As near as I can tell, Infinity is going to be the last space sim all aboard the Kickstarter train. There is literally zero chance that it will even begin to approach Star Citizen in funding, and while I know the ultimate goal of Infinity is significantly broader than that of Star Citizen, there are a veritable ton of space sims that have recently popped up. Especially with the Kickstarter launching for Battlescape and not actually Infinity itself, why would anybody still be looking for new space sims? Star Citizen is going to do what Battlescape is going to do, as are a great number of other recently announced/kickstarted space sims. So what is Battlescape going to have that will make it stand out? As near as I can tell, it might have been impressive three years ago, but now there are so many competitors on the field and Infinity is showing up so late to the party that I just can’t imagine it’s going to go anywhere at this point. I was super excited for this game literally for years since I first saw the tech demo, but now I just don’t see that it’s going anywhere at all.
tl;dr: Star Citizen is going to let me shoot bad guys sooner than Infinity and likely better due to its frankly massive budget. No Man’s Sky is going to let me explore procedurally generated galaxies sooner than Infinity, and even let me walk on the surface of the planets. What makes Infinity special anymore, especially now that the “goal” is not even the MMO, but instead an arena space sim which are a dime a dozen as of the past year?
Well it seems to me that Infinity takes all those aspects and just does them better, I mean look at the graphics in No Man’s Sky lol, and I don’t think it’s anywhere near the scale that Infinity will be. Infinity also means more than just the game, what makes it great is the engine behind it.
Let’s be honest, Star Citizen only became this popular, because it has a big name behind it: Chris Robberts. I don’t think SC is a big competitor to I:BS, it is a space sim, but what else does it have in common? In fact the community at ST is a bit in a rage-mode, because the game does not deliver what it promised at kickstarter, besides the graphics. Also these high-end graphics have a huge con… only people with powerfull machines can take full advantage of them, which means the hardcore gamer fraction. I:BS can run smoothly on a previous gen. AMD
Combat in Star Citizen* and probably also Elite: Dangerous** will occur in space scenes, while in Battlescape the combat will occur anywhere within the solar system or on planets. Both of them love to taunt travelling between locations within the solar system, when they are only changing space scenes. Only when I found out about PlanetSide 2, did I realize what Battlescape could be capable of. Even though I-Novae promise only 128 players from the thousand player combat in PlanetSide, it might scale up with testing. Though I am disappointed about the news that Capital ships might only be controlled by NPCs, hopefully it is just a question of just a short stretch-goal.
_* - CryEngine 3 does not allow maps to be bigger than a few kilometers. This disallows a large combat scene with dozens of capital ships.
_** - Not actually sure about Frontier Developments game engine, it could generate real sized planets in Elite 2, but with their focus of space combat and saying that they might add landing on planets later, it doesn’t raise hope that they will be able to do it.
Three months ago, a lot of people were anticipating X: Rebirth for being the ultimate space sim and that they wouldn’t need to play any other space game in their lifetime ( I’m not exagerating, I’ve seen this ). Did you see how that turned out ?
Neither Star Citizen nor Elite offer seamless procedural planets. Neither are massively multiplayer. They’ll certainly have a good solo experience, narratives and visuals and as a player I’ll sure enjoy playing them, but that doesn’t mean there is no room for I:B or for more space games.
It’d be like saying that you shouldn’t care about Battlefield or Planetside because there’s already Call of Duty in the FPS market.
What we want to do with Battlescape is to offer players massive multiplayer battles, both in space and closer to the planets. All in a seamless solar system.
The keyword here should be massive. It’s not a linear, scenarized game made for a low amount of players. Our aim is to recreate the frantic, massive, chaotic battles you’ve seen in movies such as Star Wars, with up to 256 players per battle, in a semi-persistent game.
Some collection features would be very nice too. I am currently playing Assassins Creed II and i love to collect items like “feathers” that are spread everywhere around the city. Something similar would be fun for I:BS. Find and collect special locations, etc. Is it possible?
Also another quick note: We hope to have mod support (stretch goal) which will give people the ability to build unique, interesting extensions to the game that will help keep it interesting for years after launch. So far I’m not aware of SC, ED, or NMS offering mod support.
Edit: Apparently SC is going to offer mod support, but they’re offering everything so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised
I think this is exactly why SC isn’t turning out the exactly the way everyone hoped it would. When I first saw the concept vid for SC, I thought it would be extremely similar to Infinity (the MMO), but with a greater focus on combat in smaller ships. But whenever the SC kickstarter hits a new milestone, it seems like we loose something that would have made SC more unique in order to ramp op the graphics for example.
