For almost ten years now, Flavien Brebion has been working on a space game that was so ambitious he couldn’t get it finished.
That game, Infinity: The Quest For Earth, sounded too good to be true. Inspired by titles like Frontier: Elite II, it would have let you roam a seamless galaxy, able to fly from a planet’s surface into space with no interruption or loading screen.
Thing is, what was crazy ten years ago is in 2015 almost a reality. Between No Man’s Sky, Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous, the space flight genre has roared back to life in the past couple of years—right down to some of those titles featuring (or soon to feature) seamless atmospheric travel—leaving Quest for Earth in the dust.
Smartly, faced with a game he clearly couldn’t get finished and some stiff, more expensive competition, Brebion has re-tooled Infinity’s design into something more managable, called Infinity: Battlescape.
Gone is the pipedream of a never-ending space MMO, replaced by a multiplayer space combat game that still sounds pretty cool, courtesy of the fact it’s got “a procedurally generated, true to scale solar system filled with planets, moons, asteroid belts, and other celestial phenomenon” and “seamless planetary transitions”.
It’s an interesting Kickstarter campaign to survey; on the one hand, you know a lot of this stuff already works and exists because it was part of a previous project. The game has also gone from a one-man project to a proper studio effort. But on the other, that previous project went a decade without being released...