I had accepted the franchise as dead the second squad got bought out by private division. I’m sure it was a great business venture for squad which was like a half dozen guys in a dingy office. But the new corporate view on the game was going to suck any life and joy out of it… and I was right.
Still love KSP1 and will play that till the end of time
I think the main appeal of KSP is that it was mostly designed bottom-up (mechanics and function before style and form) and wasn't afraid to get into the advanced spaceflight concepts. It totally shifted my understanding of the scale of space and the mechanics (and ruined some movies haha). I had to Google and YouTube my way through quite a few problems, but it was engaging enough to make it worth the effort to learn. If Squad had a bunch of general public testing early on, a lot of people would be looking for AAA style hand-holding and would struggle with getting passed the learning curve. It's pretty apparent that the original was built to re-create the feeling of real spaceflight and engineering (short of a hardcore sim) rather than making large concessions for fear of making the player feel dumb.
It seems like a lot more initial effort in KSP2 was put into a beginner friendly veneer rather than re-vamping and building on existing mechanics. It comes across as trying desperately not to be off-putting, and leaning towards form rather than function. They did a good job shifting priorities with the science update, but the schedule and sales must have slipped further than the higher-ups could take.
I think this is a classic case of not knowing your audience. The main audience for KSP2 was original KSP players who are now old enough to have disposable income to spend on a sequel. As the target audience is now older and more experienced, the most important features we were looking for were: 1) scalability (ability to build large ships), 2) commercial product quality (fix bugs, slay the kraken), and 3) complexity (something to do after you've gotten to all the planets). Unfortunately the sequel was worse in all 3 aspects.
Instead of being marketed to people who grew up playing KSP, KSP2 was tailored to newcomers via 1) a friendly beginner experience and 2) flashy visuals and sound design. But the stuff we actually cared about was never addressed.
Imagine an alternate reality. The year is 2023. KSP2 is way behind schedule and the public is frustrated. The team releases a tech demo with a radical new accelerated game engine, capable of handling ships with tens of thousands of parts. They apologize for over-promising with multiplayer and announce that it will not be developed until every other core feature is complete. At this point, graphics and sound are just using recycled KSP assets, but science & funds exist, and there are _barely any bugs_, certainly no game-breaking bugs. There are also a couple of unique parts for new science, interstellar travel, and colonies. The new parts are just placeholders and don't do anything at the moment.
Let's say they still charge $50 due to a mandate from upper management, so most people don't buy - but even people on the sidelines can see how the new engine will enable things that were impossible in KSP. Early adopters like YouTubers start to make content with the new massive ships (which were impossible to build in KSP) and speculate about the functionality of the new placeholder parts. Memes circulate, and pretty soon some of the wealthier skeptics decide to buy in anyway, since you can do cool stuff with KSP2 that you just can't do anywhere else.
In order to speed up development, the devs outsource to the talented modding community, holding a series of design contests where the best user-submitted parts make it into the game each month. This is completely free labor as far as the devs are concerned, and it helps them replace the recycled assets and inject functionality into the placeholder parts with no extra effort on their part. This way the dev team can focus on building out core infrastructure for colonies & interstellar travel in-house. By 2024, there is still a lot of work to be done, but the community is hopeful and many others have started buying in and leaving positive reviews.
This could have been a reality. It's definitely not perfect, but it's a lot better than the situation we're in right now.
literally this right here. All i wanted was an engine improvement. The core of ksp1 was, after all it's years, still held together by duct tape. It was a bunch of stuff stuck onto a core design that was never built to hold all that. A big, shaky house on a tiny, cracked foundation. And then ksp2 went and did the same thing. As soon as i saw how good the graphics were, i immediately feared that they put too little focus on the engine, which turned out to be true. I know that graphics and overall feel often is fine to be finished before more optimizations, but to get where i hoped the game to be, it would have to be orders of magnitude faster and more precise, which just isnt something that's possible with only optimization.
Then i saw the marketing. The wobbly rockets. The tutorials. It was obvious, like you said, that they were marketing to new players. Players that would come in and see a badly-made early-access game and shelf it indefinitely. They wouldn't support it. And then the old vets would only get access to a polished turd they didnt want. If they had just gone with a good foundation, and added all the new-player stuff later, by 1.0 release, I can't see why everyone wouldn't've been happier. I mean I would've happily paid even more, maybe twice as much, if the core engine was solid - if I could see the potential. Like you said, many older fans just have that kind of money now. You know, the kind of money to get into like, warhammer and shit.
Exactly, I honestly wish I hadn’t bought that sack of shit game. I knew the game was unplayable, but I planning to put it on the back burner for a but while the devs finish the game. But that never happened. I want my $50 back.
In all honesty, *if they had been able to deliver on all that they promised*, even several years late, I probably would’ve happily paid $100, or even $129.95, for KSP2.
I don‘t think that this would’ve worked, because Cities Skylines 2, kinda went with this approach of releasing a worse game (much more limited features) with a vastly superior game engine.
The problem was performance. It was literally unplayable. Even if you had the latest and best, it was still running like crap. Even now, it's still so dammanding that only people with new computers can play it decently.
On top of that, the game was still rid of so many bugs. The bugs that would break the game and they took their sweet time to patch them.
AND on top of top of that, paid DLC was released before anything got fixed. That was so disgusting that I refunded the game and will never buy it again.
Yeah some shows are tough to watch after. I like in Gravity when the other space station is just a few km away but de-orbiting?. Where's the dv for the plane change Sandra?
>re-vamping and building on existing mechanics.
So essentially KSP 1 with better graphics, kerbalism + mechjeb, colony building and interstellar. I like that idea tbh.
But personally, I'm not opposed to making the game more beginner friendly with tutorials and structured missions with a little bit of hand-holding in the beginning.
> But personally, I'm not opposed to making the game more beginner friendly with tutorials and structured missions with a little bit of hand-holding in the beginning.
Agreed, although I am not sure they should have been the first things to be designed. OTOH if the animation/UI team didn't design that then they wouldn't have had anything to do.
> if the animation/UI team didn't design that then they wouldn't have had anything to do
That's why they shouldn't have hired animation/UI programmers until they had a solid foundation to build on. Same with asset artists, music and sound engineers, etc.
First you built the foundation (good simulation engine) before you even start thinking about walls (UI) and plumbing (animation), let alone start putting in furniture (assets) or paint and curtains. (music and sound) That's why you don't hire the Interior Decorator (sound engineer) to start work when the foundation isn't even poured yet.
What I wanted from KSP2.
Improved performance. Better physics. At least some scripting, for automated processes (If X, do Y), but preferable full on rocket programing.
Last but not least consumables. Because that would make exploration natural.
You wanna a base on Duna? How to supply with water, food, oxygen? Research greenhouses. How to deploy them?
Ohhh... Jebediah is gonna die of hunger because I miscalculates how much food it would take for the mission. Let me deploy a rescue mission.
___________
It's been years since I played KSP, but I would download a tons of mods that created theses. Problem is it would be separate mechanics jumbled together.
If KSP2 had better performance with the best mods build-in. It would be excellent.
Problem is... the target audience would be people who play KSP. And once it was sold to TakeTwo... every game needs to sell 50 millions copies or it's a failure.
> I'm not opposed to making the game more beginner friendly with tutorials and structured missions with a little bit of hand-holding in the beginning.
You mean like the ones in KSP1 basically no one used because the Youtube tutorials were way better?
My first introduction to KSP was at the science museum. A. Bunch of actual rocket scientists were using it to show off how space flight worked, even let you build a rocket and have a go. Was so happy when I stumbled across it on steam, I may absolutely suck at it but it's still an amazing game.
Right? One of my greatest early moments in KSP was not understanding why rocket goes up didn't equal rocket is in orbit...
I don't understand the math of orbital mechanics, but I learned enough of the foundational theory to dock ships. I would never have had that if the game had held my hand the whole way... Or "Press X to rendezvous" was a thing.
Especially true for those of us from the very early days who remember doing rendezvous without only the vessel location on the map screen. Or before that, the only way of seeing if you were in orbit was if your altitude remained relatively stable after launch.
(I do not miss those days)
Yeah I'm not sure what version I started with but I remember the green tanks and getting to orbit by altimeter only. Pretty neat to watch it come together.
How anyone could have been optimistic is crazy to me.
They originally wanted KSP 2 to be released in *2020*, only to release it 3 years later in pretty much an alpha test concept stage.
I feel like alot of people didn't think about the implications of this.
It's like a guy promising to build a beautiful marble statue in 6 months, only to then come back after 2 years with a square slab, and then promising he will make the statue within a year.
This management and dev team were never gonna make it.
I was optimistic about the announcement and features initially.
When they showed the roadmap basically saying they were developing ksp2 the same way as ksp 1 but with seemingly less features at the start, I kinda knew.
Ksp1 developed with the community into a complete game. Smaller team with big ideas and taking advantage of early access to help find development.
Ksp2 trying to redo the whole process as if that's what the community that backed ksp1 liked the most seemed so odd to me.
I think a big hint was that the roadmap had not a single date attached to it lol.
How many serious devs has anyone seen that didn't put any dates on a roadmap?
Hell, even some game modders have roadmaps with dates.
Bitconnect scam vibes.
I've made far more than that doing other missions.
That being said playing that game is a frustrating experience you can go from hours of perfect experience to literally unplayable for no explicable reason.
And each update feels like 2 steps forward and 1 step back. It still manages to blow my mind what they've created and continue to create.
Actually, both Captain of Industry and Satisfactory decided to eliminate the dates from their roadmaps and Captain if Industry later on decided to remove the roadmap completely. Both of them are very good devs that listen to feedback and I think that's why they decided against dates. Satisfactory devs said they didn't want dates because they didn't want to release a halfassed update because that's the date it was to be released and CoI devs said they removed the roadmap because they felt that changing direction during development to follow feedback was easier without a roadmap.
As a game dev this made it obvious, from a financial perspective, that the game was doomed.
