ZAM interviews Senior Game Designer Trick Dempsey on new cross-media event

A sickness is spreading across the eclectic, alien-terraformed lands of San Francisco and St. Louis. In Defiance, players will already have noticed that some humans are suffering from a mysterious, terrible affliction.

Today marks the day when the plague fully hits Defiance and kicks off the latest cross-media event that promises to once again link the game and television show.

As stated in a press release today, the new content includes:

"The Plague Sieges – an all new game mode, 8 new emergencies, 2 new pursuits, a new data recorder, and an all new mission series that runs from June 10th to 17th."

We asked Trion senior designer Trick Dempsey about the event to discover just what lies ahead.

Already Defiance players will have noticed humans doubled up in pain from a mysterious illness in places like Shandu’s Consulate, what story developments can players expect when the plague hits even harder on Monday?

Clever players have already discovered the origin of the disease and heard the effects of letting it develop further, but life is going to get a whole lot harder on June 3^rd. The story of the plague is actually spread across the show and game, so some important bits will be revealed on each separately. Though, by the end of the event, all of the information will be discoverable in the bay area.

From what we saw in the latest Across the Badlands episode, the effects of this illness are going to be quite extreme. Will familiar in-game characters be affected?

While characters all over the bay will be affected, we’ve spared our human stars from the rigors of the disease. We didn’t want to gate the main story line while Grant or Rosa had the flu, and we also did not want the narrative inconsistency that would present if they were suddenly well during their missions and scenes. When the full outbreak occurs, you’ll have a better idea of how impractical their illness could be. It’s going to get... nasty.

What kind of plague-related events can players look for in-game?

Hell on Earth? Initially, players will find afflicted roving en-masse as they seek a way out of the bay to spread the disease elsewhere, but Eren NiDen also triggers periodic special events in key areas around the bay. She’s devised a cure for people who have not already reached the terminal phase of the disease, but the vaccine synthesizers can only be placed in a few key locations. Players will have to protect the synthesizers in our new open-world siege gameplay mode.

This promises to be a cross-media event, as players engage with the game, how will their actions link to Defiance, the SyFy television show, on this occasion?

Players will see a very different kind of interaction over the course of the coming weeks. Rather than thematic crossovers or the handoff of a character, the plague is going to affect multiple episodes of the show and players are going to have their first direct intervention with the plot of the show.

This is the second trans-media event since the game and the show were released; do you have a particular cadence that you are aiming for on this kind of content?

While we generally aim for two week periods between our crossover events, our release cadence is directly focused on quality. For the plague event, we needed to dedicate a significant amount of time to the development of the new game modes and enemy types that players will face, and another of our upcoming events will have a similar lead time. One week was just too short to be sure that players got the chance to experience the content, and longer than two weeks really breaks the mystique of episodic content. Two weeks is about the perfect time between our major crossover content.

A noticeable effort has been put in by the dev team to improve the game since launch, what do you think are the main strides Defiance has taken?

We’ve been heavily focused on what we call “quality of life” improvements. There are a lot of features which were not obvious to players or otherwise difficult to access that we’ve tried to bring to the forefront. Shadow War, competitive maps, and coop maps have all become both more stable and accessible, and we’ve taken strides to make sure that our progression both in gear and EGO rating are more significant and clear. While that’s been going on, we’ve also focused on providing a steady stream of new content for players to use that progress against.

What’s your current priority for improving the game?

Our goal right now is to push to have more large events for our players to take part in. Sieges are just the start, and soon players will be greeted with a plethora of arenas, arkfall bosses, and open-world events to both test their skill against and to compete with other players. With our upcoming Castithan Charge Pack DLC, we’re going to greatly expand the options our players have. They’ll have a new race, a whole slew of new weapon types, and a mission line that will take them into a deep dive into Castithan culture and politics. The New Frontier is no place for the traditions of old.

I'd like to thank Trick for taking the time to answer our questions and make sure to keep your browser locked on ZAM for more Defiance news.

Scott "Jarimor" Hawkes, Editor in Chief