VentureBeat » Defiance

Defiance developer cuts staff; MMO Rift unaffected

Jeffrey Grubb — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:05:21 +0000

Trion Worlds recently launched online-shooter Defiance on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. Now that the studio has that game out the door, it’s laying off some of its development staff.

Trion confirmed to GamesBeat that it is cutting jobs, as first reported by IGN.

“To best position Trion in a rapidly changing industry, we have reorganized our teams and are expanding our free-to-play offering,” a Trion spokesperson told GamesBeat. “With Defiance, we delivered a great game that more than one million gamers registered to play and continue to enjoy. As we progress from launch to ongoing development of [Defiance], we are adjusting our staffing levels to deliver new content and improved features.”

That new content won’t require the big team Trion had on hand to launch Defiance, which is a sci-fi shooter. Defiance is also a SyFy television program. The game and the show interconnect and affect one another.

Trion claims this move relates solely to the development cycle of Defiance and that these layoffs won’t have an impact on its other projects.

“Rift, and our other titles in development, were unaffected by these changes. We are very much looking forward to the free to play release of Rift and are excited by the other new titles currently in development.”

Rift is Trion’s subscription-based fantasy massively multiplayer online game. It is going free-to-play in June. Trion also has the real-time strategy MMO End of Nations in development, but it hasn’t revealed a release for that yet.

Filed under: Games

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Syfy renews Defiance — the TV show that is also a game

Jeffrey Grubb — Fri, 10 May 2013 19:00:38 +0000

The transmedia collaboration between the SyFy network and game developer Trion Worlds is paying off.

SyFy revealed today that it will renew the show for a second season. The sci-fi postapocalyptic drama debuted to the second largest audience in the network’s history and continues to retain much of its audience.

“Bringing the rich world of Defiance to life has been in incredible team effort,” SyFy president of original content Mark Stern said in a statement. “We couldn’t ask for better partners than Kevin Murphy, his amazing cast and crew, and Trion Worlds. We can’t wait to see where they take us in the second season.”

Murphy is the show’s executive producer. He will stay on with the show in that role for its next season.

The game is also finding success. GamesBeat reported earlier this month that Defiance for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 has had more than 1 million gamers register for its multiplayer online action.

As the show continues to grow into a series, Trion will have to try to find ways to keep the game interesting to players as well. The show and the game have a small influence on one another, and we’ll also continue to follow how that works and expands in season two.

Filed under: Games, Media

1M gamers register for accounts in sci-fi MMO Defiance

Jeffrey Grubb — Thu, 02 May 2013 18:01:17 +0000

Trion Worlds is finding some success with its online-shooter Defiance.

Trion revealed today that over one million players registered for accounts in the $59.99 PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 mulitplayer online game. That’s a major milestone for a title that saddles players with “bland graphics, an unintuitive user interface, and performance issues,” according to GamesBeat’s review.

Defiance, the game, might be getting a boost from Defiance, the SyFy television show. Nearly a month ago, SyFy introduced the science-fiction series that ties into the events of the game. It drew big audiences for its premiere and showed off several commercials for the game. It’s likely that the SyFy audience is crossing over to the game in a big way.

To celebrate the Defiances’ (plural) success, Trion is also announcing a competition where players can compete in the game for a chance to appear on the show. The contest is available to enter now on the official website.

Filed under: Games

GamesBeat weekly roundup: A new social gaming King, big Xbox announcement May 21, and more

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:23:27 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Microsoft announced that it will unveil the new Xbox console on May 21, Nordic Games Licensing acquires both Darksiders and Red Faction from the THQ bankruptcy auction, and Candy Crush developer King overtakes Zynga as the largest social gaming company.

You’ll also find reviews of Monaco, Dead Island: Riptide, Injustice: Gods Among Us, and Defiance, as well as previews for Call of Juarez: Gunslinger and Kingdom Rush: Frontiers.

News

Mobile News

Earnings and Acquisitions

Tech

Woops

Nintendo’s new plan

Nextbox

Microsoft officially revealing next-generation Xbox on May 21

All This Funding

Reviews

Previews

Interviews

Pieces of Flair

Filed under: Games

Defiance is Borderlands: The MMO without the humor (review)

Stefanie Fogel — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:45:13 +0000

Video game publisher Trion Worlds is taking a big risk on Defiance. It’s a transmedia experiment — a collaborative effort between Trion and the Syfy channel to produce a massively multiplayer online game alongside a television series. The publisher has reportedly spent more than $70 million developing the game, and it claims the MMO will continue even if the show is canceled. But players might not want to stick around that long.

While Defiance has its fun moments and features a ton of content, it also feels unfinished, paying no more than lip service to the TV show while saddling players with bland graphics, an unintuitive user interface, and performance issues.

What you’ll like

The combat is fast-paced and satisfying

Right now, Defiance is the closest thing we have to a Borderlands MMO. Its gameplay will feel instantly familiar to anyone who’s played Gearbox Software’s popular shooter on consoles or PC. It takes place in a not-so-distant postapocalyptic future where, after years of terraforming and war, enterprising souls called Ark Hunters scour the San Francisco area for valuable alien technology. As one of these hired guns, you’ll spend most of your time cruising the game world on ATVs, shooting at assorted mutants, bugs, and cyborgs and collecting loot. It’s not revolutionary, but it’s satisfying and a welcome break from traditional fantasy role-playing MMOs like World of Warcraft.

Defiance further differentiates itself from other titles in the genre by ditching character classes and skill rotations in favor of four unique combat abilities: Cloak, Blur, Decoy, and Overcharge. Surrounding each ability are passive perks used to further flesh out your character. With them, you can turn your Ark Hunter into a powerful sniper, a “rogue” who can sneak behind enemies to deal extra damage, a close-range brawler, or a combat medic who distracts enemies with a decoy while reviving teammates. Eventually, you’ll be able to branch out and choose perks situated near other abilities, giving that combat medic some much needed damage boosts near the Cloak skill, for example. Perks can be reset at any time for a little Scrip (in-game currency) while multiple loadouts let you store your favorite builds.

Player vs. player options are limited but adequate. There’s the usual 6-vs.-6 and 8-vs.-8 deathmatches, along with a larger 64-vs.-64 point capture mode called Shadow War. These competitive matches take advantage of the game’s solid shooter mechanics to create an experience that is as fun and fast-paced as a round of Call of Duty or Halo. It’s just a shame there are no more modes available right now (where’s capture the flag, Trion?).

Dynamic events are chaotic fun

Like Trion Worlds’ other MMO, Rift, Defiance features dynamic events. These events, called “Arkfalls,” appear randomly on the map and usually include multiple stages of enemies culminating in some sort of boss fight. When dozens of players congregate in these areas, Arkfalls become a chaotic, enjoyable mess filled with bullets and explosions. They’re also the best way to collect Key Codes, which unlock boxes filled with randomly generated rewards.

The spirit of cooperation shared during Arkfalls extends to Defiance’s story and co-op missions as well. The main story missions take place in the open game world, and you’ll often receive unexpected help from other players working on the same objectives. If they’ve already started the mission, you still get credit, eliminating the need to “camp” an area to achieve your goal. The four-player co-op missions are Defiance’s version of instanced dungeons. They’re short, largely unscripted affairs that I felt could use a bit more storytelling to make them more compelling.

What you won’t like

The graphics are ‘meh’

Defiance is a multiplatform game, and it’s clear some concessions were made while developing it for consoles, especially in the graphics department. PC players might feel like they got the short end of the stick when they see its lackluster textures and short draw distances obscured by fog. Facial animations are stiff; it’s as if everyone in the game was recently given a free Botox injection. On the plus side, it has some nice lens flare from time to time, and lower graphics means more accessibility for people with less-than-stellar PCs.

The user interface also suffers from Defiance’s multiplatform development. Although you can play with a keyboard and mouse, it was clearly designed with controllers in mind. Navigating menus is a chore. Even the simple act of logging out requires three or four button presses. First you press Start (or Escape) to bring up one menu, and then you hold the Left Trigger (Space Bar) to bring up a menu wheel. Then you press X to log out and hit “Yes” to confirm. It’s as irritating as it sounds. Defiance also seems to lack some features that PC users expect, like an easy way to hide the U.I. while taking screenshots.

Character generation is lacking compared to other titles in the MMO genre. You encounter a few alien races during your travels, but you can only choose one of two for your character: human or slightly less human. Defiance calls them “Irathient,” but really they just look like Vincent from Beauty and the Beast cosplaying as a Mad Max extra. People who love customizing every little detail of their character’s appearance might be disappointed with the game’s shallow options.

It feels unfinished

Trion and Syfy made a lot of noise over how their game and TV show will cross with each other, but so far that connection seems nebulous. About a handful of so-called Episode Missions featuring the show’s main characters, Nolan and Irisa, explain what they were up to before they arrive in St. Louis, where the show is based. And that’s pretty much it. Without having seen the pilot episode, it’s hard to say if other ties exist in the game. But for now, Defiance’s transmedia experiment feels shallow and gimmicky.

Arkfalls are a great idea but fall victim to repetitiveness. Fighting off a hellbug invasion sounds great at first, but after you’ve done that same event numerous times, it quickly grows stale. For a game that offers so many missions and challenges, it’s a shame it doesn’t offer more variety in its dynamic events, which are one of its defining features.

Traditional MMO fans looking for any sort of “endgame” are going to be disappointed. There doesn’t seem to be any raids or heroic dungeons. Like Borderlands, you’re expect to finish the main story missions, then wait for Trion to release new content. Luckily, there’s no subscription required, so you won’t feel like you’re wasting your money while you wait for DLC.

Then there are the technical issues. Every MMO suffers from them during launch, and Defiance is no exception. The servers are mostly stable, in my experience, but I’ve encountered noticeable lag. There’s a perceptible delay when switching between weapons or interacting with objects. Enemies take a second or two to drop dead once their health is depleted. These issues mostly disappear while playing instanced co-op and PvP, so hopefully it’s something Trion can work on in the future.

Conclusion

To its credit, Trion Worlds is handling Defiance’s launch problems well. The company has kept players updated with a constant stream of blog posts on the official website, poking fun at itself along the way. It released a large patch to fix bugs and improve server and client stability. It’s also working to improve the game’s terrible voice chat. (Seriously, it’s bad. Use a third-party program like Skype to communicate with your buddies. You’ll thank me later.)

Despite my complaints, I want to stress that I’m having a good time playing Defiance. None of its issues are game-breaking; Trion will most likely fix many of them over time. While its story and graphics are uninspired, its sci-fi setting and skill-based combat are a refreshing change from its pointy-eared, min-maxing, level-grinding brethren. But you might want to wait for a price drop before giving it a chance.

