Trion Worlds and Syfy are undertaking an ambitious project that connects an open-world shooter MMO to a TV series. We stopped by Trion's booth at E3 to witness the unveiling of Defiance.

Players unlock new skills and abilities as experience is accrued. You get some neat options that not only increase your hit points, speed and armor, but also enable stealth options and other support abilities. Missions in Defiance center on squad-tactics that involve completing a lot of sub-objectives. In our demo, we saw squad members performing flanking tactics and laying down suppressing fire while teammates traversed a bridge.

Also, while leveling up matters, it won’t compensate for bad aim. Defiance is a shooter game and your character’s ability to deliver damage and support is tied to your reflex skills.

The demo’s big event came when an Arkfall appeared in-game. Arkfalls serve as randomly-spawning dungeons that players and NPCs from all factions swarm to. It goes without saying that rewards from controlling Arkfalls will be significant. When Arkfalls spawn, an announcement goes out game-wide to each faction allowing players to fight together in a quasi-grouping system. Ironically, Arkfalls look eerily like rifts from Trion’s other MMO of the same name.

Eagerly Anticipating More Details

After the demo finished, Trion opened the floor for a brief Q&A session. We gleamed that Trion will enable some competitive play features, possibly leader boards. For truly exceptional players, their character names might even be mentioned in the television series. We also discovered that given the alien’s terraforming activities, players might wake up one day and log in to find that the world as we know it has completely changed, again.

Most detail-specific gameplay questions were met with a standard “we can’t answer that yet,” or “that's not decided,” bringing us back to my original gripe. The fact is, whenever you have an ambitious title you can never have enough information.

However, the big question on my mind was Syfy’s role in development. Some viewers may not agree with their recent acquisition of World Wrestling Entertainment and the cancellation of fan-favorite shows. For example, Rockne S. O'Bannon’s space opera Farscape was abruptly canceled after season 4. That may matter because O’Bannon is writing the pilot for the show that's tied to Defiance.

When I raised this admittedly awkward question, Trion’s representatives seemed taken off-guard before explaining that it wasn’t appropriate to tackle that question without a Syfy spokesperson around. While hopefully the Defiance television series will get a fair shake, I hope there are backup plans to keep the game running if Syfy pulls the plug.

As for the rest of our questions, we’ll just have to eagerly wait and see what Trion has in store for Defiance.

Christopher "Aurum" Wyatt