Blog

The Infinite Fleet Beta is now live, Commanders.

This blog will dive into what has changed since Alpha and what to expect in Beta.

New and Improved Features

The development team has made outstanding progress in 2022. After our "Great Infinite Fleet Reset," the team rebuilt the whole game from the ground up, and it's never looked better!

When you first warp into the Milne system, you'll notice a drastic improvement in the game's graphics. We made numerous advancements in rendering and optimization to achieve a stellar level of visual quality. We've also tightened up our art production, so minimum specifications to run the game have lowered dramatically. Mid-range PCs will have no trouble running Infinite Fleet!

Tactical view has been overhauled. You no longer need to awkwardly click on each ship to issue commands. You can now drag select and assign attack groups with your fleets. Positioning your fleet is effortless.

You'll immediately notice that we’ve redesigned the HUD. We've been working on the user experience so you can intuitively access the information you need.

We now have missions, so you can take on various challenges and gain rewards to bolster your fleet. In the beginning, there will be three types of missions: Reconnaissance, where you will search for enemies or objects and scan them to send data back to the USF. Assassination, in which you have a particular mark to destroy. And finally, Routing in which you must eliminate an Atrox threat.

We will add new missions for you to overcome in the coming releases.

By completing missions, you'll be rewarded with USF Credits as well. Credits are currency of the United Sol Federation, and you can use them to upgrade your ship. Later, you'll use them for tech tree upgrades, paying for ability upgrades, researching technologies, and more.

You needed a "pulse scan" in the Alpha to find asteroids with rare minerals. Now, you can directly scan asteroids highlighted in the HUD simply by holding down the ALT key. There are now many more minerals to find, and you will use them to fabricate equipment for your ships at space stations.

Finally, you can upgrade your Commander Level by upgrading your ships. Your Commander Level will give you rewards and increase your ship level cap. In this first version, your Commander Level will be capped to 12 while our design team works on some balancing. 

Read more about player progression in our blog.

Gameplay Changes

Prepare yourselves, Commanders! A lot has changed.

Combat is very tough! We have tuned ships to have a much shorter range, so you can't pummel the Atrox from afar. For example, in Alpha, beam weapons had a range of 93.75 km, which has been reduced to 50 km for Beta. Combat will get a bit easier as we begin to add more abilities that your ships can use. However, you should be very careful - we recommend bringing a friend.

We've tuned acceleration speeds, so the ship movements feel more like naval ships. You can't rush in and out anymore as you could in Alpha. Positioning will need to be more precise, coordinated, and planned.

You can now assume direct control of your Cruisers. You still need a Centurion-class ship, but you can spread your fleets across the battlefield and control your Cruisers when you need to take specific actions.

More points of interest are now spread across two-star systems that you can select via the all-new galaxy map. One of those star systems is our very own Sol system!

Overall, adjusting to gameplay in the Beta will take some time. A lot has changed and the Atrox also now have more varied ships and will present much more of a challenge. We highly recommend you team up with a few others to play - after all Infinite Fleet is an MMO game.

Known Issues

We are very excited about this Beta build. However, there are quite a few issues that we are actively addressing.

• There may be some substantial connectivity issues at first. We appreciate your patience while we work on stabilizing the networking, as you will likely encounter some problems.

• Some users may find their antivirus applications block the installation. 

• There is a problem with fabrication, but we will be fixing this feature shortly after release.

Most of the VFX and SFX right now are placeholders, such as ship self-repair and thruster sounds. We'll be continuing to replace them to make Infinite Fleet look and sound fantastic over the subsequent iterations.

If your ship is destroyed, you will be warped to a space station with 1hp. Your shields will regenerate, but your ship will be very vulnerable until it is repaired. You can activate self-repair to regenerate your ship's hull but it does take a long time to get back to full hull integrity. Soon, you will be able to spend USF Credits to repair your ships at a space station quickly. So, take care when engaging the Atrox.

Summary

The Beta is the first actual installment of Infinite Fleet, and we're very early. The team worked fiercely to hit our target date and will build new features and fix initial bugs after this release.

Our priorities are to stabilize the network issues and build out the progression systems so that you can enjoy configuring and upgrading your fleets.

As we mentioned in our previous blog, our team is planning to have regular releases every two months, and you'll see significant improvements on each release. We'll publish a roadmap next month, and we'll keep you updated on the development in monthly video transmissions like this.

We will deploy a hotfix in August for any critical issues and we appreciate your ongoing patience and support while we build the most incredible space game in the galaxy!

Thank you, Commanders.