I don’t see how a “World of Tanks vs DayZ” analogy would work. The first has a versus mode on a single map, while the other is a more solo driven sandbox game. (Note I have played neither)
The closest analogy I see is PlanetSide 2 with spaceships only, while maybe Infinity: Battlescape might be capable of supporting a few hundred instead of a thousand players at start and unlike PlanetSide continents, the scapes in I:B will be connected.
A full solar system is a gigantic game world (hell, full planets themselves are gigantic game worlds), and a Battlescape match will have to be completed in a reasonable time frame to keep player interest. IMO, it’s more likely level designers will be placing potential areas of interest in which teams can scan down and utilize the available resources, as opposed to say a realistic asteroid belt like the one in our solar system, where every asteroid is a “goldmine”. Think of an RTS like StarCraft and the location of vespene gas.
If these scanable/exploitable areas of interest are not limited, you may have the potential for game tactics that allow for indefinite stalling of defeat. I guess my original point was, I’m not convinced an FPS space shooter can operate within a fully explorable/exploitable solar system. So technically, while a player is free to fly anywhere and explore anything as long as they have enough fuel, a team that can more quickly discover these limited resource points are better equppied to defeat their opponent. This is not to say that you can’t have indefinite resources and limit other aspects of gameplay to ensure players do not disperse to a level that makes battles never ending, but how intrusive would those game mechanics become?
The core gameplay feature we want to present to players is that of multiple team/squadron skirmishes coalescing and culminating into an endgame huge space battle scenario. That might be hard to achieve (in a reasonable time frame) without restricting areas of interest IMO. So exactly how “free” is the roaming if the explorable areas of interest are placed by a level designer? “free roaming” and “fully explorable” may mean different things to different players is I guess what I am getting at. To some players that might imply sandbox gameplay, which to my knowledge, is not going to be a stretch goal for I:B. Now I guess we can argue what sandbox means/implies 
Very large. I thought about it the other day. I mean Planetside 2’s total playable area is something like 32 square kilometers. Farcry 2, 80 square kilometers. World of Warcraft, 207 square kilometers. Fuel, 14,400 square kilometers. Minecraft (playable lands) 4.1 quadrillion square kilometers. Infinity simulating one solar system assuming a solar system similar in size to ours, 100 AU as the generally accepted limit or 2.2379523e+20 square kilometers in a plane. Obviously far more when looking at cubic kilometers. I assume, you might not simulate all that Oort cloud and beyond but needless to say, it’s very large. Certainly many orders of magnitude larger than any game that isn’t procedurally generated. Even if we played on a single planet, in a game with hundreds of people, we would be veryyyy hard pressed to find each other without game design help.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s kinda the appeal of the I-Novae engine.
It was also my understanding that Battlescape matches would last a day or more and that players would join and leave throughout. If I-Novae have switched their target audience to the attention-deficient mass market then I’d love to know now before I give lots of money in the Kickstarter.
Edit: Found this:
I expect as time goes by the game will be easier to win. Desired time from four to seven days. Ties possibly.
I’m not saying it can’t last that long nor that we don’t want it to. However, we simply don’t have a team to make an MMO at this stage, and IMO feature creep via “fully explorable solar system” stretch goals could get us there on paper pretty quickly. That seems to be a common trap for crowd funded projects. At this point in time, who knows what is optimum for gameplay/viability of the product. I guess that’s what alpha testing will be for 
Hopefully the game is appealing to a wide range of play styles. For me personally, a match lasting a week sounds pretty cool, as long as a casual gamer can enjoy the match for a few hours here & there and still feel like they are contributing.
Having said all that, if we only achieve the minimum funding goal, the matches will likely be like ~30 minutes long tug of wars with fixed areas of interest. That’s a drastic difference in gameplay via stretch goals.
What I understand of what Keith has described, the fully explorable solar system is true inasmuch as the fact that you can travel to any part of it, at any time, with no restrictions; rather than in the sense that there’s going to be dedicated exploration content.
“Exploring” the Battlescape solar system would be like loading up a private match in Halo and “exploring” one of the maps (I guess the best analogue would Reach’s Forge World map); wandering around looking at everything there, but not really ‘doing’ anything. Just many, many times bigger.
I believe that it has been mentioned several times before that there will be a seamless open solar system, and resources so we can gather and fight over those things, not a WoT in space. Correct me if I’m wrong.
There will be different funding goals with different levels of gameplay, as mentioned above:
So, if you only raise minimum KS then you will basically create a WoT (instanced based matches with no relation to other maps) in space.
A resource system would certainly add a lot to the game play, but I’m not convinced it has much to do with people finding each other.
For that, I think you need 3 things:
That doesn’t seem completely unrealistic.
There is of course a danger that people become too spread out, but I suspect nearly everyone will want to join the big battles and will fly to where the action is. You still need points of interest of course, but a single match could have several objectives in a system.
Just my opinion. I realise it’s almost certainly not as easy as I’m making it sound.
Sounds good. I just hope you don’t have to sacrifice gameplay to get that quality. You are, as you say, a small team with limited resources. Good luck.
I think the system that EVE has is good enough. A sort of list of players, planets, stations ect close to you and you can warp to them. Also, the player/station has an icon on the actual screen which you can click to travel to it.
Wat u say?
I’m partially agreeing with CapainRogers and disagreeing with your last statement lolsparta.
First I hope that Infinity:Battlescapes Kickstarted goes way over its minimum goal and will implement the scale that I hope will be in this game. But if not I will still be happy to see I-Novae studios show that they can put out a product.
What I wish for in terms of gameplay has been mentioned several times in the past, mostly in the old forums. It’s pretty lengthy to go into detail but to make it short scale is the most important thing for me. Also there are comparison games, Planetside 2 being one of them.
Optional: Ether a random building placement or player building placement based on a simple instant resource scanner with limited range
EVEs warp system takes all the freedom of the spaces between the fixed POIs and removes possibilities of in warp interdiction … I think interdiction would be awesome.
I know most of those points are resource intensive … just want to voice my opinion.
Even though those points are related to the connection of the Battlescapes and the Star System they all are pretty multi faceted … so please discuss them in a separate thread.
Yeah, you can’t warp for a long time in EVE. You have to warp to a stargate, go through the stargate, warp to another stargate, go through it ect in autopilot. In that sense Eve isn’t really open world. It is divided into solar systems. In this you should be able to just have one long warp to get from one place to another.
No, I don’t think you get what I meant.
In eve you can’t control your warp drive directly. You can’t turn left a little to aim at another Jumpgate because you misclicked. You need to finish your warp and then warp again. That won’t allow for in warp interception (the only exception being ambushes).
What I’m saying is full or semi control of direction while in FTL. It has nothing to do with multiple Starsystems.