The seamlessness is one of Battlescape’s big selling points, but people are going to be playing it primarily to shoot each other.
We’ve been told and shown plenty about why we’re fighting and where, but we’ve only seen glimpses of the how. The devs need to get everyone who has access to the prototype together, get into a dogfight, and record it. They need to show people assaulting battlescapes, or getting eaten by capital ships, or something.
They’ve shown the tech, and that’s got them to the halfway point. Now they to show the game; that’s what’s going to convince people.
I can really use that sort of visual (screenshot and videos) over on the ED/SC forums to aid with the last remaining doubters. There have been a few who changed their minds in the last days and posted so. There’s still more pledges to be had from the SC/ED forums.
Flavien answered in one the threads why he doesn’t like this idea. If I remember correctly, it’s because it doesn’t look good at all for various reasons.
Honestly, while I can understand his argument, I’d also argue that it’s only a prototype yet. People can be far more forgiving when it comes to “at least it’s in front of us, just needs a little fixing” instead of “where’s that feature they say it already exists? Can’t see it, must means it’s another lie”.
I never even thought to use other successful past Kickstarter campaigns as media outlets for our campaign. Genius! What other games do we know of that got successfully funded?
[quote=“Tjafaas, post:207, topic:1096”]
Honestly, while I can understand his argument, I’d also argue that it’s only a prototype yet. People can be far more forgiving when it comes to “at least it’s in front of us, just needs a little fixing” instead of “where’s that feature they say it already exists? Can’t see it, must means it’s another lie”.[/quote]
There are already like 30 NPC ships flying all around these battlescapes. And they consume bandwidth ( at least server to client ) like any player does.
Yes indeed, and so what? They serve no purpose, they are indestructible. Yes, they bring some “life” around the stations. However the people playing PvP are not there to mess with the AI, otherwise it’s called PvE.
If all you wanted to show is the exploration part, fine, stations with AI flying around is great. If you want to showcase the arena PvP, then get rid of the 30 NPCs if it takes too much bandwidth and replace them with 30 players. Even 40 is good enough as SC promises no more than this number.
As suggested by many other players around here, even get a scenario with red and blue team, it doesn’t matter. It will get messy, it will not look “AAA”, and it’s OK because it’s still a prototype. But the possibility of arena with “many players” will be demonstrated.
I support you wholeheartly. Whatever decisions you make, it’s fine by me as long as it’s clear for you and you know what you’re doing. If you think for whatever good reasons that arena demonstrations is too early, OK. But the one you just gave here is terribly wrong, in my opinion, sorry to say.
That was a technical comment, directed at people doubting we could do hundreds of players. Ofc 30 is far from 300, but I was just pointing out that in terms of technology, all those NPC ships flying around are consuming server resources and bandwidth exactly like players do. So I don’t think that’s off-topic.
The primary reason they’re here is to demonstrate gameplay. That Battlescapes are not just empty places, but that there will be NPC ships flying around, collecting resources, that other players have to attack or protect.
We’re looking into organizing an event with more players. I’ve already explained that many times. The fact is, organizing such an event is extremely tricky. We’d have to open the server to a lot more players, but if we open it to forum members, the backers will be jealous ( especially the dev access ones ). We can’t open it to backers only, simply because we don’t have the list yet. And we can’t simply post the link to the prototype publically, otherwise there will be 10K+ people trying to connect to a server that has a max limit of 100 at once, and I’m not even speaking of the thousands of dollars it’d cost in terms of hosting / downloading just so that people could try it out…
So yeah, IMO we’re not in a state where we can show a 100 players battle, for all sorts of reasons. I’m sorry you feel like it’s bad for our campaign, but keep in mind most KS have nothing to show in terms of game. We’ve already demonstrated seamless transitions. We’ve already demonstrated that we can have dozens of ships ( at least NPCs ) in a single zone. The server / netcode is already functional, there has been streams with 8 players fighting in an atmosphere. We’ll try to organize bigger events, but I can’ t promise it’ll happen soon, because there are a lot of factors we don’t even control. That’s the best answer I can give you, sorry if that’s not the one you’re expecting.
Personally, I wouldn’t get envious nor jealous that other people get to test / demonstrate. Random lottery could be a solution, but I guess not everyone would understand.
Please could everyone stop posting aggressively defensive comments on the Rock Paper Shotgun article. It’s making a bad impression.
This article didn’t put me off this project, the comments from its community did. Not interested in playing a multiplayer game with any of you guys thanks.
Yes the article was bad, but you won’t get any new backers or change the view of the writer by being aggressive or negative.
Instead of starting with “This article is really bad, the author didn’t do a good job,”, starting with “Hello! Thanks for writing a piece on Infinity. I could not help but spot a few misunderstandings in your text, I hope you do not mind me pointing out some of them.”
The second of these two will set a much more friendly tone and might actually persuade the author to revisit the article, as well as hopefully turn more visitors into backers. While the first one probably will be ignored (journalists and game journalist in particular probably gets a lot of those comments on most things).
One of the points made there is that if you want to use controversy to sell a product you have to pick your targets carefully. This is what Alice O’Connor did when she wrote that article, her angle was to create controversy by calling it vaporware which made the article seem hard hitting. That probably pleased her editor. She chose her target well because I-Novae Studios cannot do anything but roll over and play nice with the power that the press wield over them.
That doesn’t apply to the community though. The more comments and debate in that article’s discussion topic, the more likely it is that the site editor will notice that something is going on and that perhaps there is more of a story there.
If that doesn’t happen, it’s all a storm in a teacup and won’t hurt the campaign anyway. Pledges went down yesterday after being featured on a major PC gaming web site. I don’t think that can be blamed on the comments in the article. It was pretty much a hatchet job to make an easy story. The journalist won’t be unhappy that there are a lot of negative comments on her story, she will be pleased.
Not at all. The second text will not change anything, nor the first. The first text is more sincere it doesn’t hide the feelings of the author at the moment he wrote it