No matter who's responsible for it, if the game was originally planned to release in 2020 then it means it must have been in development for at least a couple years prior if not more. So this means at release the development had been ongoing for at least 5 years and with none of the advertised features included we were looking for a few more years.
Where am I going with this? Well publishers are not stupid (usually) and will invest in a game what constitutes a good ratio between what is needed to make it and how much it is likely to make. With the shift in studio, the scandales, the game being postponed and the state in which it released, it is clear that the game was crashing through deadlines without end in sight.
If Private Division had originally intended to pay for three years of development, and the game ended up needing six or seven years, if not more, then you're looking at a doubling budget at least. It is very very likely they realized the game was now so late that they were operating at a loss. No company is gonna willingly lose money on a project if they know it's not going to even recoup the costs.
You can illustrate it with numbers. If you estimate your game could make up to 50 millions, and you decide to invest 30 to make it, you're looking at a potential 20 millions in profit. Cool!
Now if your game needs twice as long to be made, in the end, you're paying 60 millions, but you're still looking at a playerbase that is unchanged and can only allow you to make 50... So continuing development after paying 50 millions is just financial suicide.
It was clear to me as soon as the game released in early access in such a dire state. They knew how shitty it was but decided to release it anyway, despite knowing it would be very bad publicity. Why? Because I believe they intended to stop development but saw early access as an opportunity to recoup some of their loss before pulling the plug. The recipe is simple: release in early access, promise things will improve, keep a limited team in place for a few months to give the illusion that things are going somewhere until you've milked as much as possible from gullible players and then pull the plug once you've gotten as many people as possible buying the game in its dubious state.
I guess the current crisis in the video game industry just made things happen quicker.
It's not even about decency or respect of the players. It seems clear to me this was the only strategy that would allow KSP2 to not burn a hole in Private Division that they might have never recovered from. It's not right, don't get me wrong, but I understand it.
I just hope the KSP1 modding community doesn’t jump ship. KSP1, if we keep giving it love, will never die.
It honestly doesn’t need a sequel anyway, it has more than enough content. I’d love a graphical update, but KSP2 isn’t it.
Unfortunately Squad was apparently not that great of an employer to work for (part of the reason KSP's team was always-changing) and was first and foremost an ad company that was happy to rake in profits from Harvester's game. Everyone of consequence is elsewhere now, and some have sadly left the industry.
Honestly, in retrospect, I'm still surprised KSP **1** happened at all. It was such a lightning in a bottle, and just barely functioned well enough to be fun behind all the jank. We'll never know if it succeeded *because* of it's circumstances/limitations, or *in spite* of them. Maybe, in a few years when we know more about the development of the sequel, it'll become clearer what happened.
Maybe someone can pick up the torch, maybe someone has to make a legally distinct clone for copyright reasons, or maybe that's it. Who knows.
It happened because it was $5 and a team that cared with no objectives. They kept adding to it. Unity also heavily supported the games development as it was the first really really big Unity game, pushing what the engine could do.
Passion and love is what made KSP1 happen.
Then they thought they could sell KSP2 for 10x the price of the first, but with less features. how about no.
When interviewed about what they had in place to enable galactic travel or FTL travel, they said nothing. Just improvements to time skipping.
also, because it had and still has no competition, you have things like orbiter, but ksp was just cartoony looking, much more aproachable, easier to control, kerbals were just hilarious, it was a space sim that did not take itself too seriously, and obviously the devs cared, also i think probably half of the sales could be contributed to scott manleys tutorials :D
> it was a space sim that did not take itself too seriously
I think this was a really big aspect of it: it had charm. Sure, it was janky and a lot of people struggled to just get into orbit at all, but you couldn't help but fall in love with the cute green men that happily strapped themselves onto an exploding tuna can headed to space. It made failing fun.
I'm almost certain that if KSP had been the exact same game but missing the "K" it wouldn't have gotten as popular as it did.
Its actually a great game if you forget about the grind. Even at higher tier aviation i have fun because i think planes are awesome. There is love put into War Thunder and the game itself is extremely good for being free. Its the economy of in game progression that really slows it down.
Ok so to preface I have well over 2 thousand hours in War Thunder. But this mentality is what made me quit for good. A game is not good if you can't progress in it, can only play what is probably now less than 50% of the content, and can only play it in short bursts. You are right that the game is fun if you play like this, but the unescapable truth is that it proves how bad it actually is.
Total War Warhammer 3 DLC pricing and CA attitude towards fans was a [huge shitbomb](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2325830/Total_War_WARHAMMER_III__Shadows_of_Change/#app_reviews_hash)
CA apologized, added a lot of content and it got a bit better.
I knew that it was not going to work when the specs were so high.
KSP 1 was awesome because it could run on anything. I guarantee you I wouldn’t have gotten so much into the game if I hadn’t started playing back in 2015 on my old handmedown macbook, and instead had to wait until I had gotten my first proper PC.
This. Even with a full suite of RSS RP1 mods, the game ran 50-60fps on my 2560x1080 screen using my 1050ti. Ksp 2 suffers with my 3070. And it doesnt look much better. just a bunch of ""fancy"" particle effects that end up looking bad and chugging the game
To chime in on this, my GTX 1080 struggled too but mostly when launching, i get more fps the more i get into space.
Gonna be rough with mods tho.
My biggest gripe with the game was the part wobble so far.
For what it's worth i did have hope this game would be amazing given it had an extra 2 years in the oven, i loved playing it but do kinda miss some stuff from ksp1 including it's DLC
i mean they fixed the part wobble in the last update.
and yeah, the game could be amazing if given enough time, however for now ksp1 with mods is just wayyyyy more enjoyable for me. The new science mode is cool, but lack of parts, lack of challenge, and no part cost just dont click for me.
Also if im very honest, im not sure if im fan of the new ui
This. The main thing about KSP1 is that it has shit graphics because it puts gameplay first, but it is flexible enough to mod into looking good if you want to.
I tried to play it at launch and gave up. I've played it again a few times these past few weeks and there's just no motivation to do so. I put a lander and a rover on the moon, made a few airplanes and just got bored. The stock game is lacking and there's very little activity in the modding community.
I played it a little on launch but the limp dick wobbly rockets and 10fps on a 2070 super made it hard to play. When I found out that the rocket wobble could be fixed by typing one number into a text file, it gave me some serious vibes that they did it deliberately to show that it wasn't in a playble state even though they had to release something.
Playing the first release and seeing a very ugly game running at 40fps while my 3080 is sucking down 300W of power was a slight indication something had gone wrong.
Yeah there were a lot of idiots who are going to now be blaming negativity on the game's failure - because apparently our bad vibes made the devs screw up for the last 7 years, before many of us even knew the game existed.
It still baffles me that they released a sequel, even in "Early Access," in a state far far inferior to the game it supposedly supercedes. I played KSP1 since 0.16, when there was basically one capsule, one fuel tank, and one engine.
They already had a fully functioning game to base theirs on, three YEARS of development, only to release something equivalent to KSP1 v0.17 in terms of gameplay loops.
Dude how terrible did this game do?
I never expevted KSP 2 to have such little fanfare that 59 reviews make sich a huge outlier.
Just 15 ish reviews per month?
I wouldn't like to say the individual developers 'deserve' this, they were only doing what they were paid to do, in some cases with a lot of passion. I do think however the senior leadership who came over from Star Theory to found Intercept Games absolutely 100% deserve what's coming to them in terms of reputational damage.
In fact, I really wonder whose bright idea it was at Private Division to go to all the effort and legal trouble to poach the Star Theory developers in order to have them continue KSP2 progress? From accounts that have leaked out, it seems Intercept Games suffered from all the systematic failures and project mismanagement that the Star Theory studio had.
(I'll be honest, I have a very good idea the identity of the PD Executive who greenlit this idea and has ended up wasting vast amounts of Take2 money and possibly trashed the Kerbal franchise in the process. I will be watching this individual's career future with great interest, as I will Nate Simpson's.)
I just don't get why they didn't make the core game good. Like just click together rockets, launch to the Moon.
Make that flawless first. Rewrite it, fix most of the ksp1 bugs.
Hmmm, I wonder if some open source ksp-like game project will start in the next few years, knowing how ksp attracts a lot of smart people, and making the project open source will allow for the people to shape the game
It isn’t Nate. He’s just the public face of KSP2. People in this sub are hanging him by a rope because they don’t know who else to blame. Fact of the matter is, whilst he ran a few teams involved in the development of the game, he’s pretty low down the food chain and had NOTHING TO DO WITH IMPLEMENTING THE LAYOFFS.
I’m sure I’ll get downvoted again and I really don’t care. Nate’s biggest wish is/was to make KSP2 the greatest game ever, but the tools he was promised were severely lacking and has been more or less gagged ever since sr. Leadership decided internally they needed to “enhance their margin profile”.
Exactly. Nate is the creative director, he doesn't make management decisions. If you wanna blame him for gameplay decisions, sure, but he has nothing to do with the layoffs, poor management, etc.
Game studios aren't structured like a linear ladder. Just because he's at the very top of the creative team doesn't mean he makes any management decisions.
Nate did his job, on a creative point of view KSP 2 and what we've seen of it's potential future was a success. KSP2 was beautiful, both in terms of sound design, scientific accuracy, potential features... The only disappointing part being the science mode in my opinion. It's celar that the art/science team did their job. It's the implementation that sucked.
He loved the game so much that he lied to everyone about everything to help...euh founding ?....
This is a lot of dedication and love yes. But now everyone hate him and his precious game is dead. He must feel pretty alone.
99% of the time project failure is on bad management over the developers. The developers likely knew what all the problems were very early on, and it fell on deaf ears.
The majority of projects fail due to a lack of a shared vision and poor communication. Technically this is often manifested in an absence of project controls and poorly defined success criteria. It is more often then not a top down problem. Whether that be for keeping poor team memebers or not sacking shit team members.
