God forbid they got millions, I need to sleep…
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Personaly and basicaly
For gameplay one my favorite gaming mode is capture de flag of to gain tickets score.
Also like every war game reward and fake rank medal like battlefield need to be added.
So without mystic and view. If inovae achived to drop a battlefield like dice in the past but in space.
With balance gameplay mecanic and less delay
You gone be rich as fuck 
6 Likes
There are so many good points about ‘hook’ and I can only say I prefer to look at Battlescape more as an actual space simulator based on real science (well pretty real) and life size planets unmatched in graphic fidelity and detail. Number of players, though good, is not what drives me to play Battlescape. Emerging and existing games boast this or that but none of them offer life size planets you can land on; what planets they do offer are moons that look like tacky Christmas tree bulbs. That said, I LOVE the fact you can get perhaps, maybe, conceivably (just covering my bases) between 200~400 players but so can EVE. After years of gameplay EVE has made available solid mechanics for large scale battles. So the uniqueness of life size planets you can land is the one thing that stands out, as well as the amazing graphics. That said, once we know the actual ship count and film a large scale battle against the backdrop of life size planets, it will usher in a new era of gaming > and Infinity will be at its pinnacle whether it’s 100 or 400 ships.
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It’s not a good idea to advertise a feature that may never happen. I’m not sure you realise how hard it is for a multiplayer game to hit 200 concurrent users, let alone getting them all into a single battle.
The game will have a growth phase, during that growth phase it is the hook that draws new players in. During the growth phase actual concurrent users will only be in the tens (assuming the game does quite well). Selling an experience and then not delivering it is bad PR.
The actual hook is the seamless transition from ground to air to orbit to warp. Get that recorded in a great trailer and it could really draw people in. If you’re clever, add in some aerobatics for the flight sim fans, some formation flying for the coop fans and finish with a money shot of an orbital bombardment because everybody knows “nuking the entire site from orbit is the only way to be sure”.
4 Likes
That’s right. Appealing to multiple demographics is important because I:B has features that actually do. That needs to be expressed in the marketing. There’s the true scale, seamless solar system for fans of exploration or the tech itself, also available in a sandbox mode at launch. There’s the large potential capacity and cooperative gameplay, the Newtonian physics, unique take on the arena shooter, large-scale tactics, potential modding… Games used to truly start their marketing for release, but look at how many games are popular in beta. Marketing the beta would mean the release could deliver large concurrent player counts.
There are many game mechanics that could funnel players into the same place and time to ensure large battles. The locational battlescapes are a good idea, but what about ‘temporal’ battlescapes? Maybe not in a sense as strict as that. Perhaps small squads would either be player-formed outside of matches or selected randomly for those not in squads. A team would consist of a large number of squads. A squadleader, either voted in or by lot, could announce ‘raids’ while in a match. This would be a beacon or some UI feature visible to all members of that team, with squadleaders able to enlist their squad. The decision making process would just rely on voice or text comms, and then the ‘raid’ would display its date, time, place, and battle plan. This allows for lots of flexibility with multiple raids coordinating with each other and eliminates the problem of just a few players controlling the whole team. Also, it works even if there aren’t massive battles. This would probably work best if all players in a match were in close timezones.
To prevent squads from all doing their own thing, just make certain tasks require more firepower, and these are necessary to win. The toughest resource base needs a team effort, same with the toughest station. Making the sites differ in difficulty (with more easier ones and fewer tough ones) would bring a natural progression from small skirmishes and few resources to fleet behavior and cap ships.
In an actual battle, since many players aren’t used to voice comms and text comms are inconvenient in an action game, a signaling system with beacons/icons could be used for essential information.
The only thing I’m worried about is lack of replayability. Sure, the map is huge, but if it’s the same each time, tactics are eventually going to get stale. Perhaps you could give each faction a subtle specialty, like cheaper capital ships. Maybe change the allegiances of the bases every game.
1 Like
It’s more that the game cherry-picks a couple fun parts of Newtonian physics that other games overlook due to difficulty of implementation. (like the networking issues of such high speed combat.) I don’t view the game as being sim heavy at all.
Having some sweet Newtonian physics in space will let the gameplay feel far more dynamic (when the atmospheric combat gets tightened up), with different atmospheric thicknesses and altitudes leading to completely different handling ships, maybe even totally different tactics in combat at those locations.
It’s something new, and that’s just as exiting as the high [possible] player counts.
You want your hardcore Newtonian 6DOF flight and combat? We’ve got that. You want your ‘fighter jets in space’ physics? Fly in atmosphere, we’ve got that. You want ‘submarines in space’? Deep in the atmosphere of a gas giant, we’ve got that too.
3 Likes
E:D in a nutshell.
3 Likes
Why not just say if you’re shooting for 100v100, that if there’s only 20 players,it fills the other 80 with bots then? Maybe you have abilities to command the AI as well. And I thought orbital bombardment wasn’t going to be a thing, although I guess every developer embellishes on gameplay with their initial cinematic trailers.
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Battlescape won’t have bots. Writing an appropriate AI would take time that is not available.
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Orbital bombardment was always going to be a thing. It was listed as one of the core features in the kickstarter.
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Not on release but I think it should be number 1 post release feature.
And it could be the one thing to hook lots of players…
“I’ve downloaded Battlescape, gonna see what it’s like.”
“Battlewhat”?
“You know the one with the orbital bombardment, that video I showed you.”
“Oh yeah, that looked cool, send me a link?”
2 Likes
And yet, it might be a very urgent feature, depending on the matching system / battle zone creation.
What’s the absolute minimum number or players for the battle zone to be correctly playable? To give a comparison, I don’t imagine playing a Battlfield map meant for 40 players with only 6 of them.
