Defiance Premiere

[Darksider]

Is anyone else watching this? So far it seems pretty interesting.

[Stark]

So interesting you couldn't summon up even a single piece of information about it?

For those who aren't Darksider, he's talking about the latest Awful Syfy Show which has the terrible idea(tm) to tie the game in with an MMO FPS. They vaguely allude to how the story will (not really) follow the progress of the game's metagame, but nobody but idiots believes them.

The game had a pretty rocky launch and is region locked on 360 because Microsoft. I can imagine all seven of the Europeans who give a shit about a game based on a TV show they can't watch having a great time playing! :V

[Venator]

Haven't watched the premiere, but would like to know how it was. I admit to being curious despite a few warning flags - a) the video-game tie in thing Stark mentioned, and b) the aliens not just playing to the "humanoid aliens" trope, but needlessly pulling it five goddamn times, with a TOS/TNG-chic 'energy race' thrown in.

[Darksider]

stark might be right about it being awful. The setting of a ruined and changed earth with humans and aliens working together to survive shows potential for interesting stories, but the plot of the premiere is about as formulaic and by-the-numbers as they come. There's a scene where the main character leaves with reward money before a big battle that's copied almost line-by-line from A New Hope.

I'd say give it about three episodes total to see if the creative team can do something interesting with the setting, then abandon ship.

Also, avoid the game at all costs from what i've heard.

[Darksider]

Also the game has better graphics than the show's CGI. So that's a definite minus

[Meest]

Only seen a behind the scene special, but it's not looking good while the creators and people working on it think it's some super revolutionary tv series while in reality it comes across as bad soap opera dressed as a sci-fi piece. All the species have their traits instead of being diverse, just run of the mill and done before stuff. The game looks nothing like the series, the game is all about co-op huge boss battles, the show's scale doesn't match at all. CGI isn't great but the props and other set decorations are terrible, especially the Dodge Charger that has a future gas (insert technobabble) turbocharger. Everything seems to follow that cheesy standard, another example is the forbidden alien/human relationship. They aimed way too high instead of just making it better at it's core, fancy backdrops can't make up for crappy story and acting.

[Alkaloid]

I know this is probably going to suck. The plot almost has to be bland because making to interesting or fast paced will throw off the dynamic of the MMO, and MMOs are co-ordinated enough to mean anything happening in it will affect the TV show, and even if it were it's not like you can film the show week to week with no prep, booking locations or having a script. I know that this is going to result in ham fisted editing of both show and game to try to make them fit together, but fuck it, they're trying to do something different with two mediums and I can't hate them for trying.

[MrDakka]

Stark, are you mad because there is no AU server

You guys are going about this the wrong way. Set your bar to the low standards that are the SyFy original movies and be amazed by this show. Then it'll be a revolutionary and groundbreaking new series that promises to explore human nature or whatever crap the producers keep spouting.

[DieselJester]

Has anyone played the game yet? I'm morbidly curious about it and was debating about renting it next week to try it out. But if it's to be avoided like Darksider said, I'd like to know why it should be avoided.

[Stark]

Stark, are you mad because there is no AU server

You guys are going about this the wrong way. Set your bar to the low standards that are the SyFy original movies and be amazed by this show. Then it'll be a revolutionary and groundbreaking new series that promises to explore human nature or whatever crap the producers keep spouting.

There is an AU server; that's what region locking means. But if I can't play with my friends in the rest of the world, quite simply what is the point?

I mean I could play on PC but ugh.

[MrDakka]

There is an AU server; that's what region locking means. But if I can't play with my friends in the rest of the world, quite simply what is the point?

I mean I could play on PC but ugh.

My mistake I was told by a PSN friend there were no AU servers and so they had to play on EU/US servers with bad lag.

As for the game I went halvsies with my roommate and its okay. It plays like ME3 multiplayer with a borderlands style loot fest. Endgame is all about the loot grinding. Its enjoyable enough if you like that sort of thing.

[Stark]

I don't think you understand what 'bad lag' and 'regional servers' means.

[MrDakka]

Nope. I do not. Feel free to explain

[Flagg]

Nope. I do not. Feel free to explain

Are you stupid? Honest question. Lag, even small amounts of it, can totally ruin any MMO experience and why put up with that shit (plus regional servers which put the "duh" in dumbshit business decisions) when you can play a good MMO that isn't frustrating as shit?

[Stark]

Places that aren't America (and sometimes Europe) generally don't have physical servers in their area anyway. Much of the time they're called 'AU servers' but in the US and are simply a way to isolate the 200+ ping community.

Of course, at 240 my friends and I can dominate shooters anyway, so what matters is that it's impossible to play with them and the game is thus useless.

[MrDakka]

Are you stupid? Honest question. Lag, even small amounts of it, can totally ruin any MMO experience and why put up with that shit (plus regional servers which put the "duh" in dumbshit business decisions) when you can play a good MMO that isn't frustrating as shit?

Brain fart. I meant about the regional servers. I was confused because I scanned this article http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3282271 in which the exec producer said there aren't plans for Australian servers which contradicted what Stark said.

Then I reread it and I'm assuming he meant no servers physically in AU and that the AU regional servers are physically in US. Thus anyone trying to play from AU still has to connect to the US and gets screwed with lag.

Thanks Stark for clearing that up.

[Stark]

It's a shame because apparently the game is region locked on 360 by Microsoft request, which I believe dooms the game to total death on 360 everywhere that isn't America.

[Darksider]

Does Microsoft do that often? I don't recall any other 360 games being region locked.