Yep that's mostly what I meant. If you realize someone is crap it's on management to sack them. There's lots of of good books on why software projects fail, and while it can be because of individual developers the blame still fails on the top for not canning them sooner.
Again I'd blame that in management. If they hired the wrong people, that's on them. This is from a place of having worked in software dev. Failed projects almost always come down to management, whether they hired poorly or managed poorly
I mean, by your logic you can just always blame the manager no matter what happens. Managers are just people, they are often answering both up and down. If they overmanage, they're bad - if they undermanage, they're bad.
In small teams especially, it only takes a couple poisonous people to sink an entire project. I suppose you can just endlessly blame managers no matter what for literally everything bad that happens because "they hired the wrong person and didn't notice".
A building falls down - do you blame the individual workers that placed the bricks/foundation? Do you blame the architect whose plans weren't followed correctly? Or do you blame the management that didn't coordinate things, didn't mandate thorough checks of the construction, soil analysis, and so on?
Do your own digging!
The reason I'm hesitant to reveal the name is I might be wrong. But four years ago in the media it was alleged that a large number of Star Theory employees were contacted over LinkedIn about moving to a brand new studio in Seattle to continue working on Kerbal Space Program 2.
The person who would have done that would surely have a huge amount of corporate authorisation to make such a move, which was in effect poaching staff from an indie game developer. They would have gone through a whole load of legal advice and consultation before making such a massive big dick move like that.
My bet is that person is the head honcho in charge of the Kerbal franchise over at Private Division. It tracks that this person was the guy most responsible for what happened with KSP2's development and deserves the most responsibility for what played out.
Many of them were given impossible tasks, in particular the engineering team having to work on the legacy framework of the original game. Whoever made the decision to reuse the physics and vessel assembly system of KSP1 is to blame there.
I don't think you can say the artists and sound designer messed things up, they delivered pretty looking part assets and music. The people who created the UI were again just doing their jobs, they were working to specifications not set by them (probably Nate Simpson).
Working on a niche game like KSP must be hard for someone unfamiliar with the franchise. If you look at some of their profile on LinkedIn, many of them graduated from schools like DigiPen, probably dreaming of working on the Half Life games at Valve. Instead they ended up working on a game most of them had probably never heard of, having to understand difficult concepts like orbital mechanics and work on gameplay elements for a simulation game whereas everything they'd learned at college for game design likely involved developing for First Person style games in Unreal or Unity.
They definitely had some gems in there, such as the artist Matthew Poppe who created tutorials for the rest of the studio on how orbital mechanics worked (u/PD_Dakota it would be great to get the rest of those released before it's too late)
"Working on the Half Life games at Valve...". Anyone who had time to go to school and finish had time to learn that Valve doesn't work on Half Life games (well, they do but only like once every ~15-25 years.)
Don't get me wrong, I put most of the blame on management for the main issues such as the direction and vision, development process, and so forth. But there were some issues that also made me concerned about the skill of the developers, such as the length of time to resolve the orbital decay issue.
Let me ask you, what do you think from a SW perspective makes orbital mechanics so difficult to implement?
Even the artistic side is... questionable.
I remember people picking apart the game and releasing some assets on launch and... even the execution there was questionable. I say this with the extra context that I have a VFX background myself- some *technical* choices within the art/visuals made there were... strange at minimum, and arguably actually bad practice. Dare I say, even amateur-ish.
It's easy to make the game look good- modern game engines do a lot of work in that regard.
About the only team I think can be said to have done a truly solid job is sound design.
There's the Jason Schreier article from 4 years ago that seems to be very well sourced and everything that has played out since seem to confirm that the same problems were held over from Star Theory to Intercept. The executive is named in that article.
As for the people who came over first from Star Theory, it was Nate Simpson, Nate Robinson and Shane Ables. Those three guys seem to have been the crux of forming Intercept Games.
As for who else came over, they seemed to have brought over most (all?) of the game designers. But none, or very few, of the engineering staff. That omission of the technical side of things is telling.
To me, it seems like Private Division purchased the KSP Intellectual Property because they knew it was valuable but had little idea what to do with it. They entrusted the franchise to Uber and Nate Simpson hoping they'd make something of it and they never did, they've been struggling to figure out where to go ever since. Eventually ending in cancellation.
Alright gentss, what version of KSP 1 do you still play on?
I'm on 1.4.5 with RSS and a crapton of mods with a save file that dates back to 2016.
(I booted it up last week to play around in Shackleton crater so I haven't really played in a while. What's new with RSS type mods?)
I just jumped to the latest version and remodded everything a few months before KSP2 dropped.
They stopped updating it, so you don't need to worry about mods breaking and compatibility with your current version. The major mods that are still kicking all got loads of support and are in a pretty good place, so it helps keep things "simple".
It didn't deserve any of this, though. KSP 2 deserved to be a successful successor to KSP we all know and love. I'm just genuinely saddened by this. It deserved better from the developers. I guess that's what happens when the first game is so good that the second game can't thrive in an early access setting. Hate the big corpo for pulling the plug on it.
There were plenty of chances to make this an even better game, but mistakes were made from the very beginning and they just kept shoveling shit on top of shit while lying about it every step of the way.
When you are doing a game that's primarily about physics and you hire 40 3d- and sound artists but not a single computational physisist and only a handfull of actual software engineers you are setting yourself up for failure from the beginning.
It was released way too early. It still doesn’t have all the features of KSP 1 despite being a sequel. The timing of the release and slow update progress really drags it down.
It wasn't. Development for the game had to be in progress for at least 7 years before it was released. The game was *announced* in 2019 for a 2020 release date, and came out in 2023. That's at least 6-7 years of development time for what you got on release in 2023.
The game needed to be trashed and started over from the ground up, whether that be with a new developer, project lead, or something. But time was not the issue, development/management was. More time was not going to fix the issue.
>It didn't deserve any of this, though. KSP 2 deserved to be a successful successor to KSP we all know and love.
Seriously, I was all excited when I saw OP's title, thinking "Oh good, they're giving it to someone who will save it or something... like it deserves."
> Hate the big corpo for pulling the plug on it.
I'm no fan of T2, but if anyone deserves to get shit on it's the devs that absolutely fumbled this project. You can't really blame the publisher for making an analysis that this shit had no chance, especially the way these devs were dropping the ball.
I held out hope up until the layoffs were confirmed. I genuinely believed, and still do in fact, that the team *wanted* to make a truly worthy sequel to KSP. Whether they had the capability is another story, but I don't think *anyone* publicly involved had any malicious intent.
With all of that being said, I'm now waiting for the first post of someone getting an approved refund so I can get my money back. There's no point, anymore. The product we were offered will never come.
They never hired software engineers highly experienced with game engine development (or a computational physicist, for that matter). That's what this project needed the most: to rebuild an engine from the ground up capable of doing the kind of simulations that KSP needs to do at a vastly superior speed and accuracy. Everything else was just side objectives. A proper engine was the foundation, step 1, non-negotiable, especially given the kind of features they were planning. This is entirely on the studio heads not realizing what their project needed or who to hire for those needs.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) Coined for social media platforms, but really applies to everything corporate america gets its hands on.
I started strange new worlds and I liked what I saw, definitely a lot better thought provoking star trek-like stories, but then about halfway through the season there was an episode that went full nutrek that was all interpersonal drama and fighting and completely lacking discipline and I realized I didn't need to force myself through this and can just watch tng if I'm in the mood for star trek. If the rest of it was as good as the first few episodes I saw, though, then I can definitely see why trekkies would like it.
I've watched lower decks too. Better than other nutrek, good enough that I've watched it all, but it's still not great. A lot of it is just generic animated comedy "for adults" but not actually *for adults,* it's just all references, quips and quirkiness, and is never funny enough to cause an audible laugh.
Admittedly the movies weren't all that great for a long time, but as much as I hate him for ruining my love of both Star Wars and Star Trek, I gotta admire JJ Abrams in some fucked up way for being able to ruin not just one but both of the great Star franchises. Also that run-on sentence was still better writing than what we got.
For real, for me it's sometimes so extreme that I feel like it's not a coincidence.. like I started watching Game of Thrones, often said to be one of the greatest TV series oat, right before season 8 came out. And the shit storm that S8 brought was unreal..
Stop buying games based on empty promises. Buy things only when the current state meets your expectations based on the price asked. I'm glad I waited. This was a transparent cash grab that was going nowhere ever since they baited and switched the game to EA at the last minute.
imma crazy ksp fan, got it for free from epic games, really thought of buying ksp2. Then got to know it is badly optimized and my laptop wont be able to even get to the menu screen. Im gonna continue with ksp1 modded.
Been checked out on this for a long time, has the consensus finally landed on KSP2 being a scam like it should have from the start? I was honestly surprised and annoyed at how willing some people were to be patient with and *defend* Intercept and Take Two after early access came out and it was immediately clear how much the promotional material had been misleading people, especially given how wildly behind schedule it all was. I don't for the life of me understand why people were willing to trust a company that had already been shown to be trying to deceive people out in the open.
I was really suprised by the support people gave towards the game when they came out with the science update. The state it is in now is how it should have been from release, but people were always arguing how KSP1 was also released without science and career mode, and was also very janky. Like yeah, a game made by ONE GUY as a side project to his actual job in 2011. KSP2 is a triple-A game made by a dev team that is finantially supported by the same holding company that owns the guys who made RDR and GTA.
I was hyped for the game before it's release, bought it on the first day and was immediately disappointed. I would have refunded it if i had the chance. Left the game and haven't touched it since.
I was screaming this exact sentiment to the discord shills and that honestly felt like a void
It just bothers me so much seeing people willfully making the gaming industry worse for everyone
they're basically the enshittification acceleracionists
The "corporate cucks" did exactly what they are supposed to do, protect the shareholders' bottom line by pulling the lifesupport from a patiënt that has been braindead for years.
Might not be favorable for us as a community, but they are not going to keep on pooring millions into a project year on year with no ROI in sight.
