What’s that you say. (Star Wars) Bespin like gas mining facilities hanging in-between (thick and varied) layers of volumetric clouds around a gas giant. Sure why not, go for it. Sounds like a great addition near release or very soon after DLC.
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Chaos in battles can be mitigated via parameters balance. That’s also correlated to performance. Changing the size of projectiles, their speed, the fire rate, etc… will make the amount of projectiles visible at once go up or down, making performance go up as well as readability. So there are solutions, it’s just a matter of figuring out what we want to achieve 
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Even in EVE large overwhelming blobs are beaten down by strategy and well coordinated countermeasures. Battles within battles hopefully will become the norm because one blob out blobbing another just isn’t fun. Sure I would love to have a 400 even a 1000 ship battle but if the mechanics are bad then its pointless for the most part. A 100 ship battle can be more fun than a 1000. IMO.
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A certain amount of chaos is important for fun, otherwise where’s the risk? 
But yes, it can’t be completely chaotic or individual players lose any sense of power to influence the battle.
We can test and refine! And, as talked about a few times before, we could look closer at how Planetside 2 handles large battles. They feel epic but controllable.
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I think in these large battles to come the side that best coordinates their targets will win.
Imagine 30 ships simultaneously shooting one ship, it will be a chain of ships popping one after another, its gonna be lit.
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I’d worry first about how to get hundreds of concurrent players in the game. There’s too many options for space battle games to have any real expectation of a high level of organic growth. There needs to be a hook, and I’m not sure what it is yet. Massive space battles isn’t a hook, it’s a kicker. Superb article on the subject here:
A good trailer will help a lot as that piece notes. But creating the Kickstarter trailer took all your resources for about six months. Are you planning to dedicate a month or more just on making a good promo video? It could be something worth considering.
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Something you could outsource …
I would think there are a lot of skilled promotional teams out there … although … I don’t really know. Guess most publishers do their marketing in house.
Anyway it doesn’t feel like you have spare time on your hands. The art team maybe in a year or two …
Depends how massive. 
I mean, Planetside 2 basically has massive battles as its hook, and it’s doing okay, even with all the dev snafus. People still play for massive battles.
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Massive space battles is the biggest hook a space shooter can offer. No other game currently offers massive space battles with shooter like realtime controls, add the fact that battlescape features real scale solar system and planetary bodies, this game will be exceptional.
Just look at star citizen, they can’t even get a stable server with 12 people, and judging by how things have went in the past regarding their networking code it seems very unlikely that they will be able to offer big battles any time soon.
Once the game is published on steam it will sell bigly.
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Sony threw a large budget behind PS2 though, which helped get them enough players to ensure the massive battles could be a hook. If you can’t get enough people through the door to actually have massive battles, you’ll struggle to use it as a hook.
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You can’t really use massive space battles as the main hook until you know you are going to get enough players to have massive space battles. It’s chicken and egg stuff.
If you hook a player with the promise of massive space battles they aren’t going to stay around long if you can’t deliver them. If players keep leaving then you’ll never get hundreds of concurrent players.
I’d also argue that massive battles isn’t really a hook in the first place (as the article I linked describes). It’s more of a kicker, the same way that procedural worlds are a kicker.
The closest I can see to a hook is the concept of having battles that seamlessly translate from orbital to airspace engagements. That could hook people if the launch video sells it well enough.
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The hook is rooted in massive space battles. Look at Flavien’s own reaction to it. He experienced something that got him excited, and that’s a hook. I don’t know what he saw beyond 400 random ships, but communicating that to players is INS’s marketing challenge.
This is how it’s done.
This is how it’s not done
The first is a demonstration of the game experience in EVE Online. The second is some fantasy cooked up by Sony marketing which outrageously misrepresents the game experience in Planetside 2. INS tried the story-telling thing in their Kickstarter and I consider it to have been a serious mistake.
The CCP video is phenomenal. They use player voices. Those voices are talking about strategy and tactics that a newcomer won’t understand at all, but will be tremendously impressed by. Those newcomers can see that there will be a learning curve to figure out the game. The player voices are calm, clear and focused. They communicate anticipation and tension. These players are getting into something epic, and we see a bit of it in the rest of the video. CCP shows the user interface, the action of mining, of just transporting goods. They communicate the risks of playing the game. It’s about the game itself, not a story that marketing decided to make up from nothing.
So EVE Online has massive space battles. Those battles are predicated on lots of up-front preparation, coordination, focus and so forth. Risking accumulated assets is a really big part of it.
Battlescape’s space battles will be different. So their promotional materials will be different. It falls to INS to figure out how to make massive space battles into something worth spending money to experience. Will players buy the product so they can lead a wing of 20 fighters - because wings of 20 fighters actually exist in the game and need to be lead? Will they buy the product so that they can be one of the guys providing logistical support to the capital siege ships - because that is an experience that the game actually makes available?
