contest for players after the end of the first season. The winner’s video game character would appear in some fashion on the series during the second season.
“Assuming they have a name that’s appropriate for network television,” Mr. Beliaeff said. “And that is a serious concern. Oh, I wish I were joking.”