Defiance is in Development for Current Generation Hardware; Here’s What Trion Worlds Has Planned

Azario Lopez December 11, 2017 11:00 AM EST

Trion Worlds reveals their plans for Defiance on current generation hardware and we got to see it on PlayStation 4.

Defiance was initially launched in 2013 as an MMO Third person shooter accompanied by a television show tie-in. Although the idea was unique in premise and execution, the television show ended, but the game continued to evolve to be its own experience. A part of this evolution was publisher Trion Worlds announcing that the game would be free-to-play in 2014.

Now, four and half years later, Defiance has a stable online community of players and receives regular updates, but Trion Worlds feels that it’s time to do more with this IP. The team wishes to take the game to the next step in its evolution by releasing it on current generation consoles.

Pictures are from Defiance running on old hardware and do not reflect the tech demo running on PlayStation 4 hardware.

Speaking with Trion Worlds, the developer doesn’t want to just announce a current generation Defiance and release it months later. Instead, they want to prove to the community that they are capable of improving the game with updated systems and graphics, but what seems to be the most important thing to them is what the players want to see.

In our meeting, the team at Trion Worlds was extremely transparent about where they were in the game’s development and how much community feedback meant to them. Currently, a small group at Trion Worlds has been working on a tech demo of Defiance running on PlayStation 4 hardware, and DualShockers was able to get a glimpse at the polished textures by checking out a side-by-side comparison with the PlayStation 3 version.

Also, we saw some hands-off gameplay that showed the game running smoothly with much better visuals. Trion Worlds admittedly recalled how the team ran into problems with the console version of Defiance, but added that the consoles in 2013 just weren’t powerful enough to support this game. After beginning the porting process, the team saw precisely what Defiance was capable of and continued to work on the project.

Trion Worlds appreciates their current players, which they say is 120k monthly active users across all platforms, and they want to improve the game for them as well as bring it to a new generation of players. Part of this is accomplished by the achievable higher frame rate, which makes the movements more fluid, and the better graphics, displaying the game in 1080p. Ultimately, the team created the tech demo to gauge the interest of fans and see if they would like a current generation Defiance. Along with getting an idea of what types of systems the community would like to see implemented.

We asked Trion Worlds producer Matthew Pettit why the team didn’t just make a sequel to Defiance and he said, “We didn’t go the sequel route because we think we already have a good core game.” Pettit also added that they felt games like a game like Destiny ran into this problem where a sequel was released, but it was mostly the same type of game with added content. So to fix this, they will just continue to support Defiance with new updates and content.

However, Pettit reminded us that Trion Worlds isn’t trying to bring the same game to a new generation of consoles. Instead, the team plans to make changes but wishes to hear from gamers about what they think about Defiance on current console hardware and also what they’d like to see implemented. We were also told that the game will most likely continue to be free-to-play with all the updates being free as well. Furthermore, purchasable materials could benefit the players in progressing through parts of the game, but all of the content can be accessed by playing the game even though the free model.

As Trion Worlds works on improving the Defiance experience, it’s probably a good time for gamers to take on the rare chance of being included in a games development. The tech demo that we saw showed promise and ran smoothly. However, we are not sure how the final product will look. We also asked if the updates for the older generation hardware will reflect the newer hardware and the team says that they are still working out how they want to handle it.

We are currently waiting on assets from the PlayStation 4 version of the game but thought we’d share the news about Defiance at the announcements embargo.