I’m definitely interested in Infinity. It’s seamlessly gorgeous in a way that’s never before been seen, but I have to agree with the OP to some degree… I mean, many of us have been following development of this engine on & off for near a decade @ this point and have lost and/or are losing faith. Is there some sort of a timeline in place, for anything? If this is old topic, apologies, but I’m one who’s moved on over the years. I just happened to bump into the 2010 tech vids again and decided to pop in here…
As for those posting about rage & backlash in regards to Star Citizen not delivering, slowly being pared down into less of a game etc… I’m a veteran backer with current pre-alpha access, have been all over the site/forums from the beginning, and unless you misunderstood the game’s original goals, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Things were pretty clearly outlined from the beginning & short the typical bickering about ship design etc, everything’s progressing nicely/for the most part the community’s ecstatic. Hell, the dogfighting module’s right around the corner!
About Star Citizen, the story was one of the selling point AFAICT (correct me if I’m wrong). While Chris Roberts is clearly good at staging, is he really that good at writing the story itself?
This is a genuine question, btw.
My experience with his stories is limited to two games.
Starlancer : fun and well-staged, but the story a horribly simplistic “Free World vs Bad, Evil Communists (did I mention they are Evil?)” whose Roland Emmerich would be proud of.
And that Freespace 2 Wing Commander mod : fun and well-staged, but the story is so utterly, atrociously hell-bend about showing how the bad guys would make Vladimir Harkonnen horrified - it was so bad that I couldn’t play it more than a few levels, despite its quality everywhere else.
So, was I simply unlucky on the games I played? Did this mod simply insist too much on the bad guys’ evilness? What stories did he (or his team) write that are good?
Compared to that, Infinity (the MMO, I:B isn’t going to have much of a story) should be at least decent, with great potential. The three morally gray factions, among other things, is a good start - even when you botch the unlimited potential you have like Supreme Commander did, you still have a decent story. And with luck, someone else will try to unleash said potential.
Seriously, if you ever played SupCom, read those books. Despite some major problems, and some minor ones [when you cough blood after blunt trauma to the chest, you’re -dying-. Drop everything and call for immediate medical assistance], it is still a mostly awesome take on the SupCom story.
It’s been much too long for me to remember and I’ve aged 14y, but I recall enjoying single player Freelancer back in the day and that my biggest disappointment was when the story ended. (which wasn’t that big a deal, as I then became engrossed in online play, which kinda seemed like the intended direction of things) If you’ve watched some of the official Star Citizen vids, it should be apparent that Chris has some extremely talented groups of people behind the game, (in all areas), and I expect they’ll deliver in the storyline, lore department etc. The plan is to continue adding chapters/evolving it as time goes on as well, which sounds great. Who knows at the moment though, it’s early and not everybody can be satisfied. Personally, while I definitely plan to run through Squadron 42, (the campaign side), I’ve sorta graduated towards/am more looking forward to online play than anything. (mixed with AI & exploration etc)
On a different note… for some reason I didn’t get an email notification of your reply, heh. (though I got one for a message I posted last night, specifically to test such functionality) Grrr!
What keeps me interested in Infinity as a game is that the goal appears to be the production of a general purpose space simulator in which just happens to contain players and their space ships. This keeps the game unique in my mind compared to other space-sims in development at the moment.
Star Citizen is firmly a space ship simulator rather than a space simulator. The space in which those ships will fly will be a poor representation of reality with no real cosmological dynamics. Limit Theory is similar in having an abstracted and static representation of space.
Elite: Dangerous has the ambition to do a proper space simulator with a fully dynamic galaxy, and is the game I’m most interested in after Infinity. The problem with Elite is that we’ve not yet seen much about how dynamic the galaxy will be yet in order to draw many conclusions. The simulation side only seems to go so far as well with actual space flight seeming to be steered in a more arcadey direction.
What I love about Infinity is the desire for fidelity that seems to be so strong in Flavien. That is the aspect of the game that will take it far, if the ambition can be maintained.
OP: Now that Blizzard has made WoW, why would anyone ever be interested in another fantasy MMORPG?
Comparing Infinity to Star Citizen isn’t even like comparing BF to COD - the very laws of physics will be different in Infinity because there will be enough space for Newtonian-physics-in-a-vacuum-style acceleration rather than airplanes without any ground to crash into.
Oh yeah and then there’s the whole 256-player slugfest in an “arena” the size of our entire Solar system. DAoC, EVE, and PlanetSide (1 and 2) all manged larger player-numbers*, and there are plenty of infinite games out there, but if anyone know of a game that’s done both in the past (or is planning to do both in the near future) please do tell me so I can go throw my money at them.
*) I’m sure these aren’t the only games that have managed putting several hundred players into direct near-real-time contact in a PvP setting, but they’re the only ones I have personally seen do so - even if the experience was more like watching a slideshow than anything else.
You are quite right, nothing running right now, and only a few rumors on the old forums to suggest that an “interactive demo” might be release before/during the Kickstarter.