Score: 65/100

Defiance launched on the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 on April 2, 2013. Trion Worlds provided GamesBeat with a PC version of Defiance for the purpose of this review.

Filed under: Games

GamesBeat weekly roundup: Supercell raises $130M, BioShock Infinite tops March sales, and more …

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:25:19 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Clash of Clans developer Supercell is now valued at $770 million and raised $130 million in February, Bethesda wraps up major Skyrim updates, and Disney fully embraces transmedia integration in Disney Infinity.

You’ll also find reviews for ShootMania, Cut the Rope: Time Travel, and a Threeview for BioShock Infinite, as well as our early impressions for Defiance.

News

Mobile news

Tech news

Benchmark reveals Ouya’s aging Tegra 3 can’t keep up with newest Android phones

NPDs and future plans

Exciting announcements

Interviews

Reviews

Previews

Disney Infinity takes shape as a huge investment in transmedia (hands-on preview)

Pieces of flair

Filed under: Games

The DeanBeat: Defiance is inescapable transmedia that you’ll want to escape

Dean Takahashi — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:00:58 +0000

I was reading an article on the front page of the New York Times today and saw a banner ad above it. It was for Defiance, the new transmedia project that’s a TV show on the Syfy Channel and online game from Trion Worlds.

As we were warned by the producers, Defiance is going to be inescapable. If you’re breathing, you’re going to hear about it. NBC Universal heavily advertised the television series pilot, and it seems to have paid off. The show drew 2.7 million viewers on Monday, and it was the most-watched scripted Syfy premiere since 2006.

A marketing juggernaut

The stars, like Grant Bowler (Nolan), are on the talk-show circuit. And Defiance earned a lot of “social exposure,” as measured by Syfy. I thought the opener was good, but I said it was no Game of Thrones. In fact, the premiere of Defiance outperformed Game of Thrones on its own premiere day. Syfy hasn’t had a show this hot since Eureka, and its second-screen tablet app posted its best day ever with the debut. The digital stats in terms of uniques, page views, and visits are stellar.

Meanwhile, the massively multiplayer online game has scored 6 million hours of playtime since the launch two weeks ago. I’ve poured around 10 hours into it myself. This transmedia — or a story that is told in more than one medium — has to be considered a success in terms of its ability to grab attention even though it appeared on the same day as the Boston bombings.

Can it last?

But the nagging question remains for me. Was it worth it? Will it last? This $100 million-plus project (the budget for both the $70 million game and the TV series with its 12 episodes) was in the works for more than five years. It occupied the time of hundreds of game developers and show creators.

In my view, the show is good, and the game is good. The cast is talented, and the special effects are respectable. But they weren’t outstanding. And with so little time on my hands these days, I won’t give a lot of time to entertainment that is just good. On TV, especially on Monday nights, the show doesn’t have a ton of competition. But when it comes to games, I have endless choices now.

That’s why the launch of the game was particularly important, and it is bad news that it had a lot of hiccups. A lot of players complained that they couldn’t get into the game. Trion took down the Xbox 360 and PC versions for part of Monday due to problems with a patch. You would think that after five years of planning, these technical issues wouldn’t happen. But it seems on par with the launch of major games these days.

The question is whether the TV show is good enough to keep the players interested even though the game’s launch could have been better. The next TV episode comes on April 22. The show will be critical in determining the fate of the transmedia project. If the audience grows — thanks to word of mouth and the ubiquitous marketing — the franchise could still be a hit.

Trion appears to understand what is at stake. When I took a couple of nights off, Trion sent me an email saying it wanted “to make amends for some of the tech issues at launch.” It gave me a bunch of virtual credits to help my progress in the game. Trion said it was “working around the clock to deliver a gaming experience that exceeds fan expectations.” It said a massive patch was coming to improve server and client stability and a bunch of other fixes.

That ability to fix problems shows the company is willing to invest in the game as an ongoing service. I am glad for that, and it may make me stick around for longer.

Players themselves appear to be strongly engaged, according to player statistics gathered by the gamer social network Raptr. In the first week, the average Defiance player on the PC played for 15.1 hours. They played for 2.2 hours each session, and played 6.8 sessions during the week. Xbox 360 player stats were similarly strong. In the second week, play time was 14 hours, 2.2 hours each session, and 6.3 sessions per week. Those are strong results that show no sign of weakness.

So, how does it play?

For those who have seen just the TV show, it may be worth it to wait until the game bugs are squashed.

I share many of the same feelings that my fellow GamesBeat writer Stefanie Fogel expressed in her initial impressions. The standard enemies in this game are really stupid while bosses are impossibly tough. On Metacritic, a review aggregator, the game has a weak 63 out of 100 score, and it’s gotten weaker as more reviews come in. (The TV show has a rating of 55 out of 100.)

The game is different because it is a third-person shooter where you can level up in many different ways. It’s not your typical role-playing game in that respect. The dynamic events can spice things up, creating big headaches — and opportunities to collect a lot of loot — where there weren’t any before.

My view is that the story of the game is compelling enough to keep you playing. You have to protect an important (but arrogant) scientist and his work from falling into the wrong hands. And you have to unravel a mystery in parallel to the mystery in the show. I’m not going to argue with people who say the story is terrible, like in a B movie. But I have to admit that it’s why I have continued to play.

Some nice touches make the game fun. The third-person combat is fast-paced and entertaining. Like with Borderlands 2, you have all sorts of ways to level up your character, weapons, vehicles, and special abilities. The open world gives you a ton of choice on which missions to pursue. You can follow a straight path on the main missions or deviate into side missions. And it’s easy to get around. You can press a single key on the keyboard to call up your vehicle, and then you can jump into it and zoom off to your next destination. You aren’t doomed to walk through the cool future landscape of the Marin headlands.

But there are also drawbacks that tell you the game has been five years in the making. Like Electronic Arts’ Star Wars: The Old Republic, the 3D graphics look like time has passed them by. The facial animations and the outlines of the bodies aren’t as smooth as they could be. Offline games still look a lot better.

And the experience isn’t all that good. I have had to replay some missions as well because the game wasn’t smart enough to figure out that I had already completed them. Some of the missions are difficult enough to get my blood flowing.

But other tasks are so difficult for the level of my character that I wish I had some gigantic gun at my disposal to take care of the problem. Those are the missions where I enjoy having a human companion to help me. Others are way too easy, with enemy A.I. that are incredibly easy to outflank. The balance isn’t there.

The dynamic events, where lots of human players converge on a single alien incursion, are fun to join. Dozens of players can converge on a single area and band together to stop the attackers. You feel like you are working toward a common goal, and you don’t have to worry that those players are going to steal your loot. I also like the fact that, when I’m driving down the road, there is no way I will hit another human player’s vehicle. I just pass right through them.

But each of these dynamic events plays out the same, and they don’t seem to be connected to the story at all. That’s a lost opportunity to make the missions more meaningful.

I know there is a connection to the TV show and its characters. By playing the game, I can become steeped in the lore of the show. But the connection seems too loose right now. I understand that both the show and the game have to stand on their own and attract fans who will enjoy one but not bother with the other. But there should be more rewards for those who both watch the show and play the game. I hear these are coming, but I don’t want to put 30 or more hours into the game before I figure out if it’s worth it.

I’m not your classic massively multiplayer online (MMO) fan in that regard. I am impatient. For this game to be a success and to generate a payback on those five years of investment, it has to reach people like me and convince us to stick around not just for a couple of weeks but for a number of months. Right now, I don’t see myself doing that. I just want to solve a mystery or two and then escape.

But I’ll give Trion this much. There’s room for improvement. The game can be polished. If the company is holding back anything on the experience for later on, it should consider releasing it sooner rather than later. This game isn’t doomed. But it has to be fixed.

Check out our poll about whether you like the game or not, and please leave a comment.

Filed under: Games

Defiance TV show isn’t bad, but will it interest you for a whole season?

Dean Takahashi — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:00:56 +0000

The opening pilot of Defiance, a TV-game transmedia project in the works for five years, debuted last night on the NBC Universal’s SyFy Channel. Early reviews are coming in for both the online game and the show — and they’re not overwhelmingly positive.

Having watched the pilot, I think it was an enjoyable two-hour episode. It has humor, action, political intrigue, and some mystery to keep you enticed to watch more. But Game of Thrones, it’s not. I’ve watched the show and played the game (see our impressions story by Stefanie Fogel), and they are not the highest-quality entertainment experiences I’ve had in the past year.

Add to that the huge distraction from the horror in Boston today, which may deter people from creating any buzz around the pilot. The initial talk about the game was negative because of some well-known server issues that stopped people from joining the game at the outset.

That means the risky bet that some big companies have made on Defiance is looking pretty scary right now. Trion Worlds spent the past five years and an estimated $70 million developing a cross-platform online game for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. The game-show combination is perhaps one of the biggest bets in entertainment today.

The show has good cast, starring Grant Bowler as Joshua Nolan, a war veteran who becomes a lawman in the wild-west town of Defiance in a future where a post-apocalyptic Earth has become the home to seven alien races. Bowler and his adopted daughter Irisa (played by Stephanie Leonidas) make an appearance in the game and then escape the San Francisco Bay Area and drive onto the TV show’s setting in what was once St. Louis, Mo.

The initial reviews are thin and not pretty. So far, 15 game publications have given the game an average rating of 62 out 100, according to Metacritic, a review aggregator. That’s pretty pathetic. On TV, 13 critics have given the show a rating of 52 out of 100. That’s even worse. The Boston Herald said it felt like the “Frankenstein of TV shows,” built from the parts of other successful shows — from Battlestar Galactica to Deadwood.

That doesn’t bode well for Trion, which has to hold the attention of gamers for many more hours of content compared to the TV show, whose first season will span 12 episodes.

I’ve put a dozen hours into playing the game, and I have to agree with the critics so far about its shortcomings. But I will acknowledge that I have played a tiny bit of the available content, and I am not willing to give the game a review score just yet.

As Nolan and Irisa move into the town, they meet the mayor, Amanda Rosewater (Julie Benz), and residents like Rafe McCawley (Graham Greene), lounge owner Kenya (Mia Kirshner), and the ambitious and evil-looking aliens, the Tarrs (Tony Curran and Jaime Murray). Then events unfold that threaten the fragile peace in the town where aliens and humans live together.