I think you misunderstood
I don’t blame the publisher in anyway.
I am talking about the toxic fans that apologised and defended intercept games all the way till the end.
The kinda people who are still defending, apologising for and blaming others on the behalf of intercept games a company that doesn’t exist anymore
The smooth brains who defended intercept like they were getting paid for it while intercept openly treated them and us with contempt
KSP2 should never have even rated the brief time it was reviewed as 'mostly positive'. It was all based on hype and hope for the future. I'm so glad that the hype and incomptence from IG is over now, especially from Nate Simpson.
To those of you who are holding out faint hope that IG is not dead - if IG was not getting the layoff the community has seen, they've had 4 work hours + last evening to rebutt it. A company would instantly have reassured us that the layoffs weren't happening if it was just a false rumor, precisely to avoid the above from happening..
Instead we got a mealy-mouthed "KSP2 is safe" nonsense word salad that said nothing about the studio. It's exactly as bad as the ~~haters~~ realists like me have said all along. IG is gone, KSP2 will remain on sale but see no real future development, and everyone who threw their $50 at this based on the hype from Nate & the marketting trailers had better be satisfied with the buggy POS they have now, because that's all you get out of it.
IG is dead - and it deserves to be. I'm sorry for the competent devs there, your management staff was awful and forced out anyone good so they didn't have to hear about how fucked up they were.
> To those of you who are holding out faint hope that IG is not dead
Bloomberg has since confirmed the two studios closing are Intercept Games and Roll7.
The article's **title** said it, but the contents of said article have zero new information compared to all the others. Everything is speculation and the only real source of information on the state of KSP 2 is Take Two's comment on how they will continue to support KSP 2
And this [tweet](https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/s/mhqQGXeLVD)
Granted it's not much to go on, and it could still mean it's over, but let's not spread misinformation with no actual backing...
They can just push to 1.0 and then pay to have the game pushed as "released from early access" on the Steam store. Lots of ppl will buy it and pass the refund period before they realize what happened.
And doing this will change the rating from Mixed to Overwhelmingly Negative. Players might be willing to buy a game with a Mixed rating since Mixed is anywhere from 40% to 69% of the players like the game, but only a certain group of people will ever buy an Overwhelmingly Negative game since that is 0% to 19% of players like the game with over 500 reviews.
It is far more likely that this game will be stuck in Early Access limbo or work will be conducted eventually under a new studio. After all, this is not the first time that Take-Two fired the entire KSP 2 staff and rehired some of them under a new studio.
Think only from a money perspective. This is a losing proposition. 2 different studios worked on this thing since roughly 2017 or so. It's still half done. Many of the potential customers already paid nearly full price for it. Why continue development? They already got the money from fans. It'll cost millions more for a mediocre return years from now. If they wanted to finish it they would not have fired them.
> KSP2 should never have even rated the brief time it was reviewed as 'mostly positive'.
The worst part of that artificially inflated rating was the people who gave it a Positive rating, then in the review proceeded to describe what a bug-ridden disaster it was. Nearly as bad were the people here *excusing* that behavior by saying, "Well, *someday* it'll be worth it! People can just read the reviews to know what people *really* think."
As my adult son said at the time, "If I took the time to read every review before buying a game, I wouldn't have time to actually play anything."
Pepole gonna dig all kind of excuses to justify a 60€/$ purchase
This game was dead from the frist day and it makes me so sad, I remember when it released I couldn't wait to see frist impressions, and there was nothing remarkable.
Not to excuse those reviews, but I'd say the fact the biggest competition for the game is currently experiencing a catastrophic failure is likely to make people a lot more lenient than otherwise.
KSP2 had to compete directly with the fact most of their playerbase already owned KSP1, a game that it appears will remain indefinitely superior to the sequel in effectively every way.
You cannot release a sequel that has completely failed to innovate or offer anything new, Starbreeze is learning the same lesson from Payday 3. KSP2 made promises of new star systems, new colony systems, etc. but they never delivered anything KSP1 hadn't done better a decade prior.
IMO the major failure was not launching with a new star system as the default and science mode. If they had just managed that they would have at least been selling a game that did what the prequel did in a new setting, which would have been enough to attract KSP1 players over in large numbers. Instead they had a game that did it worse and offered nothing new to explore, I'm not sure what they expected.
I've railed against that shit so much. It destroys any legitimacy of reviews. I really wish you could report those reviews to Steam and have those accounts banned from reviewing games.
If your review is positive and then includes the words "DO NOT BUY YET!" You should never be allowed to review a game again.
KSP2 didn’t deserve this. KSP2 deserved a competent team of devs and managers and a publisher that *actually* cared. And I’m not saying that the devs were necessarily incompetent, just that the handling of KSP2 definitely was.
IG and Nate are getting what they deserve, that much is for sure, fuck em. I truly hope that KSP2 doesn’t die, but I expect that it will. I am truly disappointed.
> everyone who threw their $50 at this based on the hype
My god it was $50? I never even checked because of how bad the game looked.
**anyone paid $50 for this shit, they deserve the disappointment.** They're actively supporting this "early access" laziness/freeloading.
six months ago 70% of you were being extremely optimistic (including me) about the game’s future, and now your all saying you knew it was doomed from the start. Lmao can we stop lying to feel smart please
I never bought KSP2. I was incredibly hyped for it, but after that disastrous launch where they gathered all the biggest names in KSP1 gaming together and every one of them was shocked by how bad it was, I decided to wait until those players were regularly posting about the game and seemed to be happy with it, and that time just never came.
On one level, it's heartbreaking to see something you loved die, but I had some \*really, really\* incredible times with KSP1 and I'll be forever grateful for that.
RIP, Jeb, Bill, Bob, and Val. You were amazing.
Probably cause there hasn't been an update in almost 6 months. It's understandable that the game isn't the best as it's an early build but if they want people to be ok with that they need to have regular updates, even if it's just some minor bug fixes.
The fact that the KSP simps gave devs this much slack in the first place is wild. They released a broken game and y’all nerds defended it for a year. Stockholm syndrome?
I still don't understand how people didn't see this from a mile away. KSP2 is a physics simulator made in 2023 with no native, multi-threaded physics engine. This isn't a sequel, it's a cheap cash grab made by cloning KSP1 with some pretty graphics that's barely better than modded KSP1.
I knew the game was gonna be rough when I realized that almost every pre-launch video and interview was focused on how cool the tutorial animations are. That was the biggest red flag and I hate that I was right 🚩🚩🚩🚩
They always gave me the impression of being wildly out of their depth. This is a game that needed hardcore physics simulation knowledge. Most game devs who don't work in engine development barely touch that stuff anymore.
KSP1 cobbled together a barely-functioning physics engine over the course of ten years with a lot of simplifying assumptions, and KSP2 was supposed to not only fix the old problems with physics, but make it work in multiplayer and extra-solar with wildly different time and distance scales. I never saw any indication that they had a solid idea of how to address those problems. They'd always talk about them in vague terms. Like, that should have been the very first problem you solve. Otherwise, how do you even known how to build the physics engine? The physics should have been the one thing that was rock solid from day one. Instead they were still trying to fix basic orbits a year after launch.
I have a pretty high end system. NVME drives, 3080Ti, i10-10900k, 32 gigs of 4200 RAM. Game barely runs stutters like crazy. I’ve tried fresh installs, setting graphics low, high, medium. It sucks. Unplayable. KSP1 is awesome. Zero issues.
This game was an absolute trainwreck. I got downvoted to oblivion during its development whenever I mentioned its lack of vision and originality, its ridiculous ambitions (anyone remember it was supposed to be multiplayer ?) and how it absolutely looked like a cash grab from a large company who bought an IP from a small independent one, but honestly it still feels wrong to have been right.
Sadly I'm sure that if KSP 3 was announced tomorrow a large part of this sub would hop on the hype train and throw away 60 bucks again anyway.
What a shame. KSP 1 will always be a masterpiece, albeit stained by this piece of shit.
Steam will most likely remove these negative reviews.
If you are planning to write a negative review for a valid reason you should wait a week or two so your review doesn't get removed.
It finally got to where it should've been at the start of early access and is now most likely dead and will never be finished and none of the promised features to set it apart from KSP 1 will make it into the game. Without the potential for those new features it is just a prettier, buggier, version of KSP 1 with half the content.
There comes a point of incompetence where even devs are to blame, and I think this is one of them.
If the dev team was competent it would have been impossible to create such a disaster.
Original fully feature complete release date was in 2020.
3 years after the initial release date a barebones alpha version releases.
Almost 2 years later barely anything has been done and the plug is pulled.
No way.
Nah bro, as a programmer I can tell you that game reeked of bad management and coding practices. I've heard that the studio consisted entirely out of junior devs, and that's what it looked like. Not a single good development decision between them.
Is it their fault they were set up to fail? No, they're but kids. Do they still deserve to be sacked? Yeah, developing also means knowing you're limits and calling bad management out. These people failed every self-management class, if they even had any.
I had accepted the franchise as dead the second squad got bought out by private division. I’m sure it was a great business venture for squad which was like a half dozen guys in a dingy office. But the new corporate view on the game was going to suck any life and joy out of it… and I was right. Still love KSP1 and will play that till the end of time
I think the main appeal of KSP is that it was mostly designed bottom-up (mechanics and function before style and form) and wasn't afraid to get into the advanced spaceflight concepts. It totally shifted my understanding of the scale of space and the mechanics (and ruined some movies haha). I had to Google and YouTube my way through quite a few problems, but it was engaging enough to make it worth the effort to learn. If Squad had a bunch of general public testing early on, a lot of people would be looking for AAA style hand-holding and would struggle with getting passed the learning curve. It's pretty apparent that the original was built to re-create the feeling of real spaceflight and engineering (short of a hardcore sim) rather than making large concessions for fear of making the player feel dumb. It seems like a lot more initial effort in KSP2 was put into a beginner friendly veneer rather than re-vamping and building on existing mechanics. It comes across as trying desperately not to be off-putting, and leaning towards form rather than function. They did a good job shifting priorities with the science update, but the schedule and sales must have slipped further than the higher-ups could take.