EDIT: I mean aside from the region-encoding on the disc. I've never had a problem playing any of my 360 games with people in other countries.

[bilateralrope]

I don't like how the characters kept switching into a non-English language that everyone seems to understand.

I know this is probably going to suck. The plot almost has to be bland because making to interesting or fast paced will throw off the dynamic of the MMO, and MMOs are co-ordinated enough to mean anything happening in it will affect the TV show, and even if it were it's not like you can film the show week to week with no prep, booking locations or having a script. I know that this is going to result in ham fisted editing of both show and game to try to make them fit together, but fuck it, they're trying to do something different with two mediums and I can't hate them for trying.

That's only a valid complaint if players have any control over how the story develops. Which is something the players don't have in a typical theme park MMO. The players just get to act out the story that the developers wrote. Making it much easier to coordinate the plot between them.

Especially if the show takes place in a different location to the MMO, which is what I've heard happens here.

Overall this is probably going to suck.

[Meest]

It's a MMOFPS with public events like fighting a giant monster as the main appeal doesn't sound like a good platform to tell a story. The show can't possibly match the scale of the game as shown with the pilot big battle, they can't even get their CGI jeeps to look good. Key to lower budget shows or movies in general is not to try too hard and know your limits, make it more character driven and keep the effects small scale but more detailed. I didn't get wowed by the big badly animated CGI enemies, I laughed at the bunch of people hiding behind rocks with small arms on a sound stage defeating them.

[Stark]

Does Microsoft do that often? I don't recall any other 360 games being region locked.

EDIT: I mean aside from the region-encoding on the disc. I've never had a problem playing any of my 360 games with people in other countries.

It's probably because they don't actually pay for equivalent servers worldwide and XBL is a tottering dinosaur. I mean, you can play Happy Wars with worldwide people... But MS like Happy Wars. :v

[Darksider]

Is XBL really that outdated? I honestly wouldn't know since I only started playing online multi regularly with the release of Mass Effect 3. Before that it was just either something I did a couple times a year or something I did at friends houses.

I wonder if MS will revamp XBL with the release of the next XBOX console.

[bilateralrope]

It's a MMOFPS with public events like fighting a giant monster as the main appeal doesn't sound like a good platform to tell a story.

MMOs in general seem a pretty shitty medium to tell a story in. You can't make any changes to the world without some players missing out on the change happening. Players who miss out will get angry because they paid the same price as the players that did get to take part, but were unable to attend due to things like sleep, work or family.

Using instances or WoWs phasing to allow big changes is admitting that the story the developers want to tell is not suited for an MMO.

[Stark]

Making XBL not 'slower than the website' is probably number one on my list of dreams for the next Xbox. So much about it is amazingly slow and terrible and I'm not sure how much of this is the old hardware and how much is the backend. Even happy wars, a game MS is pushing pretty hard, was amazingly mindblowingly slow for the simplest tasks. I imagine this is because of the way the system was set up in 2006 or whenever so that all traffic has to perform contortions to get anywhere.

With this in mind I'm not really surprised MS don't want an MMO going worldwide in their horrid system. Hopefully the next box will allow them to simply explode the current system and make a not shit one.

[Guardsman Bass]

I've watched the first 20 minutes of it. It's not bad, but it is rather formulaic, and I ended up watching something else because I lost interest.

1. The Earth has been terraformed, with some strange golden scenery and a bunch of monstrous creatures in the wastes (presumably to serve as kills in the MMO game).

2. There are the eight races (all roughly humanoid), but it's more important and annoying that they all basically act human. I don't mind humanoid alien races even if I think the evolutionary chances of it are extremely unlikely, but it would be nice if they actually felt alien, like with some deeply different cultural and physical ways of looking at things*. Now granted, they've all been living together for 15 years in peace . . .

3. We start off without two main characters, whom I'll call Flatnose Redhead (alien) and Human Protagonist. Human Protagonist is a bit bitter, rough around the edges - think Han Solo. Flatnose Redhead is . . . whatever. They're hunting for salvage, spend 3-4 minutes singing to an annoying country song in the car, find something valuable, predictably get harassed by some type of Flatnose Biker Gang, get attacked by weird forest monsters (did the terraformers spread those out too?), get rescued in the nick of time by people from the town of Defiance (formerly St. Louis), blah, blah, blah, mayoral speech, bickering and politicking, blah, prestigious white-haired alien guy with his wife bitching about the fact that the Asian mine owner got more applause than him, blah. Then I gave up.

I'm probably being too harsh with that. Like I said, it's not actually that bad, and I think some people here might like it if they can watch the premiere all the way through.

4. I don't think the CGI is horrible, at least in what I saw, although it's obviously not $150 million movie quality. What makes it work better is that they mostly don't show CGI elements right next to the actual actors, so it doesn't look as jarringly fake (if you want to see what that looks like, watch some of BSG: Blood and Chrome). On the other hand, an overview of the city Defiance looked very much like a model set. The scene where the big alien ships move on to Earth through the clouds look cool.

Aside from that, the aesthetics are meh. The crashed alien spaceship is cavernous with lots of crystal-looking stuff.

I'd give it a watch. It's free over on Hulu, at least for the premiere.

* Best example of this I've seen in fiction are the Non-men from a fantasy book series called the Second Apocalypse. They're humanoid, aside from having fused teeth, no hair, and eyes which apparently can't see color contrast too well. But their society and outlook on the world is radically different, to the point where it's hard for humans to really understand them beyond the basics.