In the TV show, Nolan and Irisa are scavengers. In the game, players take on the role of Ark Hunters, who hunt down lost alien artifacts. The idea is to make the players feel like the main characters. In the show, Bowler does a great job being a cocky yet diplomatic lawman in a lawless town.

Trion is promising a couple of patches to fix software problems. And it has to give out some extra goods to players to convince them to stick with the game.

As I noted in my previous preview, the content is good. But I don’t know if this show and the game are going to pan out. You don’t have to watch the show and play the game at the same time, but it’s a fair bet that these two will live or die together.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the development costs alone on the video game are $70 million. That’s not hard to believe considering Trion has raised more than $150 million and has a team of 150 working on the game. Over five years, it’s easy to see how payroll costs alone could hit that number. Another 150 worked on the TV show at SyFy, and they all had to coordinate.

The story is set on Earth in the year 2046. It takes place after a massive alien ship, the Ark, crash-lands on Earth. The aliens are seeking a refuge as they flee their own planet, but they make a mess of Earth. The ship terraforms the whole place, and it dumps seven unwanted alien races to live or fight among the surviving humans. The aliens brought with them a new resource, Gulanite, that everyone wants to control in a kind of gold rush. The game’s version of San Francisco is in a state of constant warfare. In Defiance, the races are living together in an uneasy truce.

In today’s pilot, players got to see more of the backstory to the game that they’re playing. Nolan and Irisa roll into town, meet the mayor, and quickly get into trouble. The mayor talks Nolan into becoming the sheriff of the town, and he immediately has to deal with a Romeo and Juliet subplot that leads to a cross-species murder. Nolan and Irisa just want to escape to Antarctica, but they have to choose their temporary allies wisely.

Add to that some serious scheming among the power brokers of the town and those who don’t mind betraying everyone who lives there. The townsfolk learn that they’ve got an invasion of mechanical robots to fend off. They have to either pull together as one to defend the town or fall as a divided community.

The story of the town is an immigrant drama. The pilot has some slow parts, but it drew me in. The acting was good, and the story had tension, action, and comic relief. The climax combat scene was pretty satisfying, but I had to shake my head at how dumb the invaders were. They don’t seem to have heard of these things called “scouts,” and they walked right into an ambush.

The show also set in motion a number of mysteries that will unfold in future episodes. I liked the episode, but I can’t say it’s going to hold my attention for a whole season in competition with so much other entertainment. It has a large cast and is tightly woven for a two-hour episode.

What was your opinion of the TV show? Take our poll below.

Filed under: Business, Games, Media

Defiance is not your normal massively multiplayer online game (first impressions)

Stefanie Fogel — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 22:45:11 +0000

Confession time: I’m tired of traditional fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). I’ve played them since the late 1990s. I’ve slain my share of bats and rats in newbie areas, learned my share of skill rotations, and seen my share of raid bosses. Now I’m looking for something a little different.

Defiance, the latest MMO from publisher Trion Worlds, is a little different. It’s a sci-fi third-person shooter for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC that feels more like Borderlands than World of Warcraft. It’s also a television show debuting tonight on the Syfy channel at 9 p.m. Eastern. The two will interconnect in some way, with characters from the show making guest shots in the game during Episode Missions. How the game will affect the show is still a mystery.

Defiance takes place in the near future on an Earth transformed by years of terraforming and war with an alien collective called the Votan. Giant mushrooms and alien flora dot the landscape along with ruined buildings and broken streets. In this setting, you play an Ark Hunter, a scavenger looking for alien technology among the debris of fallen spaceships. I’ve spent more than 15 hours cruising postapocalyptic San Francisco on my ATV and shooting at various mutants, raiders, and cyborgs. A full review is on the way. But in the meantime, here are some first impressions.

The story is forgettable, but the shooting is fun

Defiance is competent at pulling the player into its world with its addictive, fast-paced shoot-and-loot gameplay, but it falls a bit flat with its story and dialogue. The plot — where a jerkface scientist named Karl Von Bach hires you and your scrappy alien sidekick, Cass, to retrieve a MacGuffin object — is mildly interesting, but it’s not engrossing. Perhaps that’s because I recently played Funcom’s The Secret World, a horror MMORPG that drips atmosphere like water drips off Cthulhu’s tentacles. Defiance feels a bit soulless in comparison.

Public quests are all the rage in MMOs these days, and Defiance uses the same system found in Trion’s previous game, Rift. These areas, called “Arkfalls,” appear randomly on the map and usually involve battling multiple stages of enemies, culminating in some sort of boss fight. You can do story missions collaboratively as well. I’ve always like the idea behind public quests, that you can cooperate with other players without having to form into groups. Everyone participates, collects their loot, and goes their separate ways. No fuss, no muss. But these events are repetitive and grow stale over time. Eventually, they just feel like part of the grind.

Speaking of grind, I also like that Defiance has no traditional leveling system. Sure, you get an EGO rating, which is really just another name for level, but it doesn’t feel as important as it does in traditional MMOs. Improving your rating doesn’t unlock new abilities (you only get one of four), but it does open passive Perk slots. EGO also doesn’t matter when it comes to grouping with others. Someone with a rating of 5 could team up a 50 and still effectively contribute as long as they know how to aim. The A.I. isn’t smart. Close-range enemies predictably run at you, while ranged enemies tend to just move back and forth behind cover, making little effort to flank you. This doesn’t mean that Defiance isn’t challenging at times; I’ve died and revived numerous times during big battles, and a particular boss fight continues to stump me.

Yeah, but how’s the lag?

Defiance has had launch issues these last two weeks, but what MMO hasn’t? The PC server has been pretty stable, but it has noticeable lag. It’s also riddled with bugs. To its credit, Trion has kept a line of communication open with its customers on the official website, and it’s resolving the game’s numerous problems. It already released one significant patch to fix bugs, boost performance, and improve voice and text chat. It’s also most likely working on new content, which is something this type of game will need to survive past the first few months.

Although I have some mixed feelings about Defiance, it’s an enjoyable game and, given time, it could turn into a rather good one. It’s also multiplatform, making it an attractive option for console gamers looking for a decent MMO they can play from the couch.

We’ll have a full review of Defiance soon.

Filed under: Games

SimCity drops to $32, Paradox gives away free Europa 3

Dealzon — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:20:02 +0000

This sponsored post is produced by Dealzon.

Strategy gamers! Allocate your resources toward these two titles: SimCity and Europa Universalis III Chronicles. Both games boast in-depth gameplay, long-running franchises, and have numerous fans – but only one will go down in RTS infamy as an online-only single player game. Setting aside server stumbles, SimCity may actually be worthy of positive attention this week. The PC download is almost half off, and Europa Universalis III is free at GameFly.

Today SimCity dropped to $32 for the PC download with Origin activation (flame away). This is a solid price for a recently released Triple-A game, server snafus and DRM controversies aside. We suspect the game will soon reach the $30 price point, but don’t expect it to break the $20 barrier until closer to year’s end.

Europa Universalis III Chronicles can be yours for the unbeatable price of FREE today through April 11 at GameFly. You’ll still have to check out with a PayPal account or furnish your credit card info. But if you’re a fan of grand strategy games, you can’t go wrong with this bundle, as it includes all four Europa 3 expansions.

Note: We update our GamesBeat weekly deal post every Tuesday with the latest deals. For last week’s deals, check below the “Last Thursday” headline.

Tuesday New Deals

SimCity (PC Download) — $31.99 at GameFly after coupon. Yes, it’s Origin activated. Yes, you still need to be connected to the Internet. But hey, you’re not paying full price.

Europa Universalis 3 Chronicles (PC Download) — FREE at GameFly. The bundle comes with all four Europa 3 expansions. This same bundle runs $30 at Steam. Between $30 and free, we’ll take free.

Ni no Kuni: Wrath Of The White Witch (PS3) — $39.99 at Amazon. First big price drop on this beautifully crafted JRPG.

June 14 release: The Last of Us (PS3) — $49.99 at NewEgg after coupon. One of the first solid deals we’ve seen on the upcoming and highly anticipated PS3 exclusive.

June 25 release: Company of Heroes 2 (PC Download) — $45 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. Comes with beta access. Thankfully the title’s still being released, even after THQ’s liquidation.

Sep 17 release: Grand Theft Auto V (Xbox 360) — $59.99 at Microsoft. Xbox 360 owners get a better preorder incentive than their PS3 counterparts with an offer of 1600 Xbox Live points.

Last Thursday

In a move to bolster sales on titles published by 2K Games, GameFly is bundling up a few fan favorites and selling them at wallet-opening prices. This is a trend we’ve noticed lately for PC game sales, where retailers are happy to cheaply bundle last year’s hit releases to increase sales volume.

For the week, GameFly is offering four solid game bundles priced from $5 to $40. If you preordered BioShock Infinite, you’re probably familiar with some of these titles – they’re the same ones given away as bonuses during Infinite’s preorder sales push. Our top pick would be the BioShock dual pack bundle, containing the first two installment of the series for only $4.

If you see something you fancy, you might want to act fast, since all four bundle deals will be gone tomorrow.

On the console front, we’re spotting the first real discounts on recent releases like BioShock Infinite and Army of Two: Devil’s Cartel. While the savings are less substantial compared to their PC counterparts, kudos to GameStop for actually slashing prices on the 360/PS3 versions. Not bad for everyone’s favorite-game-store-to-hate.

2k Games PC bundles

BioShock Dual Pack (PC Download) — $3.99 at GameFly after coupon and includes BioShock 1&2. If you haven’t played the well-reviewed BioShock series, this is a cheap way to start. The cheapest we’ve seen this combo in the past is $10, and each game normally costs $20 apiece. Note the GameFly coupon code can only be used once per account, though it can apply to multiple games at once.

Spec Ops: The Line and The Darkness II Bundle (PC Download) — $3.99 at GameFly after one-use coupon. Four bucks makes a great price on two 2012 releases with Metascores of 76+. Buying each separately sets you back $60.

BioShock, BioShock 2, and Spec Ops: The Line Bundle (PC Download) — $7.99 at GameFly after coupon. On the surface, this is a good value since each game separately totals up to $70. That said, it’s actually a better move to buy both the BioShock bundle and the Spec Ops: The Line/The Darkness II bundle in the same transaction and use the once-per account coupon code because you’ll get 4 games instead of 3 for the same price ($8).

Borderlands 2 and XCOM: Enemy Unknown Bundle (PC Download) — $31.99 at GameFly after one-use coupon. Two very popular 2012 games are discounted $78 off their normal combined $110 price. If you buy each separately elsewhere at their lowest prices online, you’ll pay $80.

