Sep 15, 2023

Star Trek: Infinite - demasiri (Arc CM)

Developer Log - Star Date: 23705.8

In today's log, I wanted to talk a bit about why we wanted to make this game. A passion project like none other, and now finally everyone can learn about it.

The Idea

Every game starts with an Idea, and for Star Trek Infinite the idea was to recapture the feeling of the Star Trek Strategy Games of the early 2000s. That mix of playing with the Star Trek ships, on big maps, and fighting the other empires for supremacy.

An important part was not to simply do a remake of Birth of the Federation or Armada. We wanted a game that captures the feeling of playing these. A modern take on the concept that they had, stories and gameplay from the Federation level perspective.

Something like that feeling you get from playing Stellaris.

Charting the Stars

We quickly knew that Nimble Giant was the perfect studio for this game. Firstly we saw the strength of their Master of Orion remaster, and then during early milestone delivery where they were able to prove their mastery of the Grand Strategy Game. They quickly built up trust with Paradox and Paramount with their passion for authenticity and great gameplay ideas.

We laid out a path for the game to be in the established series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. At the point when we started this game, Discovery and Picard was still ongoing, and we wanted to avoid making something that would be directly contradicted in the shows at a later point. The Original Series and the Animated series could be referenced, but our style and tone should be set in the shows of the 90s.

It should mainly occur in the timeline of these series, and we should pick our visuals to match them, and our stories should reflect the storytelling they used.

We needed Diplomacy to remain a prime part of the game, and we needed to balance the perspective between major and minor powers in the Alpha and Beta quadrant. We needed to be better at telling the long story, focusing on the events that play out in the show, and how players can affect these.

With these choices made, a lot of the questions we had were answered, who were the major players in the game, what important events needed to happen, and how were we going to work these stories into the game, no matter what empire you selected to play.

Turbulences and Triumphs

The Trek universe is huge, and we really needed to focus on what stories we wanted to tell and what would amplify these and not distract us.
Should we have fallen empires like Tkon, Talosian or Iconians? No, these could appear in stories, but making them a faction with their own faction would not improve our stories.

Should we have all the quadrants? - While Voyager takes place almost exclusively in the Delta quadrant, the stories we were trying to tell were about the Major Powers in the Alpha and Beta quadrant. Including the Gamma and Delta quadrant was a distraction from our goal of telling stories about these four Powers. They can influence the stories, and we can have some interaction, but play should focus on the Alpha and Beta Quadrant.

Did we pull it off?
I believe we did, and we were lucky to get this confirmed when we started doing previews. People seem happy with our vision, and we are looking forward to showing this to more people.

In the coming weeks we will have several more developer logs, where we discuss all the aspects of making this game. How we approached new features or reworked old ones, how we're-focused on art and what type of new gameplay we added.

The work that has been done by Nimble Giant on this game is amazing, and I am so happy to have been able to work with them over these last few years.

We have already started showing a few pieces of gameplay in our trailer that was released last week (here, in case you missed it) and some folks in the gaming press have had opportunities to get hands-on, share their experiences and conduct interviews with myself and the team at Nimble Giant. Soon we will be giving content creators access to the game, so expect more from them in the coming weeks!

That’s not all, though, we will be creating more dev diaries over the next few weeks in preparation for the launch, so we’d love to hear your thoughts as we publish those. Our Discord server has been steadily growing with Star Trek fans since the pre-order announcement, so if you want to come and say hello, that’s where a lot of us will be!

I can’t wait for you all to see more.

End Log,

PDX_Ruk
Producer for Star Trek: Infinite

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