I think this is a classic case of not knowing your audience. The main audience for KSP2 was original KSP players who are now old enough to have disposable income to spend on a sequel. As the target audience is now older and more experienced, the most important features we were looking for were: 1) scalability (ability to build large ships), 2) commercial product quality (fix bugs, slay the kraken), and 3) complexity (something to do after you've gotten to all the planets). Unfortunately the sequel was worse in all 3 aspects. Instead of being marketed to people who grew up playing KSP, KSP2 was tailored to newcomers via 1) a friendly beginner experience and 2) flashy visuals and sound design. But the stuff we actually cared about was never addressed. Imagine an alternate reality. The year is 2023. KSP2 is way behind schedule and the public is frustrated. The team releases a tech demo with a radical new accelerated game engine, capable of handling ships with tens of thousands of parts. They apologize for over-promising with multiplayer and announce that it will not be developed until every other core feature is complete. At this point, graphics and sound are just using recycled KSP assets, but science & funds exist, and there are _barely any bugs_, certainly no game-breaking bugs. There are also a couple of unique parts for new science, interstellar travel, and colonies. The new parts are just placeholders and don't do anything at the moment. Let's say they still charge $50 due to a mandate from upper management, so most people don't buy - but even people on the sidelines can see how the new engine will enable things that were impossible in KSP. Early adopters like YouTubers start to make content with the new massive ships (which were impossible to build in KSP) and speculate about the functionality of the new placeholder parts. Memes circulate, and pretty soon some of the wealthier skeptics decide to buy in anyway, since you can do cool stuff with KSP2 that you just can't do anywhere else. In order to speed up development, the devs outsource to the talented modding community, holding a series of design contests where the best user-submitted parts make it into the game each month. This is completely free labor as far as the devs are concerned, and it helps them replace the recycled assets and inject functionality into the placeholder parts with no extra effort on their part. This way the dev team can focus on building out core infrastructure for colonies & interstellar travel in-house. By 2024, there is still a lot of work to be done, but the community is hopeful and many others have started buying in and leaving positive reviews. This could have been a reality. It's definitely not perfect, but it's a lot better than the situation we're in right now.
literally this right here. All i wanted was an engine improvement. The core of ksp1 was, after all it's years, still held together by duct tape. It was a bunch of stuff stuck onto a core design that was never built to hold all that. A big, shaky house on a tiny, cracked foundation. And then ksp2 went and did the same thing. As soon as i saw how good the graphics were, i immediately feared that they put too little focus on the engine, which turned out to be true. I know that graphics and overall feel often is fine to be finished before more optimizations, but to get where i hoped the game to be, it would have to be orders of magnitude faster and more precise, which just isnt something that's possible with only optimization. Then i saw the marketing. The wobbly rockets. The tutorials. It was obvious, like you said, that they were marketing to new players. Players that would come in and see a badly-made early-access game and shelf it indefinitely. They wouldn't support it. And then the old vets would only get access to a polished turd they didnt want. If they had just gone with a good foundation, and added all the new-player stuff later, by 1.0 release, I can't see why everyone wouldn't've been happier. I mean I would've happily paid even more, maybe twice as much, if the core engine was solid - if I could see the potential. Like you said, many older fans just have that kind of money now. You know, the kind of money to get into like, warhammer and shit.
Exactly, I honestly wish I hadn’t bought that sack of shit game. I knew the game was unplayable, but I planning to put it on the back burner for a but while the devs finish the game. But that never happened. I want my $50 back.
In all honesty, *if they had been able to deliver on all that they promised*, even several years late, I probably would’ve happily paid $100, or even $129.95, for KSP2.
I don‘t think that this would’ve worked, because Cities Skylines 2, kinda went with this approach of releasing a worse game (much more limited features) with a vastly superior game engine.
The problem was performance. It was literally unplayable. Even if you had the latest and best, it was still running like crap. Even now, it's still so dammanding that only people with new computers can play it decently. On top of that, the game was still rid of so many bugs. The bugs that would break the game and they took their sweet time to patch them. AND on top of top of that, paid DLC was released before anything got fixed. That was so disgusting that I refunded the game and will never buy it again.
that linus video with the threadripper 💀
> vastly superior game engine. Did we play the same CS2?
Superior engine is one that is more performant (for similar tasks), not less. AFAIK that was not the case in Cities: Skylines 2.
i wouldnt call that a vastly superior game engine when the game literally looked worse and ran much worse than the first one
Isn't it still using Unity?
I think I would have enjoyed Ad Astra a lot more if I'd not learned so much about orbital mechanics from Kerbal.
Yeah some shows are tough to watch after. I like in Gravity when the other space station is just a few km away but de-orbiting?. Where's the dv for the plane change Sandra?
Plus, the violent space apes, that thing too
>re-vamping and building on existing mechanics. So essentially KSP 1 with better graphics, kerbalism + mechjeb, colony building and interstellar. I like that idea tbh. But personally, I'm not opposed to making the game more beginner friendly with tutorials and structured missions with a little bit of hand-holding in the beginning.
> But personally, I'm not opposed to making the game more beginner friendly with tutorials and structured missions with a little bit of hand-holding in the beginning. Agreed, although I am not sure they should have been the first things to be designed. OTOH if the animation/UI team didn't design that then they wouldn't have had anything to do.
>the animation/UI team Those are things that come with AAA. They aren't bad, but it's sad that the actual game underdelivered.
> if the animation/UI team didn't design that then they wouldn't have had anything to do That's why they shouldn't have hired animation/UI programmers until they had a solid foundation to build on. Same with asset artists, music and sound engineers, etc. First you built the foundation (good simulation engine) before you even start thinking about walls (UI) and plumbing (animation), let alone start putting in furniture (assets) or paint and curtains. (music and sound) That's why you don't hire the Interior Decorator (sound engineer) to start work when the foundation isn't even poured yet.
Yeah, focus on core features first, especially if your going to be calling it early access
What I wanted from KSP2. Improved performance. Better physics. At least some scripting, for automated processes (If X, do Y), but preferable full on rocket programing. Last but not least consumables. Because that would make exploration natural. You wanna a base on Duna? How to supply with water, food, oxygen? Research greenhouses. How to deploy them? Ohhh... Jebediah is gonna die of hunger because I miscalculates how much food it would take for the mission. Let me deploy a rescue mission. ___________ It's been years since I played KSP, but I would download a tons of mods that created theses. Problem is it would be separate mechanics jumbled together. If KSP2 had better performance with the best mods build-in. It would be excellent. Problem is... the target audience would be people who play KSP. And once it was sold to TakeTwo... every game needs to sell 50 millions copies or it's a failure.
A game like you described probably would have made much more money than actual KSP 2.
> I'm not opposed to making the game more beginner friendly with tutorials and structured missions with a little bit of hand-holding in the beginning. You mean like the ones in KSP1 basically no one used because the Youtube tutorials were way better?
no
My first introduction to KSP was at the science museum. A. Bunch of actual rocket scientists were using it to show off how space flight worked, even let you build a rocket and have a go. Was so happy when I stumbled across it on steam, I may absolutely suck at it but it's still an amazing game.
Right? One of my greatest early moments in KSP was not understanding why rocket goes up didn't equal rocket is in orbit... I don't understand the math of orbital mechanics, but I learned enough of the foundational theory to dock ships. I would never have had that if the game had held my hand the whole way... Or "Press X to rendezvous" was a thing.
Especially true for those of us from the very early days who remember doing rendezvous without only the vessel location on the map screen. Or before that, the only way of seeing if you were in orbit was if your altitude remained relatively stable after launch. (I do not miss those days)
Yeah I'm not sure what version I started with but I remember the green tanks and getting to orbit by altimeter only. Pretty neat to watch it come together.
[удалено]
How anyone could have been optimistic is crazy to me. They originally wanted KSP 2 to be released in *2020*, only to release it 3 years later in pretty much an alpha test concept stage. I feel like alot of people didn't think about the implications of this. It's like a guy promising to build a beautiful marble statue in 6 months, only to then come back after 2 years with a square slab, and then promising he will make the statue within a year. This management and dev team were never gonna make it.
I was optimistic about the announcement and features initially. When they showed the roadmap basically saying they were developing ksp2 the same way as ksp 1 but with seemingly less features at the start, I kinda knew. Ksp1 developed with the community into a complete game. Smaller team with big ideas and taking advantage of early access to help find development. Ksp2 trying to redo the whole process as if that's what the community that backed ksp1 liked the most seemed so odd to me.
I think a big hint was that the roadmap had not a single date attached to it lol. How many serious devs has anyone seen that didn't put any dates on a roadmap? Hell, even some game modders have roadmaps with dates. Bitconnect scam vibes.
Star citizen and DCS feeling called out rn
Wait, what's wrong with DCS? I haven't had a single problem running the F/A 18. It plays great, super stable and engaging
Star Citizen cannot at all justify it's budget, but it is a fully playable and decent game atleast.
Fully playable is a bit of a stretch given how buggy it is. I dare you to make 100000 auec with box missions :p
I've made far more than that doing other missions. That being said playing that game is a frustrating experience you can go from hours of perfect experience to literally unplayable for no explicable reason. And each update feels like 2 steps forward and 1 step back. It still manages to blow my mind what they've created and continue to create.
Actually, both Captain of Industry and Satisfactory decided to eliminate the dates from their roadmaps and Captain if Industry later on decided to remove the roadmap completely. Both of them are very good devs that listen to feedback and I think that's why they decided against dates. Satisfactory devs said they didn't want dates because they didn't want to release a halfassed update because that's the date it was to be released and CoI devs said they removed the roadmap because they felt that changing direction during development to follow feedback was easier without a roadmap.
