Defiance: A World Where Games and TV Collide

Fictional television shows have occasionally tried to glom onto the world of gaming. ABC's Lost had the Lost Experience, an alternate reality game, plus a video game called Lost: Via Domus, which no one remembers. The CSI franchise and Doctor Who each had a handful. The Walking Dead just tried it too. Typically the game arrives long after the show has become popular (or long after it's been cancelled, in the case of Star Trek and Buffy: The Vampire Slayer). Defiance defies this. Both the TV show and the game have been in joint development for years, and it took multiple contracts to pull off the simultaneous world-building that culminates this month. The television show debuts Monday April 15 on the Syfy cable channel in the United States, then globally on Tuesday, while the massively multiplayer online (MMO) video game by Trion Worlds has been in stores since April 2 for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. How well will they do? The Story Imagine a dystopia similar to Mad Max except with a lot more aliens—think Firefly without the ship. That's a very simplistic take on the series because Defiance is more than just a space Western. The TV show and the game both take place in 2046, decades after its aliens—a bunch of different species collectively called Votans—tried to settle on Earth in 2013. They thought the place would be uninhabited but we humans, very much inhabiting, granted the Votans part of Brazil. For a decade humans and the Votanis Collective negotiated while most of the aliens remained in hypersleep in orbit. However when one of the alien leaders was assassinated, full-scale hostilities known as the Pale Wars broke out. Worse, alien ships fell to the surface after some kind of "accident" in the orbiting arks. Some released terraforming tech that transformed the landscape. The devastating Arkfall, as it was called, ended the war, forcing everyone to live together. But the arks formed a belt of debris around the planet and some still rains down, full of valuable technology that many covet. Who are the characters in this future drama? On the TV show, the main character is an ark hunter named Joshua Nolan (played by Grant Bowler, the werewolf Cooter from True Blood) who travels with his adopted daughter, Irisa (Stephanie Leonidas), a young warrior of the Votan's feral Irathient race. When their latest salvage goes bust they travel to what was once Nolan's home of St. Louis; now called Defiance. Nolan ends up becoming sheriff and contending with human and alien politics as the rich families in town are Native American humans and Castithans, another race of the Votanis Collective. Expect some star-crossed romance and watch Nolan fall into a love triangle with two sisters, one of whom is the mayor of Defiance (played by the awesome Julie Benz from

  News source:www.pcmag.com

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