Hmm… The planets seem small. Smaller than the ones from Shores of Hazeron from what I can make out.
The terrain itself looks rather flat and bland. If it would have looked good from above looking down, they probably would have shown that off rather than hugging the ground or looking straight up at the sky. Could be mistaken.
The Inovae engine is clearly more advanced. Im not worried about that.
What worries me is that we now have Elite Dangerous, Star citizen, Limit Theory and NMS announced, in a 14 months period. Not to mention X: Rebirth failed miserably and put the scare on people. Potential backers will now ask, “If Egosoft can fail, why cant Inovae?”.
That website needs to be changed asap so people can easily see the updates without having to enter the forums. Right now, the only boundary is your… website. You can’t easily find the blogs, the latest video, or even your twitter accounts in that thing.
Yeah I’m working on it. I just got the final design last week however I’ve been getting distracted with engine stuff. I’ll try to get it up soon.
I suggest you drop everything else and finish the website. Every week its in this state is basically one less week of publicity.
I also suggest that, when you release the final version of it, you also release a summary of the blog posts and info from the last couple of months, with a couple new pictures to justify it.
When the new site is up the older blogs and articles will be filled in.
I just watched No Man’s Sky video and the first thing I thought was, “What the hell happened to Infinity”? My first reaction was that you guys should just panic and get something out there. But perhaps even smarter is build a great game over the next 3 years and release something that blows No Man’s Sky… out of the… err… sky. I wish the development team the best of luck - I for one am a sucker for photo-realistic atmospheric scattering.
Saw that video too. Interesting. I enjoy their graphical approach. But i enjoy much more the approach Infinity will hopefully flesh out in the future.
Im sure its good for more competition in these games. Devs will start to be more ambitious i hope
As someone else said: that trailer was missing more than it showed. While it seems impressive i immedietly started to notice a lot of things, like:
This does look like a very neat Freelancer where everything is very neatly instanced with lots of fake transitions to hide the loading screens behind.
Article by Rock, Paper, Shotgun where they apparently interviewed them on the game.
Nothing much on the technology, but the very end of the article said they would put out a part 2 on the procedural generation and art.
Yeah, I’ve been following you guys for over what, 6 years? And this year is the first time that I’m kinda getting less excited.
You do have what I feel is probably the most good looking procedural engine but you don’t have the gameplay…or at least you don’t show it.
I think working on an engine is something that you know “works” and with enough time you end up having something special. But that principle doesn’t apply to gameplay, and that is what games are about, gameplay!
That requires a lot of iteration and experimentation, and that is what takes ages to get right!
You guys seems to have started the engine without the gameplay while the other projects seem to have gone the other way around. They never show you only tech but the promises of what you will experience with their games. The more exciting the promise the less visually spectacular it has to be(e.g. Minecraft).
So, as a big follower of this project, I ask myself. Why would I still be interested? All I can see is a procedural generated universe that I already played in Space Engine.
Space combat? My hopes are on Star Citizen. Trading and exploration? probably Elite, maybe X when its patched up. And now NMS seems to bring what I really like, the true realtime destruction that was missing from Elite (that meteor being blown) and all the leaving breathing planets that I was assuming Infinity would try to bring in maybe 5 more years of development. I don’t care if the shores have foam or not but if I see a giant snake going through a sand planet I’m very excited about the possibilities.
I guess what I’m saying is, its time you guys look at where you are heading (which I’m sure you probably have but just don’t share it). From a “follower” point of view all I see is is a team that is very tech driven doing a great engine and always trying to get new features in but always leaving gameplay (the most important thing in a game) for the end.
I’m asking myself is what do you have that no other project has?
PS. I’m saying all this as a huge fan that wants this project to succeed!
No Man’s Sky isn’t a multiplayer game, in as much as you’ll never see another player. But the galaxy is the same between everyone and actions of “significance” will be shared.Not a multiplayer game - case closed!
The fact that everything is made from voxels is impressive (and that everything you will ever see on screen is real), but lack of a true multiplayer makes the comparisons pointless.
ELITE: Dangerous - 1:1 scale planets are already in game and the seamless planetary landing is planned as an expansion (DLC), but there is a catch - the space is not really seamless. It’s apparently not as bad as in Star Citizen (not based on instances), but gameplay and interactions with other players will be only in POIs and the exploration / discovery of new places will be completely abstract (you will have to get new POIs on the map), so there will be no true free-roaming.