Hot deals & recent releases

Dead Island Game of the Year Edition + $8 preorder credit towards Dead Island Riptide (PC Download) — $4.99 at Amazon. This ties the lowest price ever seen on Dead Island GOTY, which includes the base Dead Island game and 3 DLC packs. Once the game is purchased, Amazon will email you instructions on how to get $8 off the upcoming Dead Island Riptide release (April 23rd).

Last Tuesday’s release: Defiance (PC Download) — $48 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. Elsewhere $60. The PS3 and Xbox 360 versions are down to $50.99 at GameStop after coupon. This week, the Magic 8 Ball says an 8+ rating from IGN and Metacritic users, although there aren’t many reviews out yet.

Bioshock Infinite (Xbox 360, PS3) — $50.99 at GameStop after coupon. Next best is $58 at Overstock.com. German retailer GamesRocket still has the PC download for $46.49, and Green Man Gaming still has it for £23.99.

Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel (Xbox 360) — $50.99 at GameStop after coupon. List is $60. Like BioShock Infinite this game released last Tuesday, March 26th but received much less attention. Reviewers say it lacks originality, but gameplay appears to be fine. GameStop has the only discount thus far.

PC download deals

Tropico 4 Collectors Bundle (PC Download) — $8 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. List is $40. The bundle includes the Tropico 4 game with 7 DLCs. Think Sim City with a sense of humor, more islands, and fewer server problems.

Kung Fu Strike: The Warrior’s Rise (PC Download) — $1.99 at GameFly after coupon. GameFly discounted this July 2012 retro-style beat-em-up from $9.99 to $2.50. Use their once-per-account coupon code and drop the price further to $1.99.

A Game of Dwarves Sale: Game and DLCs (PC Download) — 66% off at GamersGate. The game alone normally costs $10, and after the 66% discount, you can get the game plus 3 DLCs for only $7.12.

360 & PS3 deals

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (Xbox 360, PS3) — $39.99 at NewEgg. Until recently, the February 19th release Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance hasn’t strayed far from its list price, making NewEgg’s $20 discount the best ever by $10. Next best price online is $50 at Amazon, which prior to this week was charging the full $60 list price.

Dishonored (Xbox 360, PS3) — $25.49 at GameStop after coupon. While Dishonored has been around for almost 6 months, this is only the second time it’s hit the $25 price point. (The only other time was Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend.) Elsewhere this week, most retailers dropped their prices from $40 to $30, but GameStop’s coupon code makes this the best deal around.

Hardware

Alienware M17x r4 Ivy Bridge Core i7-3740QM, 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675M, 1080p, 8GB RAM — $1,999 at Dell Home after coupon. Although this Alienware laptop commands a premium price, this is the lowest we’ve seen on this 17-inch behemoth by $100 and cuts $300 off this config’s $2,299 list price.

Dell XPS 8500 Ivy Bridge Quad Core i7-3770, Radeon HD 7570, 8GB RAM, Windows 8 — $659.99 at Dell Home after coupon. Dell’s cheapest gaming-capable desktop just got cheaper. At $660, the desktop is a new low by $20 and now costs the same as the base XPS 8500 config – but with a more powerful processor and video card. List price is $875.

PS3 Slim 320GB Console (Refurbished) — $171.96 plus $10.44 shipping at TigerDirect. Next best is $300 at Best Buy. While most PlayStation gamers are saving up for a PS4, the PS3 console prices are starting to drop. This 320GB console costs $300 in new condition, so the buyer saves $118.

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Filed under: Games

Trion Worlds launches massively multiplayer shooter Defiance with a lot on the line

Jeffrey Grubb — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 17:30:39 +0000

Launching a massively multiplayer online game is always a major undertaking, but developer Trion Worlds might have set a new high mark for technical difficulty with the debut of its latest title.

Yesterday, Trion finally released its MMO third-person shooter Defiance for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC for $59.99. The studio began work on the game in 2008, so finally getting it out the door marks a major milestone for the company.

“I can’t tell you how proud I am of all the teams that got together and made this a reality today,” Trion executive producer Nathan Richardson told GamesBeat yesterday. ”We didn’t exactly choose the easiest route.”

The lengthy development time and simultaneous release across three platforms doesn’t begin to describe the complexities of Defiance’s debut. The title also ties into a major SyFy television show of the same name that debuts April 15.

To even call it a “tie-in” is a bit of a misnomer. Defiance, the game and the show, are symbiotic entities that will directly affect one another — a “transmedia” project. According to Trion, the show will reflect the actions of the players in the MMO game. It’s not clear how that will happen, but Trion and SyFy are both hoping that the curiosity will drive each audience to the other product.

If one fails, the other may falter as a consequence. So Trion and SyFy have a lot riding on the success of the game and show.

Richardson went on to list some of the issues his team had to solve when creating Defiance: “Massively multiplayer on PC, Xbox, and PS3? Sure. Connect it to a TV show? Why not. Launch at the same time, no delays possible? OK. Wait, multiple territories, integrated with Microsoft and Sony infrastructures, and it’s a shooter? Yup. Also add microtransactions as well as an aggressive free and paid downloadable-content schedule. OK.”

Filed under: Games

Yep, already a preorder deal on Battlefield 4: premium expansion + $12 off

Dealzon — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 19:50:38 +0000

This sponsored post is produced by Dealzon.

Hot on the heels of the Battlefield 4 gameplay trailer (and all the glorious screenshots from the Frostbite 3 engine), DICE/EA has announced all preorders of BF4 will receive the Premium Expansion Pack, making it a juicy incentive for fans of the franchise.

To whet your appetite even more, GameFly is offering a 20% off coupon for Battlefield 4, making the game only $48 for PC download. No fuss or mess – just enter the coupon and get $12 off. (Note: You can only use the coupon once per account, so pick your poison wisely).

Android gamers will want to look into this week’s Humble Mobile Bundle, which includes excellent titles such as Plant vs. Zombies and Anomaly Korea. Pay more than the current average of $5.51 and you’ll also get the classic arcade game Metal Slug 3.

Hot deals & recent releases

Q4 2013 release Battlefield 4 (PC Download) — $47.99 at GameFly after coupon. Includes Premium Expansion Pack. U.S. only, sorry everyone else. Console gamers can probably expect a deal from NewEgg in the near future.

Last Sunday’s release: Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon (Nintendo 3DS) — $33.24 plus $0.99 shipping at Kmart. Great sequel to the “classic” GameCube game Luigi’s Mansion. Can you believe that was a decade ago? #oldfart

Last Tuesday’s release: BioShock Infinite (PC Download) — $46.49 at GamesRocket. Straight up discount from this Germany-based retailer. UK/Euro residents should get from GMG which is at £23.99.

April 2: Defiance (PC Download) — $45 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. Defiance is promising a “groundbreaking” interactive experience by blending the SyFy show with the shooter MMO. Magic 8 Ball says: Cannot predict now, ask again later.

April 26: Star Trek (PC Download) — $40 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. A Star Trek game based on the movie? Given the paucity of good Star Trek games (Bridge Commander, perhaps?), we’re not holding our breath.

PC download deals

Borderlands 2 (PC Download) — $20.38 at GamersGate. Not the lowest ever for BL2, but it’s close at a few dollars more. Good price for the Steam-activated version.

Saints Row: The Third The Full Package (PC Download) — $13.60 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. Sigh. Every time we spot a THQ game, we get a little bit sad inside.

Prototype 2 (PC Download) — $10.49 at GamesRocket. Another decent deal from GamesRocket, making the lowest price we’ve seen so far. The Steam activation code is sent via email.

Darksiders + Red Faction: Armageddon (PC Download) — $1 at HumbleBundle. The dollar’s looking pretty strong when you can buy two games for a buck. This week’s HumbleBundle is an appealing “pay-what-you-want” system with a minimum of $1. If you beat the average price ($6.73 at the time of writing), you’ll also get two other games: Darksiders II and Red Faction: Guerilla. Just buying Darksiders and Red Faction: Armageddon separately at their lowest prices elsewhere would cost $37.

360, PS3, and Wii U deals

Dishonored (Xbox 360, PS3) — $29.99 at Amazon. Not best ever, but a good price for this excellent Steampunk-themed stealth-ish FPS.

Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (Wii U) — $29.99 at NewEgg. The 360 and PS3 versions are also on sale for $19.99 and $24.99, respectively. Metacritic scores of 80%+ for all platforms.

Assassin’s Creed: Ezio Trilogy (PS3) — $22.99 at Groupon. Yes, your eyes have not deceived you – Groupon sells video games in addition to their yet-another-spa-treatment offers. The trilogy includes Assassin’s Creed II, Assassin’s Creed Revelations, and Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood. Next best is $40 at Best Buy.

Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days (Xbox 360, PS3) — $5.99 at NewEgg. Hard to believe a popular Xbox 360/PS3 title is only six bucks with free shipping. Reviews are mixed, but one of the main complaints about this FPS is the shaky-cam, which can be turned off in the Options menu. Next best price online is $13 at Amazon, but most retailers are $20+.

Filed under: Games

SyFy’s Defiance transmedia television show is like an immigrant drama with aliens (video)

Dean Takahashi — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 21:00:29 +0000

Michael Nankin has been working on the Defiance television show that ties in with the massively multiplayer online game of the same name from Trion Worlds. The project has occupied hundreds of creators for years and is finally coming to a head. The game debuts April 2, and its story builds to the beginning of the TV show that debuts on April 15.

“There’s a seamless transition from one to the other, and we are hoping that will lead gamers — after becoming attached to the characters after two weeks of play — into the pilot,” Nankin said.

The first season will have 13 episodes. Some are finished and some aren’t. That’s what you call real-time production. Here’s our video interview with Nankin.

SyFy’s Michael Nankin tells us about the making of the Defiance television show from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

Filed under: Business, Games, Media, Video

After five years of work, Defiance’s Nick Beliaeff needs sleep (video)

Dean Takahashi — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 19:00:27 +0000

Trion Worlds’ Nick Beliaeff has been working on Defiance, the online game and television show “transmedia” project, for the better part of five years. The game is set to debut on April 2, two weeks before the April 15 launch of SyFy’s television show. Making the massively multiplayer online game has been a harrowing journey for Trion’s team, but it has sent the first version of the game off to manufacturing so retailers can begin selling the disks on time.

So Beliaeff is a little tired. But he doesn’t have time to rest, as Trion still has many episodes to do, and the the game is going run as a continuous service alongside the TV season. Both the show and the game reinforce each other as a single entertainment property.

“We’re so excited this labor of love is about to see the light of day,” he said in an interview with GamesBeat.

