Infinity Battlescape: Metagame

Battlescape
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The purpose of the thread while good intentioned, may lead to many ideas/concepts that quickly become out of scope for the resources that will potentially be available and may raise expectations beyond our capability to deliver. Having said that, we appreciate and read all the suggestions and internally discuss whether or not they can fall into our current scope.

Long term playability is definitely a goal for us, and we feel that delivering modding support into the hands of the players is the best way to accomplish that goal in lieu of providing MMO-like features in the shipped game due to insufficient resources available.

We’re hoping the thrill of combat skills & tactics/player & corporation competition/honing of skills will keep players coming back. Holistically at its core, Battlescape is an “arena shooter”. You will spawn, you will fight another team(s), one team will win. As funding increases, the complexity and length of the battles will evolve infusing more possibilities in the realm of tactics/semi-persistence, however ultimately you win or lose a battle, then start over. This is a successor to ICP remember.

It is not in the current scope for Battlescape to include a galaxy generator in to the game, therefore a galaxy/territory map cannot be navigated by players. We of course will generate a galaxy for the celestial backdrop, however there will be no hyperspace mechanics for players to travel to other star systems.

Players and corporations while having stats on battles won/lost, will not be able to hold any territory and freely navigate to those systems at their leisure to acquire resources & whatnot. It is possible that stats could include “planetary systems taken” for corporations etc, however again, members of said corporations would not be actively populating/defending those systems.

With more funding, the star systems where the battles take place can be procedurally generated as we will have more resources to increase planet types/textures etc, so the possibility does exist for a territory map in the sense of systems that “XYZ” corporation has acquired. Whether or not this becomes an interactive map that tracks wins/losses/holdings and intelligently pits bordering corps against one another in future battles…, I’m not sure about that, we’d need to discuss the scope viability internally.

If you could elaborate on your territory map idea with those constraints in mind it could be of help. I am not a MWO or a WoT player, so I am not privy to information that might help me fully understand your idea.

We understand that each players’ gaming goals are their prerogative, and that gaming features and experiences are highly subjective. We have a game goal/idea that we want to achieve/build. We have a scope(s) and a budget(s), and we also have minimum crowd funding goal we must achieve to deliver a product. Combining all of those factors, shipping a solid build is top priority to hopefully demonstrate our capabilities moving forward. Resource constraints will likely preclude us from incorporating many of the player experiences/expectations discussed on the old and current forums as an unfortunate fact of the monetary system we will be dealing with while developing the game.

That’s almost like asking what is the meaning of life :smile:

This is a tough one, because many gamers’ ideas of sense of purpose are highly subjective. IMO the purpose will be to extract the most fun you can get out of the game by becoming the best Interceptor pilot, the best squad leader, the best Cap ship captain, deriving the best bombing run tactics, or forming the most dominant corporation, etc. Our task is to provide compelling gameplay while not exceeding budget/scope. If there are players who feel features such as taking and actively holding galactic territory, setting up interstellar resource acquisition supply chains, or dominating a player run economy are must haves, then we simply cannot provide those gaming experiences with our initial offering. Our ultimate goal will always be the Infinity MMO, however there is a pragmatic path to be taken to reach that ultimate goal, and we are at the first stepping stone.

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Regarding the galaxy map, I think the idea was not so much an actual navigable galaxy, but a sort of territory map that’s merely a method of displaying how well one side is doing against another in the long term.
Eg the map could be composed of tiles. Each tile on the map would not be actual locations that you could travel to, but each arena battle could decide the ‘ownership’ of that tile… If one side kept winning, the border would be gradually pushed back towards the other side.

A requirement for this is that each battlescape system is procedurally generated because two battles representing different tiles shouldn’t be played in the same solar system.

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Randomized orbit order and position would be acceptable in my opinion.

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if battlescape is successful enough it’s likely some unofficial leagues with a similar setup to what you described @hrobertson will exist, if it’s not officially supported. Even MW:LL with it’s tiny population had one going. If anything this demonstrates the demand for these kind of campaigns.

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I think you’re confusing long-term goals with grinding, and grinding with skills (1 and 4).

A long-term goal could be “acheive rank X in the fleet”. This can be done with a specific set of tasks. It doesn’t always come with grinding, since the tasks can be sufficiently diverse and be somewhat random to not get too fast a sense of repetitiveness. Nonetheless, this means you can’t always do your favorite thing (I hate this arena but I have to go in it for the titale) and players will often track the most efficient ways to acheive the desired goal, creating by themselves the grinding that may not have been there.

Grinding doesn’t need a definition I guess as most are familiar with it.

The “skill” would be getting better at something, for instance DotA.
Playing a thousand hours on World of Tanks (to take the example I best know) will only allow you to get better tank tiers and upgrades, but not necessarly allow you to get better (though it should at some point).
Amongst many measurement, the Elo ladder is used in DotA and LoL to somewhat get a hold of your “skill” level.

As a side-note, LoL does not have any grind type really, except if you wish to buy all the heroes with the in-game currency, which is gained by playing games.

I guess many games use this kind of approach, but the best exampls I have in mind would be GW1 and WvW in GW2 I guess?
How would you see the interaction between the conquered territory and the player’s ability / gameplay?

Fair point. I would like to ask you: if you had all the time and resources in the world, how far would you see the modding control, or rather have access to, the functionnalities of your engine? Would it be a UE-like, that is almost anything possible, or something “limited” so as not to affect negatively the game and possibly make it crash?

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If they had this, they wouldn’t be making I:B in the first place, which is really the main issue here anyways if we’re honest, but unfortunately that decision was made a long time ago.

