One of the things that Defiance Senior Producer Rob Hill likes to emphasize is that the Trion-Syfy collaborative effort is a Massive Online Shooter versus an MMO. He's got lots more to say about this groundbreaking title so keep reading our exclusive interview! Let us know what you think in the comments.

MMORPG: With the limitations on how many players and NPCs that you can render on screen has this limited how many people you can design an Ark Falls for?

Rob Hill: We had an Ark Falls the Friday before last where we had 50 people at an Ark Falls.  We only rendered certain amount of characters and monster but it looked very crowded.  The players still exist because it is all server side.  The sever is tracking all the damage and that kind of stuff so they are still participating you just won't always necessarily get to see them, but we did show them on the radar so it was just a mass of purple dots.

Read more of Rob Lashley's Defiance: It's a Massive Online Shooter & More.

Rob Hill: We had an Ark Falls the Friday before last where we had 50 people at an Ark Falls.  We only rendered certain amount of characters and monster but it looked very crowded.  The players still exist because it is all server side.  The sever is tracking all the damage and that kind of stuff so they are still participating you just won't always necessarily get to see them, but we did show them on the radar so it was just a mass of purple dots.

This worries me.  GW2 has the same problems.  With massive fights the engine can't render all of the players.  This was a major reason I ended up leaving GW2 and went back to Rift & WoW.

• In PvE you just have enemies dropping left and right even though you can't see someone attacking them.  Making it seem just disconnected and weird.
• In PvP you would be fighting a few enemy normally.  Suddenly you would start taking huge spikes of damage, and then 15 enemies would appear right next to you.  Little did you know that those enemies were there the whole time hitting you, but the game couldn't draw them fast enough for you to see them comming.

I am always concerned when a game has a hard launch date set by executives not by programmers. The TV show and the game will debut in April 2013. Presumably whether the game is ready or not.

Good luck and I hope it is ready on time.

That was a very diplomatic answer on Firefall - he knows that the difference in game engine and net code is huge and thats where Defiance is far ahead from Firefall. There is nothing more frustrating than lining up a perfect headshot and failing because the server thought the targets head was somplace else - Firefall still needs to fix that huge net code issue.

As posted by Trion's devs before Defiance is a true pixel-perfect shooter and that is pretty huge for a MMO.

Akurx, This game has been pushed back more than once. This was originally green lit for FALL 2012.

They're taking the time to get everything ready and with seven months to go i'm relatively encouraged by this. I hope they offer simular subs to rift. This game does appear to be fun and is different enough i'm very interested in it. I dont play rift right now because of issues with players in it. Though i might change that. Trion's an exceptional company and has kept things flowing. Though some of the decisions in Rift boggle my mind.

Originally posted by ragz45

Rob Hill: We had an Ark Falls the Friday before last where we had 50 people at an Ark Falls.  We only rendered certain amount of characters and monster but it looked very crowded.  The players still exist because it is all server side.  The sever is tracking all the damage and that kind of stuff so they are still participating you just won't always necessarily get to see them, but we did show them on the radar so it was just a mass of purple dots.

 

This worries me.  GW2 has the same problems.  With massive fights the engine can't render all of the players.  This was a major reason I ended up leaving GW2 and went back to Rift & WoW.

• In PvE you just have enemies dropping left and right even though you can't see someone attacking them.  Making it seem just disconnected and weird.
• In PvP you would be fighting a few enemy normally.  Suddenly you would start taking huge spikes of damage, and then 15 enemies would appear right next to you.  Little did you know that those enemies were there the whole time hitting you, but the game couldn't draw them fast enough for you to see them comming.

Yeah, I think I'll pass, this is such an anoying thing in GW2 right now.  Invisible Battles around you are the norm in WvWvW. Corpses appearing out of nowhere, spell effects without players or mobs causing them. I know there are limitations of what client and server can communicate in a timeframe to make the gameplay appear seamless. But they should develop the games with those limitations in mind and not bring on huge scale battles that will only appear on your minimap and each player will only see tiny part of the real stuff going on. Not a good design choise, I rather have them limit the ammount of players in a zone, then this selective rendering.

Originally posted by Grakulen
In this game the monsters are the last thing that drop off the list so you should never get hit and not see it.

Well.. in PvE this may work, because the now how much mobs will be around. But in pvp?

Just say you got into a 100vs100 confrontation, but only can render 50? So what now? So you just see your self and 50 of your enemies?

But the most limiting thing is here the multiplatform release. Consoles are not nearly as capable as a high end pc. And this will limit all this by a lot. And how will they handle this difference?

So everyone just sees 50 NPC/PCs or only console players, whereas a player with a highend pc will see 200 NPC/PCs?

And another point.. the controlling? Will PC player be forced to use gamepads? Because as of experience in Shooters, mouse + keyboard is always superior in comparsion with a gamepad. In the usual multiplatform game it is not much of a problem, because PC and console player dont play together or against each other. In a 32 player map you can do this very easy. So.. will they have Console player server and pc olayer server?

But nevertheless, i will try it out, to see how it will turn out.

Originally posted by Apraxis

Originally posted by Grakulen
In this game the monsters are the last thing that drop off the list so you should never get hit and not see it.

Well.. in PvE this may work, because the now how much mobs will be around. But in pvp?

Just say you got into a 100vs100 confrontation, but only can render 50? So what now? So you just see your self and 50 of your enemies?

But the most limiting thing is here the multiplatform release. Consoles are not nearly as capable as a high end pc. And this will limit all this by a lot. And how will they handle this difference?

So everyone just sees 50 NPC/PCs or only console players, whereas a player with a highend pc will see 200 NPC/PCs?

And another point.. the controlling? Will PC player be forced to use gamepads? Because as of experience in Shooters, mouse + keyboard is always superior in comparsion with a gamepad. In the usual multiplatform game it is not much of a problem, because PC and console player dont play together or against each other. In a 32 player map you can do this very easy. So.. will they have Console player server and pc olayer server?

But nevertheless, i will try it out, to see how it will turn out.

Its not cross-platform. PS3, Xbox, and PC are all on their own seperate servers, so we will not be fighting with console players.

As far as the rendering limitations go. I imagine this will be a much bigger issue for console than PC.

I will lightly follow this game the tie in to the syfy show sounds pretty cool, I have been around games for along time, one thing I do is, not over hype myself, get expectations to high, or over analyze, the game from what I read and interviews, plenty of arm chair devs out there to that..LOL  I just wait and see, if I enjoy the game I roll with it, if not I roll on to the next one.. :)

I try to give games a chance to become their own game and not compared to every other game on the market, bringing to much baggage from game to game can kill your fun pretty quick. So far I have enjoyed Trion World games and wish them the best of luck..