In our video interview with Beliaeff, he was breathing a sigh of relief about finishing the launch part of the game. But he is still preoccupied with all of the details that still need attention in the ongoing project. Trion raised more than $150 million and hired more than 500 people across its studios to make dynamic MMOs like Defiance, which is a cross-platform shooting game. Defiance itself occupied the time of more than 150 people, and SyFy has had more than 150 working on the TV show.

The first two weeks of the game follow two of the characters in the San Francisco and Marin County regions of Earth,after seven alien races have crash-landed on the planet. The two characters, Joshua Nolan and Erisa, will move from the game into the beginning of the TV pilot, which is set in St. Louis, in a seamless way. That will be the first of a number of crossover points between show and game. Trion has generated enough content for hundreds of hours of gameplay. But the development has seen a distinct hand-off between the first two weeks of the game and the start of the TV show.

Beliaeff’s team has completed its first patch and the content update that happens with the start of the TV show. But he’s also got to get his team moving on the game content to go with the second season of the TV show.

In the meantime, Comcast and NBC Universal (owner of SyFy) are building a crescendo of marketing noise so that everyone on Earth knows about Defiance. Here’s our video interview with Beliaeff.

Trion Worlds’ Nick Beliaeff describes Defiance’s run to the finish line after five years of development from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

Filed under: Business, Games, Video

SyFy’s Defiance television show and Trion World’s online game are in the home stretch after five years

Dean Takahashi — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:00:37 +0000

I’ve seen the pilot episode of Defiance, and I’ve previewed the massively multiplayer online third-person shooter game. Both are launching this month as part of a huge collaboration between NBC Universal’s SyFy network and venture-backed game company Trion Worlds. And I’ll be honest. The content is good, but I still don’t know how this one is going to turn out. These two properties will share a common fate. They’re both going to succeed, or they’re both going to fail.

The magnitude of the gamble is unlike any other “transmedia” project involving both TV and game versions of the same entertainment property. The Wall Street Journal reported that the development costs alone on the video game are $70 million. That’s not hard to believe, considering Trion has raised more than $150 million and it has a team of 150 working on the game. Over five years, it’s easy to see how payroll costs alone could hit that number. Another 150 worked on the TV show at SyFy, and they all had to coordinate.

The story is set on Earth in the year 2046. It takes place after a massive alien ship, the Ark, crash lands on Earth. The aliens are seeking a refuge as they flee their own planet, but they make a mess of Earth. The ship terraforms the whole place, and it dumps seven unwanted alien races to live or fight among the surviving humans. The aliens brought with them a new resource, Gulanite, that everyone wants to control in a kind of gold rush. The game’s version of San Francisco is in a state of warfare. In Defiance, the races are living together in an uneasy truce.

The game launches on April 2 with a huge amount of publicity from NBC Universal and its owner Comcast. Players will become immersed in the game and, hopefully, become attached to the lead characters Joshua Nolan and Erisa during a two week mission. They will start in the Marin County headlands and work their way down to the Golden Gate Bridge, where the player will feel a “Planet of the Apes” moment at seeing the ruined state of the iconic bridge, said Nick Beliaeff, senior vice president of development at Trion Worlds, in an interview with GamesBeat. The game is one of the only ones that works across the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 platforms.

“We’re so excited this labor of love is about to see the light of day,” he said.

An intriguing pilot

After two weeks in the game, Nolan and Irisa will leave San Francisco and drive to the St. Louis arch, which is also in a ruined state after an alien spaceship crash lands on Earth. In the town of Defiance, where the TV show takes place, the aliens and humans are trying to live together. The movement of the characters from the game to the TV show is what transmedia theorists call a “touch point.” It’s a place where the fans of one medium could cross over and become fans of the same story in another medium. It is the hook to draw us into Nolan and Erisa (pictured right, Nolan played by Grant Bowler; Irisa played by Stephanie Leonidas). The touch point can work in either direction. It can pull the TV fans into the game or vice versa. If it happens right, like with the Harry Potter films and games, it’s a gold mine.

“We’re not binary when it comes to entertainment,” Beliaeff said at a recent event in Las Vegas. “We have touch-points. We don’t care how you get into Defiance, through the TV show or the game. We just want you in Defiance.”

The TV pilot is finished and set for its debut on April 15. Altogether, the first season will have 13 episodes. Some are done and some aren’t, said Michael Nankin, directing producer at SyFy, in an interview with GamesBeat.

You can play the game without ever watching the show and vice versa, but as TV series goes on, some characters will leave the show and transition into the game. Global issues affect both worlds, as the show is set in St. Louis and the game is based in the San Francisco area. The sci-fi show has the flavor of a western, but Nankin describes it more as an immigrant drama. The pilot has some slow parts, but it drew me in. The acting was good, the story had tension, combat, and comic relief. The show also set in motion a number of mysteries that will unfold in future episodes. I liked the episode, but I can’t say it’s going to hold my attention for a whole season in competition with so much other entertainment. It has a large cast and is tightly woven for a two-hour episode.

So how is the game?

But the game, by definition, is non-linear, with hundreds of hours of content and enormous territories for the players to roam over. You can run around on foot, but more likely you’ll want to ride an all-terrain vehicle. I’ve played the game several times, watching it move from an unpolished state to nearly finished. Last week, I played the version that players will see.

In the third-person shooting game, you can take on a wide variety of roles, including medic and machinist. I walked into a battle as a machinist with a sniper rifle and a machine gun. The graphics in the PC version look a lot sharper than on the consoles. But titles like Crysis 3 definitely look better.

I happened to materialize in the middle of a bridge. I tried to ride over it, but faced a roadblock by a bunch of mutants. I retreated and used my sniper rifle against them. They were not particularly hard to kill as they stood out in the open. But they did have a nasty habit of scooting to the side whenever I had them in my gun sights. The artificial intelligence was limited but passable. While one set of mutants fired at me, another would occasionally rush me with the mission of slicing me in two.

Filed under: Business, Games, Media

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Why the creation of ‘transmedia project’ Defiance terrified game developers and TV show makers

Dean Takahashi — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:09:36 +0000

LAS VEGAS — The production of Defiance, a transmedia property with both a game and a TV show, took place over an agonizing five years. The trouble was that both the TV show and the online game associated with it had to be made on very different, and terrifying, schedules.

But against the odds, the giant project is nearing its completion, and both the game and the SyFy cable-network TV show are going to launch in April. The top executives in charge of the project spoke about working together at the DICE Summit, an elite game industry conference in Las Vegas today. They also gave a joint interview to GamesBeat before the talk.

“This was a five-year journey of taking a hypothetical idea that has never been done before,” said Nick Beliaeff (pictured above, left), the vice president of production at Trion Worlds, the maker of the massively multiplayer online game. “It was turning a leap of faith into a reality.”

Many had tried to take a linear story from a film or TV show and make it interactive. But both parties were prepared to make huge investments. Trion raised more than $150 million and hired more than 500 people across a variety of studios to make dynamic MMOs, where the content could be developed in an episodic fashion, much like a TV show. The company launched its Rift fantasy MMO in 2011 and generated more than $100 million in revenue in its first nine months. Trion also has several other projects being launched this year, like Rift China, ArcheAge, and possibly the online real-time strategy game End of Nations.

But the flagship title that has consumed more resources than anything else was Defiance, which required 150 employees for the game and another 150 on the TV show. If you count contractors and outsourced workers, another 100 contributed to the game.

“We wanted to create something big enough where we didn’t have compromises,” Beliaeff said. “Or at least not fatal compromises,” Stern said.

“Which is better?” Beliaeff asked. “I’m not binary. I like both linear and interactive entertainment. There are different audiences and they complement each other,: said Mark Stern (pictured right), president of SyFy, a property of NBC Universal.

“We’re not binary when it comes to entertainment,” Beliaeff said. “We have touch-points. We don’t care how you get into Defiance, through the TV show or the game. We just want you in Defiance.”

Stern said that the companies found each other while Trion, which was just a year old at the time, was raising a round of funding from media partners. NBC Universal invested in that round. The idea of doing a transmedia property with a game and TV show combined came up. Stern’s team sent a bunch of scripts, some of which became good TV shows later.

But Beliaeff said that the scripts for the TV shows were too thin. They could work for a half hour of entertainment, but Trion needed a deep and complex story that could last for hundreds of hours.

They came up with separate territories for the show and game. The show is set in St. Louis, where political intrigue is the norm. The game is set in San Francisco, where combat is the reality. The story of the science fiction show is really more like a Western. The locations are close enough that a player can talk about hearing something that happened in St. Louis without having to go there on a daily basis.

“I didn’t want gamers running through my town with guns, shooting up the place,” Stern said.

Players will encounter a “changed Earth,” where aliens fleeing their own planet have crash-landed on humanity’s home. Their terraforming equipment has hit Earth and caused a lot of destruction. But the aliens, who are split among seven factions, also brought with them a new resource, Gulanite, that different parties will fight to control in a kind of gold rush. The game has a lot of “fast, kinetic action,” Beliaeff said.

Stern said the “terrifying” part was that his TV show team had to agree to a story and characters in the game so early, since Trion’s team had to spend several years creating an enormous amount of animated content. At one point, a proposed alien race eventually became a rock, the Gulanite resource. Still, Stern said it was difficult for the TV show crew to approve characters and a story three years before they started shooting.

“There were times when Nick and I had to get in there and pull people apart and pour cold water on them,” said Stern.

Beliaeff said the game will feature thousands of players at once, often teaming up to deal with events where they have to take care of various alien threats. Sometimes, “arc falls,” or big pieces of the alien ship, crash down to Earth. This creates a battle for the resources in the wreckage. The more players play together, the better the loot when they achieve their goal. That encourages teamwork.

Right now, the TV episodes are edited and are in the home stretch, Stern said. The game is in its “mastering stage,” Beliaeff said.

Soon, advertising will be everywhere. NBC has made Defiance one of its advertising priorities for the full year, with the full assets of the company promoting the TV show and the game, which will ship on the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

“The whole company is going to promote Defiance,” Beliaeff said. Products have been placed in both media. For instance, Dodge has its Challenger vehicles in the game, and Chargers in the TV show. Preorders have begun. And Stern said that the TV show team is working on Season 2.

Asked what he learned from the process and from shipping Rift, Beliaeff said, “We have learned to be responsive to what the players want. When we ship this game, it won’t be done. We will run it as a service.”

Beliaeff said that April is looking like a great release window for the game. When Take-Two Interactive announced it would delay Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto V to September, Beliaeff said, “There was much rejoicing.” And Beliaeff said the team is starting to think about, “What do we do next?”

