The grand strategy video game Star Trek: Infinite set in the Star Trek: The Next Generation era was launched today. To get a sense of the game, there is a new launch trailer plus a video giving an overview of how you get started building your empire.
Infinite is out
It was just in June when Paradox Interactive and Nimble Giant Entertainment announced plans to release Star Trek: Infinite. The makers of acclaimed simulation and strategy games like Stellaris, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, and Cities: Skylines are putting that expertise into the 24th century of the Star Trek universe. Infinite promises to take players “on an interstellar saga with its emergent gameplay and complex choices, as they face the powers of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.”
The game was released today on PC and Mac. Here is the launch trailer…
“Star Trek: Infinite represents a monumental achievement for our team at Nimble Giant Entertainment. We’ve poured our passion for the Star Trek universe into every aspect of the game, striving to create an experience that captivates both long-time fans and newcomers alike,” said Martin Cao, CEO of Nimble Giant Entertainment in a statement. “With its rich storytelling and deep strategic gameplay, we hope that Star Trek: Infinite will become a beloved addition to the Star Trek gaming legacy.”
“We’ve been working closely with Paramount Consumer Products to ensure that this game faithfully captures the intricate lore of Star Trek,” said Fredrik Wester, CEO of Paradox Interactive. “It’s a true voyage into the heart of the Star Trek universe, allowing players to shape the galaxy’s destiny through grand strategy.”
Screenshot from Star Trek: Infinite (Paradox Interactive)
Gameplay preview
Here is the official description:
Set about two decades prior to the era of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Infinite lets players shape the fate of the galaxy by leading one of four formidable Quadrant Powers: the United Federation of Planets, Romulan Star Empire, Cardassian Union, or Klingon Empire. With utmost fidelity to Star Trek lore, the game introduces fresh avenues for exploration as players navigate the complexities of empire management, handle intricate economic systems, and interact with enigmatic civilizations.
Paradox also released a “Your First Day” video which offers a brief overview of the gameplay…
Trek your way
Here are the key features for Star Trek: Infinite, as described by Paradox …
- Your Star Trek Story: With Star Trek: Infinite there is no singular way to play. Whether you wish to take the route of diplomacy, espionage, warfare, or a mix of all of these, there are multiple paths to victory. You are in command, and the fate of the galaxy is in your hands!
- Choose Your Faction: Choose between the United Federation of Planets, Klingon Empire, Romulan Star Empire, or Cardassian Union. You will take on the role of the leader in charge of all the major decisions of your faction as the game unfolds. With each faction having their own unique styles of play, your decisions determine how successful you are in reaching your goals.
- Iconic Characters: Star Trek: Infinite has been meticulously created to provide an immersive Star Trek experience while allowing you to shape the story of your playthrough according to the choices you make as the leader of your chosen faction. As you take on the role of the Federation, you’ll have the opportunity to recruit iconic captains and officers, including Picard, Janeway, Sisko, and Data to name a few. Meanwhile, other factions offer their own set of iconic characters to enlist, such as Gowron, Makbar, Garak, and many more.
- Diverse Starships: Beyond the potential cast of characters you recruit to your faction, the game grants you access to a range of starships from the Star Trek universe, tailored to each faction’s arsenal. From the Federation’s reliable Intrepid– and Defiant-class ships, the menacing Cardassian Galor-class vessels, the sleek Romulan D’deridex, or even the formidable Klingon Negh’Var battleships.
- Of course, the U.S.S. Enterprise-D can be developed and added to the Federation fleet through the bespoke storytelling system developed for Star Trek: Infinite.
- Deep & Complex Strategy: Star Trek: Infinite is built upon the core systems of Stellaris, leveraging the deep and complex system and making them its own. Aspects of these systems have been streamlined and simplified to better resonate with the Star Trek franchise.
Screenshot from Star Trek: Infinite (Paradox Interactive)
Fans can purchase Star Trek: Infinite for $29.99/£29.99/€29.99 or the Deluxe Edition—featuring a digital artbook, the game soundtrack, and an in-game music pack featuring fresh compositions from Star Trek’s original soundtrack composers—for $39.99/£39.99/€39.99 on Steam.
It’s reminding me of birth of the federation. Just add the ferenghi as a playable race and that increase the similarities.
Goddamn, just give me a move, shoot and jump game like Elite Force…long overdue!
Imagine. For a moment. If Call of Duty went Star Trek.
Oh, my!
This is right down my alley, I love Horizons for Stelaris and this is the official version of that. However, it seems like this is riddled with bugs…I will wait.
Ditto. The reviews I’ve seen so far point out enough game-breaking bugs to put me off. They can have my money after they actually finish the game.
If this will scratch the itch for a digital version of Star Trek Ascedency then I’m in
An update after playing for about 20 hours. It’s not terrible. A bit slow and relies more on the exploration and expansion X’s of the 4x game model.
I wish there was an option to turn off what appears to be forced on you no matter what storyline that happens about halfway into the game regardless of what race you are.
There are so far minor differences I noted between a couple races but nothing that dramatically changed gameplay (vs the Ascendency board game where the factions can swing your strategy wildly). Any major difference was me trying to be faithful to the race I was playing given the two or three options presented, nothing purely mechanical that forced my strategic hand.
It makes me interested in Stellaris (which I’m not terribly familiar with but sounds a little more open-ended and deeper.) Star Trek Infinite, for all its apparent freedoms and title, often feels like it’s on rails
Looks fun! Though if its set two decades before TNG why are there Galaxy and Intrepid class starships…
It’s not set in 2340 in the sense it stays there. The game starts in 2340 and can last until 2640. Months pass in seconds.
that sort of thing is just kind of something you have to accept with many franchise translations to digital or board gaming (unless you mod the crap out of it)
How is having the E-D, Defiants and Intrepids around 20 years before TNG utmost fidelity to Star Trek lore?
