I came across Infinity: The Quest for Earth a few months ago when they released a trailer of a spaceship flying seamlessly from one planet to another with no loading times. Let me say that again, from the surface of one planet into and across space, into the atmosphere of another planet and onto the surface with NO loading time. Today they released a new video of the games combat system. One of the main things I didn’t like about Eve Online and one of the reasons I couldn’t really get into it was because you don’t actually get to fly, it’s basically point, click, wait, even the combat. Infinity allows for real-time combat where you actually get to pilot your ship. How well you can maneuver will no longer be based on stat point, but instead on your skills. By my count that gives Infinity a huge advantage over Eve.
Aside from the real-time combat system and seamless flying, Infinity also promises to have an enormous galaxy to explore. Keyword is galaxy, you can land on a planet, fix your ship and get supplies, but you can’t walk around it. It’s basically like Eve where you’ll spend most of your time in your ship.
“Expect a galaxy with up to hundreds of billions of worlds. You will not be able to visit them all in your whole lifetime, even if you were to spend only one second per world”
Wow, that makes Eve look like my backyard. So how does one travel to all these billions of planets? There will be jumpgates throughout the game, however every ship can equip a hyper-propulsion system so you don’t need to travel all the way to a gate. But just because you have a jumpgame doesn’t mean you’ll get to where you going instantly.
“You can choose your destination on the galaxy map and jump there (providing you have the resources). Jumping will not be instantaneous. It will be very fast to jump to a local system, but jumping to the other side of the galaxy will take from minutes to hours (in real time). “
HOURS! I’m sure they’ll change there minds once gamers get a hold of the game and curse them out. Seriously, who’s going to sit there for hrs, just make the resource cost very very high, problem solved. The game promises to be very open ended, which means PvP. HORAY!
Infinity is still in very early development and is expected to take another two years before the game is finished. So far from what I’ve seen it looks like it might be worth the wait.
More Infinity Videos here
I really likes the concept and idea behind Eve, but hated the combat system. I am definitly going to keep an eye on this one now, thanks!
I had heard of this game, but holy moly that looks amazing!
There should be a combat alpha test still running too, unless they shut that down. Anyway – this looks promising, but will take quite some time before it arrives. Meanwhile a fair few other space MMOs with direct controls are already lining up to be released (Jumpgate Evolution, Universe Online, etc).
Looks like there will finally be some serious competition for EVE-O!
Editing, nice camera pans/sweeps, and a nice soundtrack can make the boring look interesting. I’ll hold my applause until something playable appears.
A good, tangential topic would be–if they could roughly model the combat system from another space sim, which one would you pick? Something with the more “realistic” type of thrusters such as from the BSG series, or something a little bit more user-friendly such as X-Wing: Alliance? Make it too hard, and you will be severely restricting your user base. Make it too easy and . . . well, is there such a thing as too easy for flight mechanics? I can’t comment on Eve, never having played it.
The video linked is a bit out of date, it shows version 0.6 of the combat prototype, check the date it was posted. The last version of the prototype released was version 2.2, even that was almost a year ago now. There’s a few of us that still play it regularly though. You can find a trailer for version 2.1 here if you’re interested:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3nfVTBcG18
Thanks for the updated link, its weird cause on the official site they link to the old one.