Filed under: Games

Trion to publish XL Games’ massive online game ArcheAge in Western markets (exclusive)

Dean Takahashi — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:00:12 +0000

Trion Worlds has signed a deal with South Korea’s XL Games to bring the big-budget fantasy role-playing game ArcheAge to Western markets. It will publish the game on its Red Door online commerce platform in North America and Europe. The deal represents a major bet on the massively multiplayer online gaming business, which is competing fiercely for the attention of consumers alongside rivals such as social, mobile, and console games.

The title has spent six years in development, and its creator is Jake Song, who made the smash hit online game Lineage. It has been in closed beta tests for two years and has launched in beta testing in Korea. For Trion, the deal is a big coup, said Lars Buttler, the chief executive of Redwood City, Calif.-based Trion, in an interview with GamesBeat. He described ArcheAge as having an “incredible amount of polish.” Trion aims to launch the game later this year in North America, Europe, Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand.

Trion is the publisher of Rift, another fantasy MMO that also took about six years to make. Buttler said that the game generated more than $100 million in revenue for Trion in its first nine months, and the title will soon be coming out in China, one of the biggest MMO markets. Trion also developed an online games publishing platform dubbed Red Door, which it can use to publish games developed by other companies. One of the premier games coming up is Crytek’s Warface, a modern combat shooter that is expected to be published this year.

ArcheAge might seem similar to Rift, but Buttler says the two are different. ArcheAge is divided into two continents. The western one (Nuia) is designed to appeal to Western gamers, while the eastern one (Harihara) is targeted at Asian gamers, who prefer different art styles.

“We’re thrilled to be working with Trion Worlds, a company who is setting a new standard for gaming by embracing original, high-quality [games] on a dynamic connected platform,” said Song, the CEO and founder of XL Games. “We are impressed with Trion’s track record as they have consistently delivered against an unwavering vision; we are confident partnering with Trion will help bring ArcheAge the success it deserves.”

Buttler described Song as a “perfectionist in the best way.”

The addition of ArcheAge will give Trion a busy spring, with Rift China, ArcheAge, and Defiance (an open world sci-fi shooting MMO that is debuting in conjunction with the launch of a SyFy channel show on television starting in April) all moving into large-scale beta tests that precede official launches.

“We could have half a dozen launches this year,” said Buttler. “We are on an amazing inflection point now. We think [Red Door] will be the winning platform.”

Buttler also said that company will publish its online games on “any connected device.” His company is operating “games as a service,” where you launch a game and continually update it.

In ArcheAge, players choose a continent and then launch a virtual life in the online world. They can design their own characters and engage in all sorts of activities such as farming, flying, trading, building ships, creating underwater gardens, fighting naval battles, and more.

“It’s all you expect from a triple-A game,” he said. “In this category, you have to see World of Warcraft as competition.”

Tencent will introduce ArcheAge in China while GameOn will publish it in Japan. GigaMedia will publish it in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao. That’s as close to a global launch as any MMO has ever had. Trion will translate the title and make changes to suit Western audiences.

Buttler described Red Door as a true web-based platform consisting of the back-end infrastructure and monetization tools for a huge online game. It has a development platform aimed at speeding up publication and a server architecture designed for dynamic events, where changes happen to the game world on the fly.

Meanwhile, Buttler said that the company has delayed the launch of its End of Nations real-time strategy MMO. The title was made by external developer Petroglyph Games in Las Vegas. But Petroglyph’s contract expired, and Trion decided to bring the game in-house to finish it, said Buttler. That resulted in layoffs at Petroglyph at the end of 2012, and Trion absorbed a number of its developers. That team is now making the game “more accessible,” said Buttler. That means the team is making it easier for players to get started more gently.

“It will take longer, but it was the right decision to bring it in-house and polish it more,” he said.

But the delay isn’t a problem since Trion will be more than busy publishing other titles in the first part of the year, said Buttler.

While Rift was tied to the PC, future titles will run across platforms. Defiance, for instance, will be published simultaneously on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the PC. Over time, Buttler said the company will embrace smartphone and tablet platforms in a bigger way. Right now, Rift has companion apps, but those don’t let you play the same game while on the run.

Trion has a big war chest to publish huge games. The company raised $85 million in early 2012. Trion has more than 500 employees.

“We created a wish list from day one with the start of Red Door,” said Buttler. “We got Warface from Europe, and from Asia, we got ArcheAge.”

Here’s a trailer video for ArcheAge.

Filed under: Business, Games

Trion Worlds will soon have multiple gargantuan online game worlds (interview)

Dean Takahashi — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 15:00:17 +0000

Few game industry chief executives have been as successful at raising money as Lars Buttler, CEO of Trion Worlds, the publisher of massively multiplayer online games including Rift. The company recently raised $85 million in equity financing, and it has launched a third-party publishing platform for MMOs produced by other companies.

Trion successfully launched its Rift online fantasy game world last year, and it gained a substantial audience. But it didn’t take down World of Warcraft, the leading online role-playing game world with more than 10 million paying users. Still, Trion is moving on with the coming launches of End of Nations, Defiance (a joint project with cable TV channel SyFy), and an expected third-party publication deal with Crytek’s Warface. These games represent some of the biggest bets in gaming today. We caught up with Buttler at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) video game trade show in Los Angeles, Calif. last week. Here’s the edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: So how’s the show going for you?

Lars Buttler: Very good. I think this is by far our biggest show and the biggest excitement. Two years ago, we had one game fully playable: Rift. Last year, we had two games fully playable on the show floor: Rift and End of Nations. This year, we have four, so every year we have doubled, you know? Knock on wood. And they’re all amazing. They’re all awesome games. They’re all original intellectual property. Different genres. Different development models. Different business models. Different partnership models.

GamesBeat: Do you count Crytek’s Warface [pictured right] as one of those? [Crytek and Trion showed the game together at the show but haven't announced a publishing deal yet].

Buttler: We want to focus on the game. We still haven’t said anything about the structure. But it’s a great partnership, and we’re going to talk about this more later.

Yesterday, we had the actors for Defiance here. We had Grant Bowler, who plays Nolan on Defiance. We had Kevin Murphy here, who’s the showrunner. He was also the showrunner for Desperate Housewives, an Emmy winner. He’s amazing. We had tons of TV crews here yesterday and today. The whole time. It’s super exciting.

The Rift expansion resonates insanely well with the fans. If there was one thing left in Rift that we wanted to address, it’s the size of the world. Because when we launched, we couldn’t catch up with eight years of World of Warcraft. But now we’ve more than tripled the size of the world with stunning content — really amazing.

And End of Nations is now extremely polished. You can play it and check it out. It’s amazing. We can show the metagame now as well — how everything you do changes the global battlefield. It’s basically nothing that anybody else has ever done before. End of Nations is revolutionary. It was even more revolutionary then, but again, original IP, the world’s first triple-A MMORTS [editor's note: massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game]. Defiance is an MMO shooter — triple-A quality for Xbox, PS3, PC — that alone has never been done before. And then transmedia tie-ins and so on. It resonates incredibly well.

GamesBeat: I played Defiance, and we all jointly attacked the giant shrub or whatever [laughter].

Buttler: Yeah. People are playing it outside on Xbox and PS3 and PC. It’s such an excitement at a show that’s generally more focused on sequel, sequel, sequel of packaged-goods games. To have four, original, premium online games that are different genres all really polished and great — I’m very happy. Exhausted but happy. And so is the entire team, I think. It reflects really well where we are.

GamesBeat: Logically, would you be happiest to make the most money with something like Rift that’s internally produced? As opposed to some of the third-party types of models?

Buttler: I’m incredibly happy with all the different structures. I think they’re all ground-breaking, and I think they can all be really profitable for everybody who’s involved. The SyFy relationship, where they’re a co-development partner and they produce the TV show, where they announce publicly that this will be the biggest thing they’ve ever done, including the marketing spending, in the 20-year history of SyFy — I think that helps everybody. If you want to create amazing new IP, being able to go all-in on the marketing side, on the production values for the game and the show, and then let everybody know about it and cross-promote and so on — I think that’s huge. And so all the different structures we have are really sorting out to be win-win situations.

In the traditional packaged-goods world, you have this master-slave relationship between the publisher and a developer. We don’t believe in this for services. They’re more like marriages. You want to be sure that the teams — on the publishing side, on the development side, everybody — everybody’s part of this, they’re in it for the long run, and they’re excited after six months, after 12 months, after two years, after four years. It is so important to think of a game as a service. If you think packaged goods, you might serve a big launch, and then after three months, everybody is gone. That’s a big problem.

GamesBeat: Were you disappointed that Rift didn’t actually take down World of Warcraft?

Buttler: We said throughout the history of the company, we want to make amazing properties that people really love. We want to revolutionize the genre and innovate in it. We want to build really good businesses that can pile on top of each other. And Rift was a breakthrough to world class. It really put us on the map. It allowed us financially to do so many other things that we’re now doing. So it did everything that we expected it to do. And quite frankly more. And we’re not done yet. I said that we would slowly and certainly just stay at it, stay at it. We’re still better at content updates than anybody else. Our expansion pack will be amazing. We’re not done yet.

GamesBeat: I always thought that Blizzard would, by virtue of mathematics, start to lose people, but they haven’t really lost at that kind of rate that some people thought.

Buttler: I mean, I think the time investment in the game and the friend connection in the game are very strong. I think that’s the key, and they know it, but you never know what happens, right?

We have a very, very loyal audience. It gives us a very good foundation to make the game better and bigger and more exciting all the time. It is profitable. We launched in Korea recently. We’re bringing it to China, to Taiwan. There is a lot of anticipation and excitement in China right now for Rift because it’s so polished, it’s so content-rich already, and with the expansion pack. What we’ll be launching is an even bigger game and more exciting game than we started with here. For me, Rift is 10 out of 10 in terms of what we expected and what it delivered. Maybe more.

GamesBeat: Are you hoping to bring every one of these games into China?

Buttler: I would assume so. It’s such a big market for online games. They’re very sophisticated, and they’re very demanding. Mostly what they’re playing today is a copy of a copy of a copy. And they churn through it really quickly. The Chinese operators and publishers are really looking for great innovation as well. It’s a cutthroat market there. Through partners, Asia is also hugely important for us. So I wouldn’t expect us to be operating our own games in those markets any time soon. But so far those partnerships are great

GamesBeat: How is Red Door proceeding? Are you expecting more of it?

