Defiance: the console MMO that might just work

[Administrator]

The nicest thing you can say about Defiance is that it achieves one of the most elusive and difficult challenges in the games business and makes it look relatively easy. Here it is, that fabled beast, a creature so rare and endangered it's almost mythical: the server-based, massively multiplayer console game.
"Nobody has really cracked that nut," agrees executive producer Nathan Richardsson. The Icelander was previously a key executive at Eve Online studio CCP, and beloved of fans as the shirtless, beer-swilling rabble-rouser of CCP's Fanfest events: a self-described "technoviking". Today he's in more restrained mood, representing his new employer Trion Worlds to the press who've come to London to sample a day's play of Defiance on rows of test PS3s.
It was Defiance that attracted Richardsson away from his tiny homeland, he tells me - specifically, the challenge of realising a multi-platform MMO. Defiance will launch on PC and Xbox 360 as well as PS3 in April next year. Only a scant few games like Final Fantasy 11 and DC Universe Online have preceded it, with the walled garden of Xbox Live proving particularly hard for massively multiplayer gaming to breach. If that weren't ambitious enough, Defiance has a fourth platform of sorts: a SyFy TV series set in the same world, with a plotline that will supposedly reflect events in the game world, and vice versa.
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