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My question remains valid, IMHO. Modding tools are not all equal.

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Alright, @INovaeGene, I guess my question was too stupid to get any kind of answer.

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Well, maybe there is no point in answering “if you had all the time and money in the world” type questions, because we won’t have all the time and money in the world…

However, when we do introduce modding, we’d like to give modders the ability to make their own games with the engine. Can I give a rundown of all the available tools/SDK features at this point in time? No, I cannot.

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Surely there will be significant differences between modding Battlescape and creating a new game with the engine?

Not least, the latter requiring a licence.

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Not every detail has been decided, but no, if you recall, we discussed many moons ago that the license/SDK would be free, and free to use to make non-profit games etc. And since I:B will allow player run servers, it will be a free for all IMO in terms of modding creativity.

Players will not be able to mod the official game run on INS servers (and official dedicated player run servers), but we do plan to have a dev approved/content marketplace for that.

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Ah yes.

From a development perspective, will modding Battlescape be different from developing with the SDK?
Would it be possible to basically make an entirely new game as a mod?

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The difference is in the tools/support for the task(s) at hand. We will spend more time developing the tools the art team needs to build I:B, as opposed to SDK tutorials/docs. So while you can do both, there will be more of a knowledgebase as well as tools on hand to do “modding” of I:B as opposed to a blank sheet of paper game design with the engine. But yes, total conversion Mods should be doable, but there is no way at this point and time we could go into specific details.

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It’s hard to say exactly this early on but we are planning on having as few restrictions as possible. Therefore, and again this isn’t set in stone yet, we expect you should be able to mod most if not all aspects of the game so that you could create what is essentially a completely new game.

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How do you decide who “has the skills” to pilot a capital ship to make that larger impact, then?
Grinding != skilled.

That sounds like the same “pointless gameplay” problem that Planetside2 has and has such a tiny and ever dwindling playerbase over.
You fight for a continent. It can take hours or days to fully capture. Then it locks and resets to nothing.

What often tends to happen is some of the sides just give up and let another “ghost capture”, as well, which makes it even more pointless.

I’m trying to help but all I can do is answer the questions that hopefully encourage answers that work. :\

I have some design doc stuff written down for an MMORTS and ideas on how to make it work since I think none of the MMORTS work at all outside of a “pay the most money and you top the global scoreboards!” way.
Some of it simply wouldn’t apply to Infinity, I don’t think, and other parts of it I’m just kind of sitting on.

There’s a lot of short sightedness of “Yeah, super long battles sound cool! Don’t you get it? It’ll just work because it will” without any answers of how to make that work in a way that isn’t, again, pointless and feeling like you’re just a gnat trying to guide an elephant across Africa.

Even in I:B I’ve gotten the impression of few hour long battles at least and 100-200 players.

In most games with that many players it feels so pointless.

Oh, Battlefield is a kind of good example, maybe? 32-32 makes it so you can’t win yourself generally, HOWEVER there’s still a lot of cool things to do that feels like you’ve accomplished something.
Like the whole jumping out of a plane to toss c4 on something and reentering the plane. It feels like you just “won” when you do things like that.
But I feel like I:B is going toward DPS vs health sponges for the most part. Or long series of respawns in fighters into death. That feels pointless, you know? It appeals to some people, and while people will be drawn into big battles as a hook there has to be something to keep them there.

For a Kickstarter it’s irrelevant I guess, because you can simply sell people on the idea of “Huge epic battles!” but then you have to actually deliver to find success after KS.

Good design doesn’t really cost that much. Bad design costs a lot.
It’s not about the resources to “make things bigger and better!” It’s just… the questions to make good gameplay with good longevity out of these big and potentially long battles.

I haven’t mentioned anything about a galaxy map and so on myself. My concerns have simply been about making a player feel like they can accomplish things out of 1 of 100 people on a team on a battle that lasts … I’m not sure how long still.

It’s about making something that will keep people invested in the Infinity “brand” that will lead to enough support Infinity:TQFE. And to hopefully have Infinity:TQFE be good and always fun no matter if you’re starting out, have been playing a long time, an whether you like slow or fast games.

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Sounds like the mechanics of battles are going to be VERY important. They should be complex enough and difficult enough to master that you keep coming back to learn and improve (Ideally for a long time), yet you don’t want it to be inaccessible to newbies.Getting that right will make or break the game. I wish you luck!

The worst thing would be if the mechanics boil down to just weapon power Vs shield/hull strength. I’d want to see many kinds of attack and many ways to defend (in the moment as well as when selecting load-outs) all with relative strengths and weaknesses. There should be hacking, scanning, stealthing, defence building and other systems, each being fairly involved mechanics or having many nuances. You have to make up for the lack of cover or choke-points in space somehow to make it as fun as a regular shooter like PS2, CS, BF etc.

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You’re absolutely correct. We’re hoping significant differences in the flight model based on environment will keep people coming back as each engagement will present unique challenges. I think we’re highly focused on making it easy to pick up and difficult to master, we look forward to working with those of you who pledge the developer tier to hone that concept to a fine edge.

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Flight model is important, but so is damage model, If it’s just an hp based system, it’s ok if the flight model is good. However a world of tanks like modular hp system would be fantastic, and a warthunder type module system would be incredible.

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Unfortunately the details of our damage model depend on how much money we raise. We actually have a stretch goal for it.

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Wish I could afford that kind of pledge.

“Flight model changes based on environment” sounds intriguing. What kind of variety of environments could there possibly be in space? Or do you just mean on planets?