Defiance producer on TV and game: “concessions had to be made”
Jamie Donnelly January 10, 2013 - 12:50 pmTrion Worlds producer Rob Hill has said how concessions had to be made by both the TV studio and game studio due to the interlinked nature of what Defiance is trying to do.
Defiance is an interesting one. Trion Worlds are attempting to simultaneously produce a game alongside a TV show (with SyFy’s help on the latter part), with the narratives interweaving and player actions ultimately influencing the outcome of the TV show. It’s difficult to say if it’s a legitimate way of broadening a game experience or a hopeless marketing gimmick at this stage, but one thing is for certain: producing things across two mediums makes changes necessary.
“The primary alien originally had four arms, others had suits and helmets,” said Defiance producer Rob Hill in an interview with BeefJack. ”When we presented it to SyFy, we were told that having that many arms would be too expensive to produce and that helmets wouldn’t work due to their blocking the characters’ expressions. In contrast, SyFy wanted horses in the TV show which would have taken several months to build in-game. So concessions had to be made by both teams.”
Losing a couple of arms isn’t exactly something major (unless of course it happens in real life, in which case you should probably get yourself to a doctor), and I doubt anyone’s going to watch the TV show and think “man, this would be so much better if only it had horses”. But it does show a willingness to compromise creative vision, and makes you wonder just what else the game may have sacrificed along the way to accommodate the TV, and vice versa.
We’ll have a preview of the game going live later this afternoon, and in the mean time you can check out all the latest Defiance news.