If it’s like Stellaris, you probably start with being able to build something like Excelsior or Ambassador class ships as technology progresses.
But if you only have a homeworld and there’s not already a substantial empire or federation to start with in the 24th century, any semblance of following the shows is out the window anyway.
You don’t start from scratch like in Stellaris. Like you said: that wouldn’t have made sense.
So maybe with an expansion down the road you would start with just the solar system and an NX.
I’m interested to see if the game has the Borg and Dominion as factors at all.
haven’t found the dominion so far. I was playing as the Klingons over the weekend and expanded the empire such that I wrapped all the way around the Federation nearly up to the Cardassian and that right pissed off the Feds and they launched a surprise war on me. It was hilarious.
Is…is there a criminal trial option here?
It’s the exciting birth of the Federation era where you can build the Federation… but bland TNG ships that weren’t in service until decades later…. while faithfully recreating capturing the intricate lore of Star Trek (?!?!?!)
Ugh, back get, get the TOS/TMP license and try again.
It starts in the 2340s
So let’s set this up after the building of the Federation, after all the exciting first contacts, when all the borders are set, exploration is limited, all the technology is developed and you get to babysit your bureaucracy. It’s like Stellaris, but with all the fun exploration and star spanning civilization establishment removed? Lol
Hmmm, come to think about it, it is faithful to TNG!
Hopefully they have a Locutus or a David Marcus Picard come along and shake that up.
Yes yes you hate TNG.
Zzzzzzzz
Games like this always bores me to tears. Wake me when they come out with a GTA style Star Trek game.
IGN’s review is savage. He wanted to love the game but called it one of the buggiest games he’s ever played.
It’s disappointing – I would like to support a game like this but it won’t do well out of the gate with bad reviews from critics and inevitably from users soon after, and a theoretical patch won’t get much PR.
I read the review. Yeah, the game is buggy, though in the 15 or so hours I spent playing most of the bugs I encountered were things like Data dying of old age or two Rikers spawning in a single game (but not in a good way), or mission trees not registering certain node conditions, or leaders advancing triggering a leader death soundbite. They’re minor annoyances, but certainly not game breaking. There’s a whole lot of game to break here, this being a Paradox title, which leads me to my next point…
Something like the integration process breaking for the reviewer looks like a lack of understanding of the mechanics instead. Integrating will break if your relations dip below a certain level which they usually do, because they atrophy over time automatically – unless you’re actively improving relations through a second envoy. I’m just not that convinced they understood what they were doing well enough to review the game properly, and focused instead on what I’d view as secondary issues as a “get out of review free” card, if you will. ‘Oh, there’s tooltips missing – this game is seriously buggy!’ Yeah, uh, that does indeed need fixing.
All those bugs (including everyone’s favourites used as a crisis that sometimes doesn’t progress – though luckily it did for me each session) are minor next to the real issues not even touched upon in the IGN piece which is the usual Paradox chestnut of the game simply being so complex it needs more time in the oven after the release injection of feedback, and it’s relatively barren at launch to boot. Paradox GSG(+ Stellaris) are almost never released in a good state – they need the time to get hammered into that state, the systems need to mature, the flavour needs to be expanded upon for the dozens to hundreds hours of play this game is designed to support each session. Victoria 3 is just now getting there after a literal year of post-launch development and rework. The bugs aren’t the issue – those will get fixed very quick. The bigger problem right now is that the mission tree nodes aren’t super interesting in the long run, or flat-out don’t make sense for the 300 years of scope, that some legacy Stellaris traits should really be reworked for certain factions, i.e. that game needs to move away from Stellaris in some ways, but also inherit some of the quality of life improvements made to Stellaris after they spun off STI a few years ago (you can’t customise the auto-pause in STI the way you’re able to in Stellaris which makes this game significantly less playable), or that there’s really no need for the game to last until 26xx and that late game flavour is kind of done by the 2400s (which is why some of those Federation missions are sort of acceptable now, but will rapidly become out of place as the game fills out in its latter part).
So while I wouldn’t call STI a good game quite yet there is very clear potential for it to get excellent. The factions are clearly distinct even now (big issue for Paradox games at launch, usually), the exploration is more fun than in Stellaris (and despite the factions not starting the game from scratch it lasts much longer here), the warp system works, is refreshing and you can already tell that some expansions are going to slide in really nicely, and fill the game out.
Anyway, I’m having loads of fun even now – best evidenced by this wall of text perhaps. Playing the Federation in particular is a very chill experience. I think it’s worth supporting despite its problems – if you’re partial to this type of game.
I agree. Overall I think it can only get better from an already decent experience for the price. I’ll be interested to see how playing it against humans works. So far I’ve only played against the AI. The politicking mechanic will probably be far more interesting
This was very helpful and insightful to read, thank you!
I’ve found relatively few bugs after about 20+ hours of play. I did run into a problem on Steam / Mac where the game would crash when trying to play the tutorial. Spun it up on Windows and found that I wasn’t missing much with the tutorial anyway. There is MUCH more mechanically IMO then they walk you through in the tutorial. The biggest “bug” I’ve seen is it being a hassle to assign ships to orbit the right planet or object for a given mission which is a big deal when there is a timer to complete the task.
Not being familiar with Stellaris, my personal comp is Star Wars Rebellion from the late 1990’s (which I enjoyed so that’s not a knock IMO).
Lots of tiny checkboxes to manage resources, assigning crew and sending ships out to different planets and occasionally a visually underwhelming battle you don’t have much control over.
I know Stellaris pretty well, and don’t mind the later stages of managing spreadsheets basically if I can delegate. I’ll get the game and try it out!