How will the matching system react? Put “on hold” until enough players join? Let them play anyway?
I guess the bare minimum of AI will be the cargo movement. More of a mapping, truly, but still counts as one ^^
4 Likes
Ideally, two - depending on your definition of “correctly”.
If INS creates a series of layers of gameplay, each targeted at successively-larger player populations, then you can scale the game arbitrarily.
But that’s because Battlefield was designed for 40 players. Design for a variable number of players and it’ll work fine.
We did this for our ARMA 3 coop server. If the player population is low, then it’s just a few infantry going in against a small AI force. They rely on a simple automated transport mechanism to get to the action, and it falls to them to either support each other or keep dying and using that transport to get back to the fight each time. There is one key objective in every operation, and even a single player can pull it off.
From there, you start adding players. Bigger teams. Players start piloting helicopter transports, air attack assets, support roles, armor, etc. As players bring those to bear, the AI starts to bring countering assets to bear, making it tougher and tougher to get to that one point of success. Things get pretty busy once the server fills out at 60 players.
INS could do the same sort of thing, leaving a core goal that can be accomplished by a couple players while layering on more and more activities as the player population grows. As the population fades, those other activities fall away and atrophy, permitting the fewer players left to battle it out at a smaller scale.
No AI is needed.
4 Likes
I agree making the game work with every possible amount of players is important and should be constantly be checked when designing the gameplay.
Most games don’t do that. And often there’s is no incentive to join an empty or low player count server.
There has to be. Especially as 20 players might be “low” for I:B standards.
I proposed a scaling “Map” in the past where more and more of the Solar System is “unlocked” the more players join and Flavien hinted of maybe implementing something like that at least in the “scale up” direction.
I would suggest for I:Novae to really oversaturate the Infinity Battlescape system with bases. Base density should be much higher than needed for a full server. By doing this it would allow the server to scale much easier as it has much more options. Allowing for a differen base/spawnpoint ratio per player depending on player count.
0 to 2 players: “Make Active” two random bases that are <100km from each other.
2 to 10 players: 4 Bases. Extend “Active Buble” to <1000km.
10 to 40 players: 10 Bases. <100000km.
… etc.
See how the ratio of base to player changes? Bases that aren’t selected by the server aren’t active and not shown on the map/ui and not usable but still in the game.
Every time a new match is started, reset the “center point” to a new suitable area. Having a high base density will allow for hundreds of different areas. There also should be some randomness to what bases are selected when the “active buble” is expanded. I think this will add some variety in the environment.
Still, when only designing for full player count these smaller engagement probably will just turn out to be deathmatches … I don’t know if that’s engaging enough to really make someone stick around long enough for the server to fill up … because this has to be the goal.
Even better would be (additionally) nested game modes that constantly run in parallel but work better with fewer/more players.
Many “space battle” Arena games do that in addition to bots. They allow for a player to destroy systems on the outside and inside the ships to add more depth and as a “sub goal” for smaller teams and lone wolves.
“Side Missions” could not just be destroying smaller parts of a bigger goal but maybe retrieving some physical or informational thing.
Concerning scaling again. I:B lends itself much better to that than many traditional games as those rely heavily on the whole map as a concept or such a thing must be accounted beforehand by a level designer. Just shrinking the map mostly doesn’t work. Battlefield does have different sizes of maps but they don’t adapt in realtime when the server fills up.
4 Likes
Allow players to open new spawn locations. As more players join, this will become both more desirable from a tactical standpoint and more practical.
That’s what I mean by designing in layers. As the player population changes in size, certain aspects of gameplay become practical. Certainly don’t automate tasks that can become player activities.
It may be that INS doesn’t even need to populate the system with buildings. Let the players place them as they acquire enough (free?) resources to do so. Of course, with certain rules about where they can be placed and who can place them. Perhaps only a leader of 10 players can place a fighter base. Perhaps only a leader of 100 can place a capital base. That leader of 100 would be a leader of 10 leaders of 10, of course. Or some variation. I think we’ve talked about these schemes before, where resources go to each player and they can be channeled up a command hierarchy, focusing them into the hands of players who can allocate them to larger-scale assets.
If that was the structure, then the players would be rushing to organize so that somebody would be placing the resources that they want to use. Fighter enthusiasts race to join Lomsor’s group because he puts down a bunch of fighter bases quickly and they’re always in good locations. Skyentist would attract the guys intent on orbital bombardment groups.
4 Likes
Another thing that’s important is how the lobby and queueing will work. I don’t know if the game on release is going to have a hangar interface, but games of this type usually do. A hangar mode where you can display ships, do customization, check progression trees (again, I don’t know if progression will be included, but it does tend to help replayability), and enter sandbox or battle mode.
At first, there should probably only be one gamemode and therefore one queue. If progression or player rankings affect matchmaking, then this could be made much harder (a problem with significant progression). Ideally, players want to queue and enter a game in minutes at most, so allowing them to join a battle in progress is the optimal solution. Players might be able to choose whether to join new matches or existing matches, with new matches being created at a minumum of ~40 players and existing matches capping out somewhere in the low hundreds. Since matches last days and are rather like campaigns of their own, players should only be in a maximum of 3 matches at any time. From there, I’m thinking they can either sign off from a match, sending them to the hangar, or quit the match, removing them from it.
To prevent mass desertion, perhaps a player should have a maximum amount of matches per day he can quit. If too many players from a team quit, the other team wins.
Another interesting way to do things would be to have matches spawn at a low number of players because matches only start with a few active bases. Players would have to ship resources to their other bases in the system to activate them, which in turn allows more people to join the match by spawning in those. To circumvent enemy capture/destruction, the spawns should be uncapturable and only affected by cutting off resources to prevent replenishing of ships.
2 Likes