Defiance

Trion Worlds revealed today more details about their latest SyFy Action MMO game, Defiance. The game will sport third-person shooter gameplay, will be focused on story-driven missions and will be the company’s first multi-platform shooter MMO that will be released on PC, PS3 and X360.
Defiance promises to combine the intense action of a shooter, with the persistence, scale, and customization of an MMO game. Moreover, developers plan to ‘sync’ both the show and the game. This means that the show and the game will influence each other and evolve together over time.
Defiance will also feature a fully realized and persistent open world. This basically means that there won’t be any loading screens between zones and is set in a futuristic San Francisco Bay Area. It will also feature custom character creation, console-native shooter mechanics with lots of of weapons, armors, and special abilities and ‘unending gameplay’ with missions, emergencies, and endless exploration opportunities across a giant game world.

Defiance is unique among MMO concepts in many ways, or at the very least, it's treading paths that are not very well worn. The first thing that sets it apart is that it's a science fiction game, but it takes place on Earth, will real world locations, so players can expect to visit such San Francisco landmarks like The Golden Gate Bridge.

This Earth isn't too familiar, however. Taking place in the near future, it represents a time when aliens have arrived and have begun to terraform the planet to their liking, so expect a bizarre melding of indigenous Earth plants and animals interacting with strange alien flora and fauna. Humans are trying to stop the aliens from changing the Earth, so many missions come from, say, preventing terraforming equipment from arriving in one piece.

The other aspect of the game that makes it more unique is that it's a first person shooter. Only one MMOFPS has ever seen any level of success, Planetside, and that wasn't a true shooter - it was more like mass battles on various levels (er, planetary regions) with persistant stats and ownership. Defiance promises to be a true MMO through and through, and even if the player isn't good at twitch shooters, there are plenty of class options to allow them to contribute as support.

In addition, the game operates on a public mission sort of mechanic, so there's no need to form a party. Missions happen in the open world, and players can dynamically join others to complete goals. Trion Worlds has been mum, however, on PvP content, but there probably will be some in some form when the game is released.

Finally, the MMO will be released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in addition to PC, and console MMOs have generally not fared well at all. Huxley is perhaps the poster child for console MMOFPS vaporware failure, though it hasn't appeared on PC as well. It'll be interesting to see if this MMO can actually make it to console - the possibility of it appearing on the next generation of consoles is a distinct possibility.

It'll be interesting to see how an MMO like Defiance fares. It has been developed to work in concert with a television show from the ground up. What little that has been seen has been impressive, and hopefully, this will be all that it promises to be: a beautiful massively multiplayer shooter with a deep backstory that players can enjoy playing, then watching an exciting tie-in story on the screen.