Defiance!

I meant to write more about Defiance long ago, but actually working on Defiance kept me so busy that I just didn't have time!  So what's this game I've been working on?

Defiance launched on schedule on 2nd April.  That date was non-movable due to the tie-in with the TV show launch, so yes, there were definitely some late nights coming up to launch. At least 6 months of them. Yep, it would have been nice to push the date back, but we hit the deadline and the game is live.  It was an amazing experience to watch how much and how well the game improved and grew to completion over that time! As the first game on which I've worked as a producer (they hired me as an associate, but soon promoted me to producer of the design team) it was one heck of a learning experience, without doubt.  One I value highly.

I'm going to assume anyone reading this blog is somewhat familiar with the Defiance story, but in a nutshell: set a few decades in the future. Group of alien races in ark ships flee a dying star system and arrive at earth intending to colonize it, only to discover -- oops -- it's already occupied.  Years of negotiations ensue, earth not being at all happy to welcome intergalactic immigrants onto an already-crowded planet.  Some settlement starts but also some fighting, and at some point a disaster occurs: the ark ships parked in orbit (still containing most of the aliens and their colonization equipment) explode.  Accident or sabotage? Human or alien doing? Nobody knows, but the damage from the destruction of the fleet, the ensuing war, and the not-as-occasional-as-one-would-hope alien terraforming equipment falling to earth and running amok result in a very changed planet.  After years of war, remnants of both human and alien armies band together and defy orders that would result in massive civilian deaths, and the "defiance" movement begins to spread peace (albeit a highly-armed and rather jumpy type of peace).  

Set in the area once known as San Francisco, the game allows players to take the character of "ark hunters", highly skilled types who make their living from recovering ark tech and similar valuables.  Meanwhile in what was formerly called Saint Louis, the TV show follow the town of Defiance and its new mayor as they try to rebuild their city and protect themselves from outside dangers, of which there are no shortage.

The main characters from the show actually started off in the game, offering a series of missions that allowed game players to interact with the characters Nolan and Irisa.  At the end of the mission line, the two depart, taking with them a crystalline bit of ark technology that later plays an important role in the pilot episode of the show.  

Screenshot of Irisa, Nolan, and my character retrieving the ark tech in the game:

...And two weeks later, in the TV show pilot episode, Nolan and Irisa using the same tech to help the town of Defiance.

Here's the Defiance launch trailer and one with a little more back story:

And also, the live-action trailer and digital comic Ark Hunter chronicles that led up to the game's release:

Defiance is a strange beast, one from which nobody quite seems to know what to expect. It launched on three platforms: PC, Xbox, and PS3, which I believe is the first time any MMO has ever done that (and, having seen what was involved in getting that to happen, I fully understand why).  It is an MMO, but not what you'd call an MMORPG. And in the gaming world of today where pretty much everyone hears "RPG" at the end of "MMO", that's definitely unexpected.  It's a shooter, but third person, and massively multiplayer. It ties in with a TV show but is not dependent on it nor dictated to by it.  As executive producer Nathan Richardsson described it, Defiance is an "MOTSCTPOWS": Massively-Online-TV-Show-Connected-Third-Person-Open-World-Shooter.  I think Defiance's refusal to fit neatly into any existing game category is illustrated very well by the extremely polarized reviews on sites like Metacritic:

User reviews have totally polarized into "love it" or "hate it" with almost nobody in between, while critic reviews do the exact reverse. My interpretation of this madness (also based on reading comments) is that players who had a particular expectation ("it'll be an MMO like WoW!" "it'll be just like Call of Duty!") are strongly disappointed when it is not, but those who didn't have a strong expectation just play it with no expectations and have a ton of fun.  Meanwhile the critics really have no idea what pigeonhole to fit it into, so they judge it on every possible category that a MMO or shooter might be judged on, which of course ends up right on the fence, since Defiance does some MMO things well and doesn't do others; and some shooter things well and doesn't do others.

I quite liked the review from TotalBiscuit which I think does a fair job summing up the things Defiance does well and still needs to improve on, and why a shooter MMO has to do some things in slightly different ways.  Defiance is definitely an odd beast, but I'm very proud of all the design team did in the year up to launch.  There are some amazing talents on the team and it's been impressive watching them at work.  If you picked up, or will pick up, Defiance then I hope you enjoy it!  It's not my normal type of game but I find myself enjoying playing, and it's great to have an MMO game where you can hop in and have fun for an hour without feeling you need to set aside your whole evening. Having played through the entire game post-launch I definitely had a lot of fun, while also seeing places there's room for future improvement.  But of course, that's always the case with MMOs, the development is never really over.  Looking forward to seeing what future DLCs and expansions will bring, and hopefully many other players are also!  Since apparently over a million players have registered for Defiance so far, seems there are a lot of other people looking forward to it also. 