Buttler: I said there will be lots of interesting announcements in the next three or six months. Like we always say, this is not an open platform yet for anyone. We want to do this very carefully and stay at the triple-A quality bar. And then, maybe over time, it’s becoming more open. We’re in discussion with the best of the best. And we will talk more about that.

GamesBeat: That SmartGlass demo that Microsoft did with Game of Thrones and being able to follow on the lap — it seemed to make the transmedia a little easier.

Buttler: I have to check it out. I have to admit I had no chance to even see it. What exactly is it?

GamesBeat: You would be watching a TV show on your screen, and then on your iPad, you could look at a map. The map would show you where the scene was taking place. As it progressed, they changed the location or something. It would jump automatically to the next location, and so you could still see information about the scene, and you could see this map that would be changing over time. That was kind of…I don’t know, it seemed like a neat way to do transmedia…. But it also looks like smartphones and tablets are something that could be interesting to get into.

Buttler: We have always said, we think that all the connected devices, they are direct windows into the world, or they can be windows into parts of the world. Maps and programming guides and auction houses, making you productive while you’re on the go and so on.

For us, you create these beautiful worlds. They’re completely alive. They have big communities. And then you have all these other options to interact with the world through a TV show or through companion apps, through mini-games, anything. That’s the ultimate vision of these living worlds — they’re beautiful, they’re stunning, they’re big communities, and any other way that makes sense, you can connect with it. We never think of making a stand-alone mobile game, for example. That makes no sense for us. Or making a stand-alone Facebook game. Everybody does that. But using all these devices, including even the TV, to be another window, another angle on this experience, that’s really exciting.

GamesBeat: It looks like some big bets are starting to pay off.

Buttler: We have creative products, but we have to stay paranoid [laughter].

But so far, so good. The reception we’re getting here is amazing. We’ve already been nominated for tons of awards. Actually, several outlets nominated all three games. So they’re now competing with each other, which is awesome. It’s a portfolio, right? We’re very excited.

I cannot tell you which one I like more. I love them all. They’re all amazing. We try to push the quality bar for all of them really high. The innovation, the originality, the factor of, wow, this is really something exciting and new. Not again the same thing. If I see a sequel number six, you know, which is not rare here, right…? And some people try to hide it. But it’s still really version eight or 10.

I always think this is worse than movies. Why not make something great and amazing? Of course, I think it has something to do with the problems that the packaged-goods model has in general. And the market is declining, and I think even used markets are declining for the first time. They all go to connected gaming.

GamesBeat: This longer console transition probably helps the PC side and your business?

Buttler: But you’re also seeing the recession.

I think there’s so many factors: the ubiquity of broadband, the explosion of connected devices that can all be gaming devices, PCs getting cheaper and cheaper — there’s so many factors. Most of the world being on PCs anyway as the lead device? And those are the parts of the world that become more important all the time. You have a consumer market in China now, you have a bigger gaming market in Russia. Germany has always been PC. But it’s now, of course, connected PC.

I think there’s so many factors, and I think virtually every one of them says, the future is connected gaming. Games as a service. Not packaged-goods software. And it’s not just packaged-goods software distributed online. It’s really new and exciting experiences, much more social, much more dynamic, live, evolving, big meta-games, and so on. And then even transmedia.

We’re excited that everybody else is now trying to have their own platform after being dependent on somebody else’s. Or evolving their quality bar upward. This is where we tried to be from day one. Super quality on our own platform so we can guarantee great quality and a great experience and scale our business and so on.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your tickets here.

Filed under: Games

GamesBeat Weekly Roundup

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 25 May 2012 20:14:53 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best games stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, game developer 38 Studios laid off its entire staff after ongoing financial troubles, BioWare laid off a number of people working on Star Wars the Old Republic, Take-Two faces a larger than expected financial loss, and Blizzard announces its first patch for Diablo III.

You’ll also find previews for Defiance, Kingdom Hearts 3D, and When Viking’s Attack.

The DeanBeat: Playstudios launches myVegas social casino games with MGM as a partner

Blizzard announces first Diablo III patches and delays the real-money auction house

Kingdom Hearts 3D welcomes casual fans back into the series (hands-on preview)

Bringing back Tomb Raider: Our need to fill the old archeologist’s shoes

38 Studios lays off its entire staff

Sony’s When Vikings Attack offers goofy street combat (hands-on preview)

Konami kicks off pre-E3 character battle (gallery)

GameFly buzzes into mobile publishing

GREE mobile gaming platform enters open beta, plans two new Moshi Monsters games

Diablo III sets launch-day record

ShootMania Storm is geared for mass, competitive gaming

Take-Two CEO says product delays signal an “unwavering commitment to quality”

Marvel Heroes’ online game world will let you smash evil for free

SOE announces free-to-play shooter, Bullet Run…which sounds a lot like Super Monday Night Combat

What does a game “producer” do, exactly? (exclusive)

Plant a money tree in Farmville as Zynga and American Express launch new rewards program

ArenaNet president discusses careful monetization of Guild Wars 2, the least greedy Western MMO

Twilight Zone table to rise again in Pinball Arcade with the help of crowdfunding

Origin offers 90 days of free distribution to successful Kickstarter games

VentureBeat:

Video game series contract will be tough for Bungie, easy for Activision

Square Enix’s Mike Fischer says Activision was “crazy” to abandon True Crime: Hong Kong (interview)

Gaming art for your Facebook Timeline (Part 5: Social and Mobile)

Nvidia expects a “breakout year” for mobile chips

Nvidia CEO describes strategic importance of cloud graphics

THQ releases Metro Last Light cinematic story video

Seagate agrees to acquire LaCie for at least $186M

Take-Two disappoints Wall Street with larger-than-expected loss

Activision reacts to fan response to Call of Duty: Black Ops II (video interview)

BioWare lays off staff on Star Wars: The Old Republic, EA to shift employees [updated]

Trion’s Defiance is one story told in an online game and SyFy TV show (hands-on preview)

YoYo Games unveils GameMaker: Studio for cross-platform development

RocketFrog wants to revolutionize online gambling with real-world prizes

How Ghost Recon is gunning to take over the hardcore and social markets (interview)

Are You a Human replaces annoying CAPTCHAs with games

Game of Thrones Ascent aims to please fans with a Facebook game (exclusive)

Filed under: Games

Trion’s Defiance is one story told in an online game and SyFy TV show (hands-on preview)

Dean Takahashi — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:00:18 +0000

Trion Worlds’ Defiance is one of the most ambitious transmedia projects, a story that stretches across multiple media, ever made. Debuting in April 2013, the online game world is being jointly developed in tandem with a science fiction TV show created by the SyFy entertainment network. We recently got a hands-on preview of the game where the creators described the depth of the story for the first time.

Trion is one of the most well-financed startups in gaming history, with one massively multiplayer online game world launched and several more in development. The company recently raised $85 million in equity financing and it has launched a third-party publishing platform for other MMOs.

The TV show and game are so intertwined that they share common characters who move from one media to the other. As an example, the main characters of the Defiance game cause some havoc in the futuristic city of San Francisco and they have to hightail it out of town. The TV series’ opening pilot shows the pair arriving in the remade city of St. Louis, where there is an uneasy truce between alien and human settlements.

“I cannot express how excited we are after about four years of talking about the concept and developing an amazing game to be able to show it today,” said Lars Buttler, chief executive of Redwood City, Calif.-based Trion Worlds, at an event in Santa Monica, Calif. “What excites me is that it is not another sequel of a packaged-goods game. It is a revolutionary project.”

He added, “It’s a triple-A MMO shooter for the console and PC and a premium online game, a live world, and an epic TV show. In a world where people get excited about cow clickers and the fifth game in a series, Trion and SyFy are doing something that has never been done before.”

Dave Howe, president of the SyFy entertainment network, said, “We have been a top cable network for 15 years, and this is the biggest and most exciting project I have ever been involved in.” Here’s a link to the making of Defiance trailer.

The story of the game is epic. Seven alien races arrive on Earth because their own planet has been destroyed. Those aliens don’t get along, but their peaceful move to Earth turns hostile after a terrorist act. The attack destroys the alien “Ark” ships, which carry “terraforming” technology that is loosed upon the world. The terraforming technology destroys much of the human civilization, and a war ensues.

After decades of war, an uneasy piece ensues because two commanders — one human, one alien — defy their orders in order to prevent huge civilian deaths. As the story begins, humans and aliens live side by side in small towns on a terraformed Earth. The citizens seek to find and trade items of value, such as alien artifacts from the mother ship, dubbed the Ark.

The game combines a third-person action shooter with the persistence and scale of a massively multiplayer online game. Like Trion’s other game, Rift, Defiance will enable dynamic events, where the fabric of the game’s landscape can change during special events, such as an alien invasion of the human territory.

While the TV show is set in St. Louis, where the only recognizable structure is the famous arch, the game is set in San Francisco. The events in one town can affect what happens in the other. The story of the show and the game will influence each other and evolve over time. The artifacts, vehicles, weapons, fauna, and animal species are the same across the two media.

“The game and the TV show constantly reinforce each other,” said Mark Stern, president of content for SyFy. “It is a high stakes story of courage and survival, a sweeping action-adventure with intimacy and a character drama with heart.”

The SyFy network has recruited some big stars to be in the show, including Grant Bowler (Ugly Betty, True Blood); Julie Benz (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel); and Jaime Murray (Dexter, Spartacus).

Like in other MMOs, you can create your own custom character, dubbed an Ark Hunter because you hunt after artifacts from the Ark. You can interact with thousands of people at t he same time and level up as you fight enemies and earn rewards. You can get a bunch of weapons, armor, and special abilities over time. And you can go on missions, deal with emergencies such as surprise attacks, and explore the world.

As you arrive, your job is to establish law in a Wild West frontier town with different factions of humans and aliens. In the town, there is a new gold rush as prospectors seek the energy of the Ark. Both human architecture and alien designs exists side by side.

I was able to grab an all-terrain vehicle and drive around in the Marin Headlands, north of the Golden Gate Bridge. The game was still in an early state as I could collide with another ATV without getting damaged. I stopped at one point and began shooting a bunch of monster crabs that came charging at me in waves. Then I saw a directional icon on the screen that signified a dynamic event. I drove the ATV over there and saw a bunch of humans attacking a gigantic alien monster. We had to shoot the thing’s underarms until its arms fell off and then vanquish it for good. It was a high-adrenaline game, but it wasn’t a particularly riveting or emotional battle.

“We wanted to wait until we had something meaty to play,” said Nick Beliaeff (pictured above), head of development at Trion. “We’ve focused on having something fun to play and a good show to watch without compromising the quality of the other.”