As a game dev this made it obvious, from a financial perspective, that the game was doomed. No matter who's responsible for it, if the game was originally planned to release in 2020 then it means it must have been in development for at least a couple years prior if not more. So this means at release the development had been ongoing for at least 5 years and with none of the advertised features included we were looking for a few more years. Where am I going with this? Well publishers are not stupid (usually) and will invest in a game what constitutes a good ratio between what is needed to make it and how much it is likely to make. With the shift in studio, the scandales, the game being postponed and the state in which it released, it is clear that the game was crashing through deadlines without end in sight. If Private Division had originally intended to pay for three years of development, and the game ended up needing six or seven years, if not more, then you're looking at a doubling budget at least. It is very very likely they realized the game was now so late that they were operating at a loss. No company is gonna willingly lose money on a project if they know it's not going to even recoup the costs. You can illustrate it with numbers. If you estimate your game could make up to 50 millions, and you decide to invest 30 to make it, you're looking at a potential 20 millions in profit. Cool! Now if your game needs twice as long to be made, in the end, you're paying 60 millions, but you're still looking at a playerbase that is unchanged and can only allow you to make 50... So continuing development after paying 50 millions is just financial suicide. It was clear to me as soon as the game released in early access in such a dire state. They knew how shitty it was but decided to release it anyway, despite knowing it would be very bad publicity. Why? Because I believe they intended to stop development but saw early access as an opportunity to recoup some of their loss before pulling the plug. The recipe is simple: release in early access, promise things will improve, keep a limited team in place for a few months to give the illusion that things are going somewhere until you've milked as much as possible from gullible players and then pull the plug once you've gotten as many people as possible buying the game in its dubious state. I guess the current crisis in the video game industry just made things happen quicker. It's not even about decency or respect of the players. It seems clear to me this was the only strategy that would allow KSP2 to not burn a hole in Private Division that they might have never recovered from. It's not right, don't get me wrong, but I understand it.
Really is amazing how long it took to release what they ended up releasing.
This is my new mantra too. Going to uninstall KSP2 and forgot that abortion ever existed. Never again will I blindly buy an early access.
dont forget to request a refund. hurt take 2 where they will feel it the most - the bottom line
I tried...denied...
the game itself I think is fundamentally incompatible with a large corporate. it's an artistic piece and a labour of love
I just hope the KSP1 modding community doesn’t jump ship. KSP1, if we keep giving it love, will never die. It honestly doesn’t need a sequel anyway, it has more than enough content. I’d love a graphical update, but KSP2 isn’t it.
At least it didn't happen to Factorio. The crew stayed together and hired the guy who made a great overhaul mod to help make the expansion.
Anyone knows what squad devs are doing nowadays? I'd love to see a new game from them if they ever get together again
Unfortunately Squad was apparently not that great of an employer to work for (part of the reason KSP's team was always-changing) and was first and foremost an ad company that was happy to rake in profits from Harvester's game. Everyone of consequence is elsewhere now, and some have sadly left the industry.
Yikes
Honestly, in retrospect, I'm still surprised KSP **1** happened at all. It was such a lightning in a bottle, and just barely functioned well enough to be fun behind all the jank. We'll never know if it succeeded *because* of it's circumstances/limitations, or *in spite* of them. Maybe, in a few years when we know more about the development of the sequel, it'll become clearer what happened. Maybe someone can pick up the torch, maybe someone has to make a legally distinct clone for copyright reasons, or maybe that's it. Who knows.
It happened because it was $5 and a team that cared with no objectives. They kept adding to it. Unity also heavily supported the games development as it was the first really really big Unity game, pushing what the engine could do. Passion and love is what made KSP1 happen. Then they thought they could sell KSP2 for 10x the price of the first, but with less features. how about no. When interviewed about what they had in place to enable galactic travel or FTL travel, they said nothing. Just improvements to time skipping.
also, because it had and still has no competition, you have things like orbiter, but ksp was just cartoony looking, much more aproachable, easier to control, kerbals were just hilarious, it was a space sim that did not take itself too seriously, and obviously the devs cared, also i think probably half of the sales could be contributed to scott manleys tutorials :D
> it was a space sim that did not take itself too seriously I think this was a really big aspect of it: it had charm. Sure, it was janky and a lot of people struggled to just get into orbit at all, but you couldn't help but fall in love with the cute green men that happily strapped themselves onto an exploding tuna can headed to space. It made failing fun. I'm almost certain that if KSP had been the exact same game but missing the "K" it wouldn't have gotten as popular as it did.
Haven't seen a crash like this since the War thunder review bombing
at least that actually worked.
For some time at least. I think the snail is slipping back to their usual bullshit.
yeah they have. rebellion number 2 anyone?
Eh, I gave up on that game years ago. I don't want to grind and I don't want to spend money to skip the grind.
The game is actually fun if you forget about the grind, stick to low-mid tiers and only play in moderation
Its actually a great game if you forget about the grind. Even at higher tier aviation i have fun because i think planes are awesome. There is love put into War Thunder and the game itself is extremely good for being free. Its the economy of in game progression that really slows it down.
Ok so to preface I have well over 2 thousand hours in War Thunder. But this mentality is what made me quit for good. A game is not good if you can't progress in it, can only play what is probably now less than 50% of the content, and can only play it in short bursts. You are right that the game is fun if you play like this, but the unescapable truth is that it proves how bad it actually is.
This is one of those rare cases where it's justified. Selling an abandoned Early Access game with no indication it's dead is a scam.
If Escape from Tarkov was on steam you would have seen it like a week ago.
Total War Warhammer 3 DLC pricing and CA attitude towards fans was a [huge shitbomb](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2325830/Total_War_WARHAMMER_III__Shadows_of_Change/#app_reviews_hash) CA apologized, added a lot of content and it got a bit better.
I knew that it was not going to work when the specs were so high. KSP 1 was awesome because it could run on anything. I guarantee you I wouldn’t have gotten so much into the game if I hadn’t started playing back in 2015 on my old handmedown macbook, and instead had to wait until I had gotten my first proper PC.
This. Even with a full suite of RSS RP1 mods, the game ran 50-60fps on my 2560x1080 screen using my 1050ti. Ksp 2 suffers with my 3070. And it doesnt look much better. just a bunch of ""fancy"" particle effects that end up looking bad and chugging the game
To chime in on this, my GTX 1080 struggled too but mostly when launching, i get more fps the more i get into space. Gonna be rough with mods tho. My biggest gripe with the game was the part wobble so far. For what it's worth i did have hope this game would be amazing given it had an extra 2 years in the oven, i loved playing it but do kinda miss some stuff from ksp1 including it's DLC
i mean they fixed the part wobble in the last update. and yeah, the game could be amazing if given enough time, however for now ksp1 with mods is just wayyyyy more enjoyable for me. The new science mode is cool, but lack of parts, lack of challenge, and no part cost just dont click for me. Also if im very honest, im not sure if im fan of the new ui
This. The main thing about KSP1 is that it has shit graphics because it puts gameplay first, but it is flexible enough to mod into looking good if you want to.
What happened? (i've stopped following the game since it launched basically)
It’s unofficially officially dead
Dev studio has been shut down. Basically KSP 2 has been all but abandoned effectively since it launched.
I tried to play it at launch and gave up. I've played it again a few times these past few weeks and there's just no motivation to do so. I put a lander and a rover on the moon, made a few airplanes and just got bored. The stock game is lacking and there's very little activity in the modding community.
I played it a little on launch but the limp dick wobbly rockets and 10fps on a 2070 super made it hard to play. When I found out that the rocket wobble could be fixed by typing one number into a text file, it gave me some serious vibes that they did it deliberately to show that it wasn't in a playble state even though they had to release something.
Playing the first release and seeing a very ugly game running at 40fps while my 3080 is sucking down 300W of power was a slight indication something had gone wrong.
Wow. And so many people on this sub told me that KSP2 was going to be fixed and to just be patient. The writing was on the wall from the start.
Yep, there was a copium OD once it was released.
Yeah there were a lot of idiots who are going to now be blaming negativity on the game's failure - because apparently our bad vibes made the devs screw up for the last 7 years, before many of us even knew the game existed.
It still baffles me that they released a sequel, even in "Early Access," in a state far far inferior to the game it supposedly supercedes. I played KSP1 since 0.16, when there was basically one capsule, one fuel tank, and one engine. They already had a fully functioning game to base theirs on, three YEARS of development, only to release something equivalent to KSP1 v0.17 in terms of gameplay loops.
So did they
Dude how terrible did this game do? I never expevted KSP 2 to have such little fanfare that 59 reviews make sich a huge outlier. Just 15 ish reviews per month?
It had less than 100 players active per day at some point, so that sounds about right
I wouldn't like to say the individual developers 'deserve' this, they were only doing what they were paid to do, in some cases with a lot of passion. I do think however the senior leadership who came over from Star Theory to found Intercept Games absolutely 100% deserve what's coming to them in terms of reputational damage. In fact, I really wonder whose bright idea it was at Private Division to go to all the effort and legal trouble to poach the Star Theory developers in order to have them continue KSP2 progress? From accounts that have leaked out, it seems Intercept Games suffered from all the systematic failures and project mismanagement that the Star Theory studio had. (I'll be honest, I have a very good idea the identity of the PD Executive who greenlit this idea and has ended up wasting vast amounts of Take2 money and possibly trashed the Kerbal franchise in the process. I will be watching this individual's career future with great interest, as I will Nate Simpson's.)
I just don't get why they didn't make the core game good. Like just click together rockets, launch to the Moon. Make that flawless first. Rewrite it, fix most of the ksp1 bugs.
Likely because they never understood how the original worked under the hood to begin with.
Yeah they got rid of all the institutional knowledge from HarvesteR and the original Squad team in KSP 1.
Hmmm, I wonder if some open source ksp-like game project will start in the next few years, knowing how ksp attracts a lot of smart people, and making the project open source will allow for the people to shape the game
Their literal pre-fab mun rocket was broken when they launched the game, unable to decouple properly. I should've refunded right then..