Above: Nolan talking to my character, while Irisa waits.  

Below: a little accident I had in San Quentin. Did I do that?  Er, well, yes I did. Fun times...

Video game fan videos

Over the years playing various games I've created a few random videos, all just for fun, when inspiration struck.  I'm certainly not a master of video creation, lacking both talent and time, but occasionally I get an idea that amuses me.  And if you don't spend your life doing things that amuse you, then what's the point of your life, right?

I was looking at the stats on my YouTube channel today and I noticed I have some pretty impressive view numbers for some of them (considering they're just random things I did for fun).  And I realized I haven't ever linked any of them on my blog, or at least not that I recall.

So here's a blog post about some of the videos I've made.  For the very first one, flash back to October 2006.  I was living in Australia, playing a lot of EverQuest II, and trying to convince them to hire me too.  Back then I was part of a wonderful family type roleplay guild called Saga, which had carried over from the original EverQuest. We hosted a tavern night on a semi-regular basis which included a quiz game for prizes and well as chat and entertainment. One night, a trio of male halflings stopped in and offered their dancing skills to entertain us: they jumped up on the bar and did a fantastic synchronized dance in perfect time, using various emotes to coordinate their movements.  It was hysterically funny and they showed up for a number of subsequent tavern nights to repeat the performance.  I assume the trio were probably the same player running three accounts and with macros set up to coordinate the movements perfectly, and the enjoyment from those performances inspired me to create this video using my halfling and an alt of my then-boyfriend's; with the computers side by side and some macros set up, I could also coordinate the dancing to create the same effect.

And thus was created: The Secret Life of Halflings.  I sent it to the EQ2 dev team to give them a good laugh, as they were hard at work crunching away on the upcoming Echoes of Faydwer expansion.  Over 4000 views as I write this.  Maybe not even all halflings.

A month or two later I created a video tribute to the EQ2 Echoes of Faydwer expansion, set to Van Halen's "Jump", which featured the fae jumping and flying around (and at the end, a halfling also trying to jump and plummeting off Kelethin to her death).  It reached over 7100 views before YouTube said I had to remove it due to unlicensed use of the Van Halen song, so alas, it is no longer viewable.

In April of the following year, 2007, I was actually hired by SOE to work on EverQuest II as the tradeskill developer. I had very little time for making fan videos during those years, though I greatly enjoyed a lot of the ones that other fans created.  (One of my favorites is still the "Pirates of the Saskatchewan" video created by user Monkeydarren.  The Arrogant Worms, who sing the song, are actually a Canadian band from my own home town of Kingston, and in case you're not familiar with the geography of Canada, Saskatchewan is an entirely land-locked province.  Ok, I might be a little biased by the awesomeness of the song, but it's catchy!)

In 2011 as I started playing a lot of Minecraft on a multiplayer server and having tons of fun creating (and destroying) things, I started playing around with some videos again.  A friend and I built an amazing snow castle for Christmas 2011, complete with an aerial powered mine cart track that played "we wish you a merry Christmas" on musical note blocks as you circled the castle. We invited everyone on the server to join us one weekend before Christmas, build stacks of snow golems, and let them loose at night to battle skeletons and zombies in a huge snowball fight. It was epic and wonderful and I filmed parts of it, and although sadly the details of the snowball fight didn't film very well (since it had to be at night to get the monster spawns) I incorporated parts of that into an overall video that I set to the same music the mine cart plays, to show off the details of the castle.  I finished this video very late at night on Christmas eve, hunched over my laptop desperately trying to get it finished in time to give it to my co-builder as a Christmas present (via an in-game treasure hunt leading to the URL written on an in-game sign).  The ending of the video is footage from the snowball fight, and for days afterwards as the snow golems escaped across the landscape, you'd hear random "KABOOM!"s as they encountered annoyed creepers.

