Defiance is a number of things. It's a third-person shooter, but it's also an MMO. It's a PC game, but it's also coming to consoles. It's a video game, but it's also a television show. A multimedia collaboration between Trion Worlds—the developer behind the MMORPG Rift, launched earlier this year—and the SyFy network, Defiance is nothing if not ambitious; events from the game will have an impact on the show, and vice versa.

Ars spoke with Rob Hill, senior producer on the game, to learn more about the world and just how the cross-media aspects will work.

Both the game and the show take place in a near future, post-apocalyptic version of Earth. First an alien race came to Earth intent on colonizing the planet, and then their arks—massive ships loaded with alien plant and animal life—crashed on the surface. At the time of Defiance, the world is in a period of re-growth, but has been significantly changed thanks to the newly introduced alien species. The game is centered in the remains of San Francisco, while the show will take place in St. Louis.

"They exist within the same universe," Hill told Ars. "And primarily where we're going to be different is the fact that things that happen in the game will occur in the show and things that happen in the show will occur in the game. From a global standpoint this could be a large political change, a big environmental change, and they'll happen simultaneously on both."

As an example, Hill said that a character from the show could leave for San Francisco, show up in the game and go on adventures with players, before returning to St. Louis to discuss everything that happened while they were in the game world.

For nearly three years Trion has been working closely with SyFy to develop the world and ensure that both properties are in line with one another. What will make it work, explained Hill, is "lots" of planning.

"A lot of things that we're going to be doing are fairly well preplanned ahead of time," he said, "and really the kind of thing we're working on now is we're going to be getting the series' writers down here in San Diego to really brainstorm how those crossovers and when those crossovers are going to happen."

However, Hill was quick to point out that even though the game and show work best in tandem, both Trion and SyFy are working hard to ensure that they also stand on their own as pieces of entertainment. "To get the full experience, though, you're going to want to do both."

Defiance will also be a multiplatform MMO, developed from its inception to launch on both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, in addition to the PC. Whether or not the game will launch simultaneously across all three platforms isn't yet known. We were also told that, at least for now, Defiance won't be cross-platform, and will likely have separate servers for each platform.

Though it has been in the works for a few years, many aspects of the game are still being kept secret, most notably any sort of release time frame. However, Hill is confident that the actual game will be able to stick out in the increasingly crowded MMO space.

“Having a third-person shooter MMO, I think the market is just really ready for that kind of thing," he told Ars.

Listing image by Defiance image courtesy Trion Worlds