Star Citizen - no planets, no space, but amazing spaceships, human beings, FPP immersion and precisely designed dogfighting. The problem is a lot of gamers believe SC will get a seamless planetary landing and giant terrains to explore in the future, because most people think that it’s just a matter of time, money and talented developers to implement any kind of feature in any video game (and CryEngine is the best engine for games, so it’s absolutely doable. Right?). SC “will have everything” because it’s the most expensive space sim ever made - the ultimate space sim.
They have huge fans and genius business model (they make millions on selling digital ships for virtual hangar despite the fact these ships will be available for free in game - amazing psychological trickery here and a big precedence for the industry), so the game has a great opportunity to be super polished and with tons of content made by experienced artists.
ELITE: Dangerous - 1:1 scale planets are already in game and the seamless planetary landing is planned as an expansion (DLC), but there is a catch4 - the space is not really seamless. It’s apparently not as bad as in Star Citizen (not based on instances), but gameplay and interactions with other players will be only in POIs and the exploration / discovery of new places will be completely abstract (you will have to get new POIs on the map), so there will be no true free-roaming.
Actually, that is old information. The current proposal in regards to free-roaming around in space can be found here:
The Frame Shift Drive
The game engine was always seamless. In the first proposal they where just trying to make sure that the multiplayer aspect would work since if you can fly around 100% free-form in a true to scale universe no one will ever meet. There needs to be some mechanic that draws the players together. However, a lot of the backers said: “Nope, not good enough, try again!”. And guess what? They did and in my opinion the current design above is awesome!
That is actually a great example of what I’m trying to say. The gameplay, how all the elements come together and how the world “works”, that is what I want to hear about Infinity and see it happening in engine! Just reading that the Elite team made such core changes to fit with their “vision” is super promising and inspiring.
We need to see that in Infinity. How does all this tech relate to gameplay and how much effort has been put into making it all work together so its no longer a tech demo but a videogame.
We’ll be releasing our full design document right before the Kickstarter.
Why don’t you get the hype machine going a few months before the kickstarter?
Sharing the documents, concepts and gameplay ideas will allow the community to do the publicity work for you.
I really think you should get Infinity in everyone’s mind before the kickstarter begins, why it is great and why it stands out from everything else, otherwise you will need to do a LOT of promotion during the small timeframe you have to raise the money.
Also someone mentioned the website, that should be your n1 priority above everything else!
Why do I get a studio page (INovae) instead of the game? Where is the press kit? Where are the media pages with screenshots (that are damn gorgeous) and videos? Where is the blog showing the amazing progress?
I’m looking at games like SpyParty where Chris started the blog and sharing the progress long long long before the game was anything pretty to look at but the game mechanics where damn solid.
I can’t tell if you are promoting your company, or your engine and tech? The game, what you want to get friction about is nowhere to be found.
I agree, but only because of a common mentality on Kickstarter: if project is less than 25% founded in the first week of the campaign then people believe it’s doomed and just give up. People just get used to the projects that got funded in the first day.
Do a pre-kickstarter teaser and a countdown (+hype and morales of fans), but definitely don’t release any info about stretch goals until you are funded (common mistake that irritates people) and if you really want to do early birds promos, make the price difference minimal (Sixense’s kickstarter completely died because of that in the second day - people felt like they missed the sales).
Yeah, the hype train has to start at least a month before the kickstarter. Too soon and there won’t be enough to keep the momentum during the campaing. Too late and the first week might be too weak for people to believe the game will be funded, and all will fail.
On No Man’s Sky topic, here is a RPS interview of the developers: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/12/10/interview-no-mans-sky-and-procedural-generation
On the topic of genre saturation, now we have Entropy,a new space mmo.
I do actually think that Entropy is quite the unfortunate choice, as there is already a spaceish-themed mmo called entropia universe out there… Was the game that instantly popped into my mind when I read Entropy.
I do however too think that the market might be saturated by the time infinity kickstarts. There was also a discussion about many ks projects failing the point of kickstarter by not using ks for actually kickstarting the project rather than using it for polishing the project. But then again I saw it quite some time ago and never since then. But they made some interesting points I think.