A month later, a server upgrade mysteriously changed the world biomes around, causing snow to fall in areas that previously weren't snow biomes, including the snow castle (which wasn't actually originally in a snow biome), my original tower, and several other people's home bases too.  A second video set to Frank Sinatra's "Let It Snow" was inspired:

For several years while working on EQ2 I'd been wanting to make more EQ2 videos, but time and inspiration didn't hit until after I'd left the EQ2 team. In August 2012 the "SOEmote" feature was added to EQ2, which allows players to use their webcam to capture their facial expressions and mirror it with their character's face.  Having worked on the team I knew this was coming many months in advance, and had been impatiently awaiting its arrival to create a masterpiece of pop culture, "EverQuest II Numa Numa".  In case you're not familiar with the meme, the "Numa numa guy" posted a short video of himself lipsyncing to the strange Romanian song "Dragostea Din Tei" by O-Zone.  It went viral and many parodies and some new versions were made, including a WoW video which misinterpreted the Romanian words into similar sounding English phrases.  I chose to use the English translation of the song, and picked a male halfling to sing it, and the result has had almost 4000 hits since August:

The video I most wanted to make, however, I'd been contemplating for at least three years but had never found the time or enough motivation to coordinate it, since I knew it would take a lot of help from other people to create.  Basically, I wanted to recreate in EQ2 the beautiful 2008 video "Where the Hell is Matt", created by Matt Harding as he traveled through the world and recorded himself dancing with people of all nationalities and backgrounds.  Matt's video not only went viral but also made the news in Time magazine and many other press outlets.  If you haven't seen the original, click through now and watch it; it's beautiful.

Anyway, I had been contemplating how to recreate this video in EverQuest II for years, but hadn't figured out the best way to do it. It was the revamp of the old Qeynos city zones that finally spurred me into action in September, long after I left the EQ2 team: with the city revamp, the old racial villages were being removed from game and would no longer be accessible except in quests. Hastily, a few days before their final removal, I logged into game and put out a call for players of the appropriate races to come dance with me in each zone to record them for posterity.  A wonderful, helpful bunch of tradeskillers, decorators, test server players, and random others spent a couple of hours following me around the world and dancing on queue in all sorts of zones, which I compiled and then assembled into the following tribute to "Where the Hell is Matt".  The main character in this one is Domino, the character I created to represent myself when I was a game developer, and she's wearing many of the tradeskilled items that I'd created over the years for various tradeskill quests.

The video includes scenes from many zones now retired from the game, as well as featuring a couple of cameo appearances from some of the well-known players of EQ2 including Jethal Silverwing, author and singer of many wonderful filk songs themed to EverQuest and EverQuest II.  My main regret with this video is the haste I had to film the disappearing zones meant I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to round up other EQ2 devs and players that I'd have liked to include.  But it still makes me smile to watch it. Favorite scene: the section of the Matt video where he mimics the indian dancers in saris is mirrored by me mimicking the goblin in the Isle of Refuge treehouse.  The video is now up to 1300+ views, clearly not as catchy as dancing Numa Numa halflings, but still pretty respectable!

Alas, my video editing skillz are pretty basic and I've been using freeware programs so haven't had the ability to do anything sophisticated. Still, they amuse me and that's the important thing, and hopefully the view counts mean they amused a few other people too!

I can't create videos yet for the game I'm currently working on - it's not yet released and still very much under NDA - but who knows.  Come April, maybe inspiration will strike again. We'll see!

Defiance at E3!

So, E3 (the Electronic Entertainment Expo) has come and gone, and with it the first time Defiance had a hands-on playable demo of our game.  A large part of my time since joining the Defiance team has been helping to get the demo ready for E3 and making sure everything ran smoothly.  Which it did!  The hard work paid off and the show went extremely well with no problems.

And people were very excited to see the game and run around in it for the first time (or drive, on our personal ATVs which are a lot of fun and handle brilliantly).  We also had an exciting new trailer that mixes up footage from the TV show with footage of the game and really highlights the close cross-overs between the two.  Here's a link: 

What I love most about this trailer is the times you aren't quite sure for a moment whether you're looking at the game, or the live actors.  In particular, check out the real and game versions of Nolan, one of the show's main characters who is played by Grant Bowler.  Obviously, the character will appear in both and is just one of the many ways that the show and game will tie together.  I can't talk about any details that haven't already been made public, but I've been very excited to help out with all this planning and I hope it turns out as enjoyable as we intend!

Photo from E3 of the actor Grant Nolan playing the game he appears in - how cool is this?

