Hey everyone,
I stumbled across Infinity: Battlescape while going down a late-night rabbit hole of space sim games & man this game looks seriously next level. The visuals, the scale, the whole vibe—super impressive. I have not started playing yet but I have been watching streams & reading up on it.
What I am curious about is—what keeps you coming back? Is it the freedom to explore, the community, the massive space battles or something else entirely? I want to hear what makes it worth sticking around for from people who’ve been playing.
Also, for someone who’s thinking of jumping in for the first time, is it more beginner-friendly or does it take a while to get the hang of things? I have been juggling some Java training on the side, so I have check this still want to know.I am hoping to fit in some game time without feeling totally lost.
Thank you.
For 2600 hours, and counting up, it’s technical artfulness, the feel of spaceflight, challenge, and even promise.
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The amount of work done on engine itself, mechanics that support gameplay, and configurability, is awesome, earned my appreciation from the start. It is not without mechanical issues here and there, no, but the balance between directions is nice. Seamless space travel at up to speed of light and good visual hit detection sync do diverge, as evident in the genre and within I:B. Not entirely sure if it is definitely a cursed design problem or a solvable one, but here both high-speed flight and combat manage to coexist enough, for resulting sense of spaceflight to emerge.
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Yeah, sense of spaceflight. It’s free, uninterrupted, controllable, and intuitive enough. Can stand desync for that freedom of flight alone, so much opportunity for positioning opens up, with a huge extra benefit of putting the sense of scale on full display. When travelling on inertia, there are still things to pay attention to, or even act upon, like making turns, starting braking in time, firing guided weapons, most importantly — assessing the battlespace and planning ahead. And mmm, long thruster burns, and the relativity of movement!
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Gameplay does give a challenge. Still there are some things to tune so that it doesn’t get too punishing or unexpectable, but the rest are for the player to learn. Tutorials are being made, Sandbox locally runs the same gameplay that is available on servers, and a pinch of tooltips are included to aid in personal exploration of the game. Definitely worth to include more support someday, but it is already possible to just look up tooltips in Options → Keybinds, and check what each bind does. Then the next part that both feeds exploration and kind of demands it, unravels — naturally, there are mechanical skills to learn, controls to match them, ship loadouts to tune, to fit plenty of naturally occurring combat circumstances, all of which very often require thinking ahead on the spot to get into, or out of. Infinity: Battlescape becomes a strategic flight shooter, even if there are plenty of AIs around, and you get a single command to use on them — kill ships around them — that you can learn to use cleverly with some practice. And all this you get to juggle while manually piloting a ship.
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Promise still remains. The game has a long development story, passionate team and community. Plans for The Quest for Earth are not missing, neither is the Infinity universe, they just depend on I:B’s success now. Technical requirements to tune the gameplay loop are all in place, netcode improvements to join combat with space travel, mainly fix the relative positioning error, would be absolutely welcome. As do match-wide gameplay changes, for there are some issues with it imo.
So it’s… habitable. Maybe not absolutely immersive, like full on exploring-mining-trading-colonizing games sometimes are. More like a local space, where there is some lively activity going on from time to time. Where players visit it from time to time. Where it can become quite more lively still, if they so manage to get together for a while.
Maybe it’s indeed this habitability that is worth improving. It’s another thing, maybe overlooked by players themselves, that was nice in previous match design. It was awesome to join a server with five planets, and to bask in the sense that there are battles going over all of them, somewhere. And seeing player fly their ships between planets does feel really lively.
Edit: Worth adding, the community absolutely does deserve a mention. Hard to say in few short words, just respectfully and thoughtfully discuss, and all will be awesome. Somewhat quiet at the moment, people got some cool insight into game and life outside of it. Personally, absolutely worth the stay.
Feels a bit like an AI ad post for a Java training course?
We’ve had a couple of these, they’re really convincing, but the structure of the last paragraph feels like a tell, as well as the links to what could be considered “off topic” or “unrelated” to the broader topic.
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Was noticeable from the start, don’t worry:
But starting paragraphs were the perfect bait for me 
Figured, if this is a common question, generated or no, it may need an answer.
Thanks for removing the links, but keeping the topic!
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No worries, it had me in the first half as well, not gonna lie. 
Questions are worthy, good that they have been written here, after all 
Speaking of what keeps people playing, I’ve seen messages about the impromptu community event, count +1 most probably. Maybe worth discussing more in detail? 12h+ idea seems on point, should pick the time, plan ahead the activity somewhat, answer questions if needed beforehand.
For example, what are the most pressing issues interrupting flight performance? How big the demand for piloting and for commanding tips is, what does it consist of? Those kinds of questions.
