Sigh. What a disappointment this one turned out to be.
What really gets me is, it wasn't a bad game overall. The basic gameplay was solid, and I appreciated how the devs made an effort to differentiate it from Stellaris by including things like "hero ships" and mission trees for each of the playable empires -- they were all good ideas.
Unfortunately, it also suffered from numerous bugs and balance problems, not to mention a few underlying issues. Having only 4 playable factions on a single fixed map (widely assumed to be due to restrictions by Paramount, though this was never officially confirmed) definitely hurt replayability as well -- why should Star Trek fans bother playing Infinite, when they could simply load up the New Horizons or New Civilizations mods for Stellaris (both of which have multiple maps and over 100 playable factions)?
Paradox deciding to pull the plug all too soon after release (
) before any of these issues could be addressed, and then most/all of the dev team being let go when the Embracer group (somewhat infamously) laid off a bunch of game developers late 2023/early 2024, were simply the final nails in the coffin.
A project like Star Trek: Infinite *could* have worked -- and still could -- but this game was probably doomed from the start. And goodness knows now when, if ever, we'll see another Star Trek 4x/grand-strategy again.