Here's a G4TV  interview with Bowler himself from the E3 floor:
http://www.g4tv.com/videos/59104/defiances-grant-bowler-floor-report-e3-2012-live/

Gamespy awarded us the "Best MMORPG" award at E3: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/dishonored/1225010p1.html

Game Informer's review: http://www.gameinformer.com/games/defiance/b/xbox360/archive/2012/06/06/a-massively-multiplayer-sci-fi-shooting-gallery.aspx

The Escapist's review, with a nice selection of screenshots: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/reviews/previews/9719-E3-Preview-Defiance

Check out this photo of a bunch of the award nominations that were displayed in the booth during the show (this was part way through the day, not sure if this is a complete collection yet):

And if you can't get enough, a whole bunch more links are posted on the Defiance community forums which do exist, although in a very limited state as yet.  Those forums will be expanding over time as our launch date approaches, of course, so keep watching!

We've already got two fan sites I've seen so far, the Defiance Wiki and Defiance Junkies.  It's great to see our future players are as excited as we are.

Keep watching the official site and follow Defiance on Facebook and @DefianceMMO on Twitter to keep up to date with the very latest news!  And I hope we'll be seeing you on the forums soon, and in game in April. =)

Two Months Later...

This weekend marks 2 months since my last day on the EQ2 team. As I posted on Facebook that day:

They don't warn you when you get hired to work on an awesome MMO like EQ2 that leaving the job isn't like quitting McDonald's; it's like ripping out your heart and stomping on it! But today is my last day on the EQ2 team and it's been nothing but the best times, the best of co-workers, and the best of players, all of whom I'll miss ridiculously much.

On the day I wrote my resignation letter, I ended up bawling my eyes out on the shoulder of my long-suffering ex-boyfriend, to the extent that a lady who passed by as I was crying into my lunch saw my tears and misheard something I said and thought my pet dog had died.  When I explained that no, I quit my job, she looked at me as if I was a bit crazy; but my ex (also being a game dev) understood.  On my last day at SOE I was so sad, I couldn't even manage to stop by and say goodbye to Smed or Smokejumper or several others because I knew I'd just dissolve in tears and be unable to stop.

As most know, I was an EQ and then EQ2 player before being a developer; now I'm back to being a player again, and still logging in regularly to check out the new content and chat with friends both old and new.  Of course I never stopped playing while I was working on the game, but now folks know I'm the former dev known as Domino, whereas before I was just another person in the crafting and homeshow channels.  So I've spent the last 2 months trying -- and I think succeeding -- to reassure the crafters and the home decorators that the world is not in fact ending with my departure, that the game is in excellent hands under Windstalker and Smokejumper, and that EQ2 is still the best, most content-rich MMO out there and will continue to be for a long, long time.  (I am clearly a little bit biased on that last point of course, but I think you can make a pretty good objective argument nonetheless when you look at the wide variety of gameplay options, the independently leveled crafting system, the amazing house decoration options, and just plain 7+ years worth of content!  And did I mention the tradeskill questlines and the house items?  Two of my personal pet projects of course so they must be awesome.)

Despite being sad, I don't regret my decision to go learn new things; it's a fact of life that doing the right thing isn't always the easy path.  But my new co-workers are also a great bunch of folks, and my new project, "Defiance", is very interesting and will present a lot of unique challenges in terms of platform as well as game/TV coordination, and I'm already learning a ton of stuff that I wouldn't otherwise have had the chance to. It's a very different type of game from EQ2 and I think it will appeal to a completely different audience, but it's fascinating to work on so far, and will definitely help me to continue to grow my skills, experience, and knowledge to become the best industry professional I can be.  If you haven't been keeping up with the press releases, Defiance is both a shooter style MMO and a TV show in collaboration with the SyFy network, and I'll be doing everything in my small power to make it as good a game as I can also. Some links:  TV show info, interview talking about the transmedia collaboration, and latest gameplay trailer:

Still, despite 2 months passing, it does still feel like there's an aching EQ2-shaped hole in my heart.  (My friends laugh that I still keep saying "us" and "we" by mistake when talking about the EQ2 team.)  I suppose when you put that much of your heart and soul into a game for so many years, a bit of you just stays there forever, even as you look ahead to what's in the future.  And I guess that's okay; if I have to leave a piece of my heart somewhere, I can't think of a nicer place to leave it than in the magic lands of Norrath.

However, to end this post on a lighter note before I start sniffling again, here's the very first fan video I made, long before I was ever hired to work on the EQ2 team; I think this was made in the lead up to EQ2's expansion 3, and sent over to the dev team (who I had met at the previous fan faire) to give them a smile while they were hard at work crunching.  Enjoy!