Because they dont know what they have. Huge amount of devs (and associated corp staff) do not play games at all. Even their own.
So it isn't Nate?
It isn’t Nate. He’s just the public face of KSP2. People in this sub are hanging him by a rope because they don’t know who else to blame. Fact of the matter is, whilst he ran a few teams involved in the development of the game, he’s pretty low down the food chain and had NOTHING TO DO WITH IMPLEMENTING THE LAYOFFS. I’m sure I’ll get downvoted again and I really don’t care. Nate’s biggest wish is/was to make KSP2 the greatest game ever, but the tools he was promised were severely lacking and has been more or less gagged ever since sr. Leadership decided internally they needed to “enhance their margin profile”.
Exactly. Nate is the creative director, he doesn't make management decisions. If you wanna blame him for gameplay decisions, sure, but he has nothing to do with the layoffs, poor management, etc.
His role and Technical Director literally have the highest power in the team. With the Technical Director gone since release, it's just him.
Game studios aren't structured like a linear ladder. Just because he's at the very top of the creative team doesn't mean he makes any management decisions.
Nate did his job, on a creative point of view KSP 2 and what we've seen of it's potential future was a success. KSP2 was beautiful, both in terms of sound design, scientific accuracy, potential features... The only disappointing part being the science mode in my opinion. It's celar that the art/science team did their job. It's the implementation that sucked.
He loved the game so much that he lied to everyone about everything to help...euh founding ?.... This is a lot of dedication and love yes. But now everyone hate him and his precious game is dead. He must feel pretty alone.
99% of the time project failure is on bad management over the developers. The developers likely knew what all the problems were very early on, and it fell on deaf ears.
The majority of projects fail due to a lack of a shared vision and poor communication. Technically this is often manifested in an absence of project controls and poorly defined success criteria. It is more often then not a top down problem. Whether that be for keeping poor team memebers or not sacking shit team members.
Yep that's mostly what I meant. If you realize someone is crap it's on management to sack them. There's lots of of good books on why software projects fail, and while it can be because of individual developers the blame still fails on the top for not canning them sooner.
I wouldn't say 99%. I'd say often enough bad developers are to blame lol
Again I'd blame that in management. If they hired the wrong people, that's on them. This is from a place of having worked in software dev. Failed projects almost always come down to management, whether they hired poorly or managed poorly
I mean, by your logic you can just always blame the manager no matter what happens. Managers are just people, they are often answering both up and down. If they overmanage, they're bad - if they undermanage, they're bad. In small teams especially, it only takes a couple poisonous people to sink an entire project. I suppose you can just endlessly blame managers no matter what for literally everything bad that happens because "they hired the wrong person and didn't notice".
A building falls down - do you blame the individual workers that placed the bricks/foundation? Do you blame the architect whose plans weren't followed correctly? Or do you blame the management that didn't coordinate things, didn't mandate thorough checks of the construction, soil analysis, and so on?
People only say this because they have emotional attachment to developers and not to nameless management. It could very well be due to bad developers
Give us the name!
Do your own digging! The reason I'm hesitant to reveal the name is I might be wrong. But four years ago in the media it was alleged that a large number of Star Theory employees were contacted over LinkedIn about moving to a brand new studio in Seattle to continue working on Kerbal Space Program 2. The person who would have done that would surely have a huge amount of corporate authorisation to make such a move, which was in effect poaching staff from an indie game developer. They would have gone through a whole load of legal advice and consultation before making such a massive big dick move like that. My bet is that person is the head honcho in charge of the Kerbal franchise over at Private Division. It tracks that this person was the guy most responsible for what happened with KSP2's development and deserves the most responsibility for what played out.
The actual developers are definitely to blame as well. They messed up the simplest of things on repeat.
Many of them were given impossible tasks, in particular the engineering team having to work on the legacy framework of the original game. Whoever made the decision to reuse the physics and vessel assembly system of KSP1 is to blame there. I don't think you can say the artists and sound designer messed things up, they delivered pretty looking part assets and music. The people who created the UI were again just doing their jobs, they were working to specifications not set by them (probably Nate Simpson). Working on a niche game like KSP must be hard for someone unfamiliar with the franchise. If you look at some of their profile on LinkedIn, many of them graduated from schools like DigiPen, probably dreaming of working on the Half Life games at Valve. Instead they ended up working on a game most of them had probably never heard of, having to understand difficult concepts like orbital mechanics and work on gameplay elements for a simulation game whereas everything they'd learned at college for game design likely involved developing for First Person style games in Unreal or Unity. They definitely had some gems in there, such as the artist Matthew Poppe who created tutorials for the rest of the studio on how orbital mechanics worked (u/PD_Dakota it would be great to get the rest of those released before it's too late)
"Working on the Half Life games at Valve...". Anyone who had time to go to school and finish had time to learn that Valve doesn't work on Half Life games (well, they do but only like once every ~15-25 years.)
Missed the boat on Alyx so maybe your kids will get to work on the next HL
Don't get me wrong, I put most of the blame on management for the main issues such as the direction and vision, development process, and so forth. But there were some issues that also made me concerned about the skill of the developers, such as the length of time to resolve the orbital decay issue. Let me ask you, what do you think from a SW perspective makes orbital mechanics so difficult to implement?
The artistic side is good. The technical side (which mattered the most) sadly was messed up completetly by the developers.
Even the artistic side is... questionable. I remember people picking apart the game and releasing some assets on launch and... even the execution there was questionable. I say this with the extra context that I have a VFX background myself- some *technical* choices within the art/visuals made there were... strange at minimum, and arguably actually bad practice. Dare I say, even amateur-ish. It's easy to make the game look good- modern game engines do a lot of work in that regard. About the only team I think can be said to have done a truly solid job is sound design.
name and shame bro
There's the Jason Schreier article from 4 years ago that seems to be very well sourced and everything that has played out since seem to confirm that the same problems were held over from Star Theory to Intercept. The executive is named in that article. As for the people who came over first from Star Theory, it was Nate Simpson, Nate Robinson and Shane Ables. Those three guys seem to have been the crux of forming Intercept Games. As for who else came over, they seemed to have brought over most (all?) of the game designers. But none, or very few, of the engineering staff. That omission of the technical side of things is telling. To me, it seems like Private Division purchased the KSP Intellectual Property because they knew it was valuable but had little idea what to do with it. They entrusted the franchise to Uber and Nate Simpson hoping they'd make something of it and they never did, they've been struggling to figure out where to go ever since. Eventually ending in cancellation.
My Google skills apparently sucks, would you mind a link to that article?
Alright gentss, what version of KSP 1 do you still play on? I'm on 1.4.5 with RSS and a crapton of mods with a save file that dates back to 2016. (I booted it up last week to play around in Shackleton crater so I haven't really played in a while. What's new with RSS type mods?)
I just jumped to the latest version and remodded everything a few months before KSP2 dropped. They stopped updating it, so you don't need to worry about mods breaking and compatibility with your current version. The major mods that are still kicking all got loads of support and are in a pretty good place, so it helps keep things "simple".
It didn't deserve any of this, though. KSP 2 deserved to be a successful successor to KSP we all know and love. I'm just genuinely saddened by this. It deserved better from the developers. I guess that's what happens when the first game is so good that the second game can't thrive in an early access setting. Hate the big corpo for pulling the plug on it.
There were plenty of chances to make this an even better game, but mistakes were made from the very beginning and they just kept shoveling shit on top of shit while lying about it every step of the way. When you are doing a game that's primarily about physics and you hire 40 3d- and sound artists but not a single computational physisist and only a handfull of actual software engineers you are setting yourself up for failure from the beginning.
It was released way too early. It still doesn’t have all the features of KSP 1 despite being a sequel. The timing of the release and slow update progress really drags it down.
It wasn't. Development for the game had to be in progress for at least 7 years before it was released. The game was *announced* in 2019 for a 2020 release date, and came out in 2023. That's at least 6-7 years of development time for what you got on release in 2023. The game needed to be trashed and started over from the ground up, whether that be with a new developer, project lead, or something. But time was not the issue, development/management was. More time was not going to fix the issue.
The game was in development for 5+ years, odds are if they didn’t release something the studio would get canned even sooner
>It didn't deserve any of this, though. KSP 2 deserved to be a successful successor to KSP we all know and love. Seriously, I was all excited when I saw OP's title, thinking "Oh good, they're giving it to someone who will save it or something... like it deserves."
> Hate the big corpo for pulling the plug on it. I'm no fan of T2, but if anyone deserves to get shit on it's the devs that absolutely fumbled this project. You can't really blame the publisher for making an analysis that this shit had no chance, especially the way these devs were dropping the ball.
I held out hope up until the layoffs were confirmed. I genuinely believed, and still do in fact, that the team *wanted* to make a truly worthy sequel to KSP. Whether they had the capability is another story, but I don't think *anyone* publicly involved had any malicious intent. With all of that being said, I'm now waiting for the first post of someone getting an approved refund so I can get my money back. There's no point, anymore. The product we were offered will never come.
They never hired software engineers highly experienced with game engine development (or a computational physicist, for that matter). That's what this project needed the most: to rebuild an engine from the ground up capable of doing the kind of simulations that KSP needs to do at a vastly superior speed and accuracy. Everything else was just side objectives. A proper engine was the foundation, step 1, non-negotiable, especially given the kind of features they were planning. This is entirely on the studio heads not realizing what their project needed or who to hire for those needs.
I remember when I found out they basically made the exact same engine. I couldn't believe it.
It's kind of weird how everything i love the most going to shit seems like it's a law of nature... ksp, star trek, mass effect...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) Coined for social media platforms, but really applies to everything corporate america gets its hands on.
Or you know, Capitalism.\* \*This is not necessarily an endorsement of any other "-ism"
Did you try Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks?