The world of San Francisco is huge in its own right, and the game will expand to include other regions of the San Francisco Bay Area over time. If all goes as planned, the story will never end. Stern said shooting has begun for the two-hour TV pilot and “it is really coming together.” The team has worked on shows or movies such as Battlestar Galactica, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Sin city.

Check out our video interview with Nick Beliaeff of Trion below and our screenshot gallery.

The third-person shooter Defiance will debut on the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 in April 2013.

Filed under: Business, Games, Media

Trion prepares to host third-party games on its online gaming platform

Dean Takahashi — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:00:54 +0000

Game maker Trion Worlds, which successfully launched its first major online role-playing fantasy game, Rift, back in March, is now unveiling a game platform to publish games created by other companies.

While Trion will continue making massively multiplayer online games such as its upcoming End of Nations and Defiance titles, the platform, called Project Red Door, is a way for the Redwood City, Calif.-based company to make a lot more money than it otherwise would, said Lars Buttler, chief executive of Trion, in an interview. The two-pronged initiative will have a consumer platform on the web and a publishing platform for game makers.

If it can start publishing third-party games in the first part of 2012, Trion could become a much bigger player in the lucrative online game market. The new strategy shows that Trion is making one of the biggest bets that a startup has ever made in the video game industry.

“We’re doing this because we see this massive shift in entertainment, which is transforming traditional content into connected services,” Buttler said. “The future of interactive entertainment is incredibly connected. Our job is to transform games into living worlds.”

Buttler said that the company raised more than $100 million and hired more than 500 employees since 2006 so that it could launch premium quality MMOs. But at the same time, it built a publishing platform that other companies can use. From a business view, the move makes sense because it allows Trion to amortize its technology investments over a much broader base of games. It also reduces Trion’s dependence on its own internally produced games.

“Our own games are just the tip of the iceberg,” Buttler said. “The true business significance of our company lies in the Trion platform.”

Red Door will roll out in the spring of 2012. Buttler said that Trion is talking with other game developers and publishers so that it can line up games that are “living worlds,” or MMOs that take heavy investment. It’s almost as if Trion is launching its own console, hoping to attract a lot of game companies to support it with their own games. Those who adopt Red Door could save years in development time, Buttler said.

For consumers, Trion will deliver a single, trusted destination site for connected games with rich social features. Players will be able to discover and download content and enjoy a suite of flexible account services, Buttler said.

Trion has game studios in Redwood City; San Diego; Austin, Texas; and London. On top of that, it has tapped Petroglyph Studios in Las Vegas to make End of Nations, which will be published as a free-to-play title, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods.

The company’s investors include Time Warner, Comcast, Bertelsmann, Rustic Canyon Ventures, Trinity Ventures and DCM. Buttler cited recent PricewaterhouseCoopers stats that show online games are growing at 21.3 percent a year, compared to console games that are growing much more slowly. Buttler said Trion can take advantage of the latest trends in providing dynamic services — where a game can be updated on the fly in response to user feedback — as well as modern monetization, analytics, and business intelligence tools.

Buttler hopes to make Trion’s site into a hub that consumers can trust as a brand that represents quality. Buttler says he doesn’t think of the Red Door platform as a social network for MMO players. Rather, it’s a destination for “games as a service,” more like Microsoft’s Xbox Live online game platform for the Xbox 360 game console.

“This is a huge evolutionary step in the history of our company,” Buttler said. “Our platform is built and we are opening it up.”

The risk for Trion is that it could be disrupted as well. While it focuses on the “deep end of gaming,” casual game makers such as Zynga are attracting huge audiences at the “shallow end.” Zynga can give away its games for free and charge for virtual items, undercutting the prices of subscription games such as Trion’s Rift. But Buttler said Trion remains flexible enough to test new business models as well to see what resonates with players. The beauty of subscription revenues, he said, is that the revenue doesn’t dry up after just a few months, in contrast to console games. And, compared to social games, the average revenue per users (ARPU) is far bigger.

Buttler said that Rift, Trion’s first game launched earlier this year, has been a great success. The game scored 84 out of 100 on Metacritic, a review aggregator. Trion continues to update the game on a regular basis. The game sold more than 1 million copies in under four months, and the average gamer plays for four hours a day. So far, players have spent 1 trillion minutes in the game and completed 1 billion quests. Players have tweeted more than 1.5 million times from within the game. Within six months, Trion has launched five major updates.

“We consider this to be the most successful MMO launch in the West,” Buttler said. “We have grown faster than World of Warcraft (the market leader) did in its early days. Rift has proven the technology and given us a revenue stream we can count on.”

Much of that success is due to the Trion platform, the underlying technology that uses a distributed computing architecture. The servers were designed to work in a dynamic fashion. If the game needs more functional tasks, particularly in a certain part of the world, Trion can simply add more servers to handle tasks such as physics or artificial intelligence of player data. That way, the game can support a huge influx of players into one part of the world, as can happen when Trion stages an invasion of the world. When the world changes, Trion simply changes its servers. There is no reason to patch a gamer’s own machine.

Anyone who adopts the Trion platform can use those same kinds of features and live services in their own games. Next year, Trion will launch End of Nations, a real-time strategy game, and Defiance, a first-person shooter game co-developed with the SyFy Channel. After that, Trion hasn’t said what else it will do.

Trion’s Red Door will be an end-to-end publishing platform that can be customized for each partner.

“The only thing you need is a talented game team,” Buttler said.

Filed under: Business, Games

Can Trion pull off a third-person shooter MMO?

Matthew Lynley — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:04:11 +0000

Get ready for a new experiment in online gaming: A game universe that’s tied directly into a television show.

Trion Worlds on Wednesday showed off a preview of Defiance, a persistent open-world shooting game that takes place in the same universe as an upcoming science fiction television show, also called Defiance, that will air on the SyFy channel. The company announced the game at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, Calif.

The tie-in means that any event that’s significant in the world, such as a cataclysmic event or a change in the balance of power, will take place in both the game and the series. But the worlds are loosely tied: The game takes place in San Francisco and the series takes place in St. Louis. As a result, the game and series directors can efficiently coordinate events between the two parts of the experience without having to worry about the logistical nightmare of having them tied together all the time. The game and series will be closely tied together, but separate enough to be avoid major consistency headaches.

That also means that the show’s directors can decide to send a character from the series over to San Francisco, and that character will appear in Defiance’s in-game world. Players can interact with that character before he or she heads back to St. Louis to rejoin the cast of the show.

Characters on the show will also talk about some of the most powerful and well-known players in the Defiance world too, said Robert Hill, senior producer at Trion Worlds.

“A character might be like, ‘I just had the most amazing experience in San Francisco,’ and you can be like ‘I was there!’,” Hill said.

Defiance is a third-person over-the-shoulder shooting game like Gears of War. It’s set in the not-too-distant future when Earth has been attacked and partially terraformed by aliens. The open world is part of the San Francisco Bay Area, so it will feature landmarks and other indicators that show the world is still Earth — though it’s lush with alien vegetation and life forms.

Like other MMO games, there’s a progression system that lets characters get experience points for completing objectives and killing enemies. They eventually level up and unlock new skills and abilities and get more health and armor when they earn enough experience points. Some of the skills in the game include creating holograms to distract enemies, lassoing enemies with an energy rope and pulling them nearby or cloaking in a stealth field and sneaking by enemies.

The combat looks very fast paced and it isn’t like some cover-based over-the-shoulder shooters that can sometimes leave players stranded behind walls while they wait for the right time to strike. Players can dash, shoot, jump and jump a second time while in the air in order to avoid attacks from enemies. It seems like the game revolves more around “twitch” gameplay, which relies on players’ skills and reflexes rather than progression in the game to make them more powerful.

The game looks great for an MMO — but that’s to be expected from Trion Worlds, which also runs Rift, another MMO. Rift also looks gorgeous and the worlds are very dynamic and feature a lot of moving objects and environmental effects. The Trion Worlds employees demoing the game blitzed through three or four quests throughout a ten minute demo, so it seems like the progression is very quick and players will be able to cover a lot of events in a short amount of time.

It looks like the game is not relying on “instances,” which other MMO games typically use on to segment the world and make it a little more bearable for the servers on the back-end. For instance, in World of Warcraft, the system transfers players over to separate servers when they are running through a dungeon with five or more people. This use of separate instances helps the back-end servers because they aren’t constantly bombarded with information from everyone all at once. It also means the players get access exclusively to bosses in an instance rather than having to camp out and wait for a boss to re-spawn.

In contrast, Defiance looks like it has players rushing around the world and jumping in and out of groups on the fly to complete quests. When players run by another group completing a quest, they can quickly drop into that group and help complete the quest and then continue on their way. They can also turn and take potshots at the other players if they’re feeling particularly malicious.

The same is true for the games’ large-scale events, called Arkfalls. Those feature large alien-like structures crashing into the group in the open world. All players in the area take place in the Arkfall and have to fend off aliens throughout the event. The Arkfall in the demonstration had players gunning down a giant terraforming pod to spawn a boss. The players then have to take down the boss to get access to the game’s most powerful rewards, and they are split evenly among all players that took place in the Arkfall. It looks like there is theoretically no limit to the number of players that can participate, compared to the limits in other games like World of Warcraft, which cap raids at 25 players.

All that being said, the combat demonstrated at E3 today seemed a little clunky. The movement of the target reticule wasn’t smooth and the hit detection on enemies looked a bit dodgy. When they shot at an alien’s head, the graphic would show up on the alien’s legs and torso even when it was the first shot fired at close range. A lot of that probably has to do with the early nature of the game. The shooting seems a little less refined when compared to other shooters like Gears of War and Uncharted. It also seemed like the skills they were using on-screen weren’t really helping much and the players were just blasting through the game with guns blazing and there wasn’t much strategy involved.

A few companies have taken a crack at creating an open-world MMO that features twitch-based gameplay and shooting. Sony was an early candidate with Planetside, a first-person shooter open world that launched in 2003, to moderately good reviews but was knocked off rails by a weak expansion pack that frustrated gamers. While the Trion team demoing the game was showing it on both an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3 simultaneously, the games will all have discrete worlds. That means that PC gamers will only play with other PC gamers, Xbox 360 gamers will play with Xbox 360 gamers, and so on and so forth.

“Those decisions are only up to the platform holder,” Hill said. “Right now we can do cross-platform play but we don’t expect to have that at launch.”

The game will launch relatively close to the television show, but Hill wouldn’t give any additional details about when it will launch. It will go into a closed beta before it finally launches.

Filed under: Business, Games