Questions

Sledgehammers role

Go-to point person communicating with the community on the forums, on twitter, on facebook, reddit, steam forums, other external game forums. Reaching out the community helping with issues and advertising upcoming content and patches.

Manage community blog and website, and create the content on those websites.

Working with external sites, review sites capturing screenshots sending them videos.

Plan events where the games are going to be shown.

Internal events where people came down to the studio.

Gather feedback and rate them and highlighting to their QA and Dev teams.

Issues with Defiance on Steam

Our team is reaching out to Steam as they are having the same kind of download issues with the free trial weekend. Keys aren't being distributed properly and the downloads are being broken. Everything is being served by Steam servers right now, so if there is a download issue or key issue it's all on the Steam end right now so we are trying to work with them to figure out what is going on. Trust me your not the only one having this issue.

Does Defiance have plans for more Raptr content?

We are in discussion with Raptr to do some cool things. We did some stuff with Raptr at launch, but lately our team had more important things like fixing the game. Instead of pushing forward those types of partnerships.

Is sci-fi taking over the lore aspect of Defiance?

The (internal) lore wiki is intense, (our writers) have already been working with sci-fi's writing team on Season 2. A lot of that content has already been written and is in place.

Shotgun nerfs

The nerf isn't that bad if you use a shotgun how it should be used instead of using it to shoot people across the map.

Server downtime

14 hours of downtime unscheduled not even intended, no-ones happy about that on our side at all.

Cross platform difficulties

Defiance being a shooter style MMO you get those two different groups of people, and two sets of expectations. The console worlds is not used to a game like this or not been exposed too many titles like this. In that there is a lot of education that is added to our job. Looking at things more tactically and trying to spell things out and make them more clear. I don't know if we've been 100% successful in everything we've done, but I feel like we've done a lot to bring these guys into the fold and get them used to a MMO world within a FPS game on their platform.

Vision for Defiance community

The vision was to run it more in the MMO style, with a FPS flare. We knew the game was a shooter with light MMO functionality. A lot of the things we want to add to the game blow both of those items out and make them bigger within most of their genres.

Did the community suprise you with the desire for more MMO features?

No it didn't suprise us, a lot of the things they are clamoring for and would like to see feature wise, are also things that some of our MMO heavy people in our dev team want.

It was a fine balance of meeting the goal of what was outlined by the development team and executing against that. Now we are an open living game, a lot of the features and the content flowing into the game from launch forward is heavily driven by the direction of the dev team and the community feedback.

The community has been very vocal on what they want to see, and we've been working hard to outline those features to the dev side. Some ideas can fit into the game, some may need to be added down the road.

That's why they have been fixing and updating things, you will be seeing some of the new game modes into the game that have already been in the works or have been new based on community feedback.

Upcoming social features

In general the dev team would love to do a lot of things with the social functionality, in 1.020 we made some UI enhancements around chat. Such as your content sticks there longer, you can see a little bit more. Obviously we want to do a lot more with that, and thats going to come in with a lot of UI adjustments we have planned.

When those will happen I can't really give you a timeline, but it is something the team is looking at. I can't really touch on the details now because we're just not ready to share what those specific changes are.

Are there any plans to allow story missions to have a friend to help out?

Typically the main story missions should never be too hard for one person, unless they are avoiding the idea of the mechanics in general. Most of the missions we encourage you to play with a friend, but some of them we want to be more exclusive for each of you.

Shadow Wars plans

PvP and Shadow Wars are definitely something we are looking at, the main designer for Shadow Wars is really active on the forums in the PvP section of the site. Asking questions and getting feedback from a lot of the gamers out there.

They are looking at other gamemodes to bring into the world and how they can improve upon the basic fundamentals of Shadow War, it's a fun gamemode but theres other things that we would like to do to beef it up.

It comes down to the suggestions section, there are a lot of things they would love to do. It's like throwing a bunch of things at the wall and seeing what sticks. It's also what sticks and what's fun and what improves the experience for the better.

Co-op mission rewards, are there ever going to be any plans for specific loot drops off bosses?

It's not against our loot philosophy. There are a lot of things that we would love to do and things that we want to do, and the community has backed us up by requesting it.

We are looking at ways to make the co-op missions more compelling for you and your buddies to go in there and have unique loot tables and possibly even make it more difficult for you guys to do.

These are all things that are in the works, I'm not making promising but it comes all down to the suggestions thread and what we want to do. Hopefully in the near future I will be able to announce and advertise exactly what we will be doing with co-op missions and even within the chain of adding even more co-op missions for you to join in the game.

Video

Links