Ultimately, those experiences are their hook. The massive fleet battles are the foundation that makes it work.
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I have to wonder about that Eve 2014 video: is that real gameplay ? It looks like a mix of real-gameplay audio and cinematic cameras ( SpaceJay style ) to me, but I never played more than a few hours of Eve and never participated in big battles myself so I could be wrong… but from what I’ve seen online and in videos, it doesn’t look like real gameplay you would actually experience. Big battles I’m seeing online are all point & click, zoomed out and tactical views; this video kind of mis-represents the gameplay as an action / twitch-based game IMO. But it does the job at being impressive and attractive, for sure.
Edit: like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO49yeIDDes
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This this this this! This is what sets Infinity apart for me.
Plus this[quote=“JB47394, post:61, topic:5914”]
Those voices are talking about strategy and tactics that a newcomer won’t understand at all, but will be tremendously impressed by. Those newcomers can see that there will be a learning curve to figure out the game. The player voices are calm, clear and focused.
[/quote]
Queue an op to defend an orbital whatever because you know one corp is gearing up an offensive op. When the attack comes you see a detachment force break off because the main attack was a ruse/cover for this smaller force to sneak attack a ground factory. Follow the defensive squad that breaks off in pursuit through reentry and engaging the offensive squad above the factory. Emphasize that it’s not a trailer but ingame footage. That’s the video that dreams are made of. That’s what gives me chills and why I want this game to succeed.
I played eve for about 5 years pretty consistently when I was into it…what’s not shown is the 2 hours of prep to get to those points but that’s absolutely real gameplay just with the UI off and graphics set to ultra. Nobody normally pays attention to the scenery in the background that makes the video look nice, but that’s how it’s played. Those cinematic cameras are cinematic cameras are still cinematic shots of ingame stuff. That’s what needs to happen for whatever you make of your own trailer. As a former eve player that is still by far my favorite trailer and still gives me chills because it’s represents the exact feelings you get when playing the game. It really is a fantastic trailer for emphasizing the incredible moments. There’s a bombing run near the end that is absolutely incredible and pulled off flawlessly. Executing fleet tactics is an awesome part of eve and should also be an awesome part of infinity.
Not shown is the soul crushing feeling of losing billions but hey that’s the game.
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Thank you. That was the point of posting it; it excites the sort people who would enjoy the game. That’s what a marketing video is properly for.
That would require some hardcore fleet management systems that the players would be using all the time. It would have to be second nature for players to get into the game, look for a fleet and fill an open spot. It would almost be like joining the crew of the USS Enterprise; find a billet on a ship and join that ship. You just go and do whatever the ship is doing. If you tire of that ship, go find a different one that appeals more.
So most players would just ride on the coattails of the organizers, and it would be the organizers who decide how battles proceed. Fleets would crystallize and shatter frequently, I would think.
I’m not sure that the INS guys have time to build that level of fleet management into the game. Without it, I figure it’ll mostly be a constant, formless push of attacks. Like any other arena game.
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Agreed. What’s more the EVE universe is on a single shard universe, so gameplay on Battlescape probably will require less commitment or at least different strategies. As for promotional videos the EVE one is immensely better than Planetside2 - having played both extensively, I prefer EVE by far and just seeing the trailer makes me want to reboot my character. Then again, as a former EVEer, I know trailers gloss over more colorful engagements:
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for sure
Maybe I’m just pessimistic, but I don’t see us being able to keep a single server populated with a dozen players 24hr/day. And as @crayfish said, you can’t sell huge battles as your hook to the game if you just can’t deliver huge battles in the first place.
If they scream HUGE BATTLES as their marketing message and when a player joins there is 10 players on the server that marketing is bound to do more harm than good.
That’s a great article @Crayfish.
I agree the possibility of large player counts can not be the focus of the marketing.
Even if hundreds of players were guaranteed, it’s not what people really want from a game - If I make a game with hundreds of players but all you can do is walk around and look at eachother, that’s not going to get many sales.
The hook has to be the gameplay itself.
The proc gen, the seamless transitions, the possibility of hundreds of players, these are all kickers - they’re awesome attributes of the environment in which the gameplay exists, they are not the gameplay itself.
I think the hook is the gameplay which is something like “multiplayer first-person tactical spaceship combat”. Which you immediately follow up with the fact that this gameplay is occurring within a real-sized solar system ranging from planetary atmospheres to deep space with the game supporting X hundred players per server.
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Even 400 ships is going to feel pretty thin when you spread it across an entire system. This means the encounters need to matter and have significant consequence.
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