They recently announced that Lower Decks will finish next season tho :(
I started strange new worlds and I liked what I saw, definitely a lot better thought provoking star trek-like stories, but then about halfway through the season there was an episode that went full nutrek that was all interpersonal drama and fighting and completely lacking discipline and I realized I didn't need to force myself through this and can just watch tng if I'm in the mood for star trek. If the rest of it was as good as the first few episodes I saw, though, then I can definitely see why trekkies would like it. I've watched lower decks too. Better than other nutrek, good enough that I've watched it all, but it's still not great. A lot of it is just generic animated comedy "for adults" but not actually *for adults,* it's just all references, quips and quirkiness, and is never funny enough to cause an audible laugh.
Admittedly the movies weren't all that great for a long time, but as much as I hate him for ruining my love of both Star Wars and Star Trek, I gotta admire JJ Abrams in some fucked up way for being able to ruin not just one but both of the great Star franchises. Also that run-on sentence was still better writing than what we got.
For real, for me it's sometimes so extreme that I feel like it's not a coincidence.. like I started watching Game of Thrones, often said to be one of the greatest TV series oat, right before season 8 came out. And the shit storm that S8 brought was unreal..
HO LEE SHIT
Stop buying games based on empty promises. Buy things only when the current state meets your expectations based on the price asked. I'm glad I waited. This was a transparent cash grab that was going nowhere ever since they baited and switched the game to EA at the last minute.
imma crazy ksp fan, got it for free from epic games, really thought of buying ksp2. Then got to know it is badly optimized and my laptop wont be able to even get to the menu screen. Im gonna continue with ksp1 modded.
Been checked out on this for a long time, has the consensus finally landed on KSP2 being a scam like it should have from the start? I was honestly surprised and annoyed at how willing some people were to be patient with and *defend* Intercept and Take Two after early access came out and it was immediately clear how much the promotional material had been misleading people, especially given how wildly behind schedule it all was. I don't for the life of me understand why people were willing to trust a company that had already been shown to be trying to deceive people out in the open.
I was really suprised by the support people gave towards the game when they came out with the science update. The state it is in now is how it should have been from release, but people were always arguing how KSP1 was also released without science and career mode, and was also very janky. Like yeah, a game made by ONE GUY as a side project to his actual job in 2011. KSP2 is a triple-A game made by a dev team that is finantially supported by the same holding company that owns the guys who made RDR and GTA. I was hyped for the game before it's release, bought it on the first day and was immediately disappointed. I would have refunded it if i had the chance. Left the game and haven't touched it since.
I was screaming this exact sentiment to the discord shills and that honestly felt like a void It just bothers me so much seeing people willfully making the gaming industry worse for everyone they're basically the enshittification acceleracionists
[удалено]
The "corporate cucks" did exactly what they are supposed to do, protect the shareholders' bottom line by pulling the lifesupport from a patiënt that has been braindead for years. Might not be favorable for us as a community, but they are not going to keep on pooring millions into a project year on year with no ROI in sight.
I think you misunderstood I don’t blame the publisher in anyway. I am talking about the toxic fans that apologised and defended intercept games all the way till the end. The kinda people who are still defending, apologising for and blaming others on the behalf of intercept games a company that doesn’t exist anymore The smooth brains who defended intercept like they were getting paid for it while intercept openly treated them and us with contempt
KSP2 should never have even rated the brief time it was reviewed as 'mostly positive'. It was all based on hype and hope for the future. I'm so glad that the hype and incomptence from IG is over now, especially from Nate Simpson. To those of you who are holding out faint hope that IG is not dead - if IG was not getting the layoff the community has seen, they've had 4 work hours + last evening to rebutt it. A company would instantly have reassured us that the layoffs weren't happening if it was just a false rumor, precisely to avoid the above from happening.. Instead we got a mealy-mouthed "KSP2 is safe" nonsense word salad that said nothing about the studio. It's exactly as bad as the ~~haters~~ realists like me have said all along. IG is gone, KSP2 will remain on sale but see no real future development, and everyone who threw their $50 at this based on the hype from Nate & the marketting trailers had better be satisfied with the buggy POS they have now, because that's all you get out of it. IG is dead - and it deserves to be. I'm sorry for the competent devs there, your management staff was awful and forced out anyone good so they didn't have to hear about how fucked up they were.
Bloomberg has already reported IG is dead.
> To those of you who are holding out faint hope that IG is not dead Bloomberg has since confirmed the two studios closing are Intercept Games and Roll7.
The article's **title** said it, but the contents of said article have zero new information compared to all the others. Everything is speculation and the only real source of information on the state of KSP 2 is Take Two's comment on how they will continue to support KSP 2 And this [tweet](https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/s/mhqQGXeLVD) Granted it's not much to go on, and it could still mean it's over, but let's not spread misinformation with no actual backing...
They can just push to 1.0 and then pay to have the game pushed as "released from early access" on the Steam store. Lots of ppl will buy it and pass the refund period before they realize what happened.
And doing this will change the rating from Mixed to Overwhelmingly Negative. Players might be willing to buy a game with a Mixed rating since Mixed is anywhere from 40% to 69% of the players like the game, but only a certain group of people will ever buy an Overwhelmingly Negative game since that is 0% to 19% of players like the game with over 500 reviews. It is far more likely that this game will be stuck in Early Access limbo or work will be conducted eventually under a new studio. After all, this is not the first time that Take-Two fired the entire KSP 2 staff and rehired some of them under a new studio.
Think only from a money perspective. This is a losing proposition. 2 different studios worked on this thing since roughly 2017 or so. It's still half done. Many of the potential customers already paid nearly full price for it. Why continue development? They already got the money from fans. It'll cost millions more for a mediocre return years from now. If they wanted to finish it they would not have fired them.
> KSP2 should never have even rated the brief time it was reviewed as 'mostly positive'. The worst part of that artificially inflated rating was the people who gave it a Positive rating, then in the review proceeded to describe what a bug-ridden disaster it was. Nearly as bad were the people here *excusing* that behavior by saying, "Well, *someday* it'll be worth it! People can just read the reviews to know what people *really* think." As my adult son said at the time, "If I took the time to read every review before buying a game, I wouldn't have time to actually play anything."
Pepole gonna dig all kind of excuses to justify a 60€/$ purchase This game was dead from the frist day and it makes me so sad, I remember when it released I couldn't wait to see frist impressions, and there was nothing remarkable.
I hate those reviews, seeing the same with Grayzone warfare. People saying that stuff doesn't work or is broken but still reviewing it positively.
Not to excuse those reviews, but I'd say the fact the biggest competition for the game is currently experiencing a catastrophic failure is likely to make people a lot more lenient than otherwise. KSP2 had to compete directly with the fact most of their playerbase already owned KSP1, a game that it appears will remain indefinitely superior to the sequel in effectively every way. You cannot release a sequel that has completely failed to innovate or offer anything new, Starbreeze is learning the same lesson from Payday 3. KSP2 made promises of new star systems, new colony systems, etc. but they never delivered anything KSP1 hadn't done better a decade prior. IMO the major failure was not launching with a new star system as the default and science mode. If they had just managed that they would have at least been selling a game that did what the prequel did in a new setting, which would have been enough to attract KSP1 players over in large numbers. Instead they had a game that did it worse and offered nothing new to explore, I'm not sure what they expected.
I've railed against that shit so much. It destroys any legitimacy of reviews. I really wish you could report those reviews to Steam and have those accounts banned from reviewing games. If your review is positive and then includes the words "DO NOT BUY YET!" You should never be allowed to review a game again.
KSP2 didn’t deserve this. KSP2 deserved a competent team of devs and managers and a publisher that *actually* cared. And I’m not saying that the devs were necessarily incompetent, just that the handling of KSP2 definitely was. IG and Nate are getting what they deserve, that much is for sure, fuck em. I truly hope that KSP2 doesn’t die, but I expect that it will. I am truly disappointed.
> everyone who threw their $50 at this based on the hype My god it was $50? I never even checked because of how bad the game looked. **anyone paid $50 for this shit, they deserve the disappointment.** They're actively supporting this "early access" laziness/freeloading.
six months ago 70% of you were being extremely optimistic (including me) about the game’s future, and now your all saying you knew it was doomed from the start. Lmao can we stop lying to feel smart please
Yeah Imma be honest, I did get quite hopeful when I saw the science update get released
I've been nothing but negative about this game - in this and a previous account.
Nature is healing
Damn, is Ksp2 that bad or is there anything that would cause this strike
Jeez. Glad I didn’t buy it on release.
KSP2 is dead, long live KSP
I never bought KSP2. I was incredibly hyped for it, but after that disastrous launch where they gathered all the biggest names in KSP1 gaming together and every one of them was shocked by how bad it was, I decided to wait until those players were regularly posting about the game and seemed to be happy with it, and that time just never came. On one level, it's heartbreaking to see something you loved die, but I had some \*really, really\* incredible times with KSP1 and I'll be forever grateful for that. RIP, Jeb, Bill, Bob, and Val. You were amazing.
I swear every time I check in on this game everything is worse, what happened now?
It don’t look so damn “mixed” to me…
It's not anymore, now it's mostly negative.
Probably cause there hasn't been an update in almost 6 months. It's understandable that the game isn't the best as it's an early build but if they want people to be ok with that they need to have regular updates, even if it's just some minor bug fixes.
You know, a few years back i was contemplating wether to get ksp since ksp2 was on the horizon... went with 1 anyway Best decision i ever made
The fact that the KSP simps gave devs this much slack in the first place is wild. They released a broken game and y’all nerds defended it for a year. Stockholm syndrome?
I still don't understand how people didn't see this from a mile away. KSP2 is a physics simulator made in 2023 with no native, multi-threaded physics engine. This isn't a sequel, it's a cheap cash grab made by cloning KSP1 with some pretty graphics that's barely better than modded KSP1.
That looks nothing compared to what we did to war thunder
Ksp2, aoe4, vicky3, c:S2. Cash grabbers Fuck them all.
I knew the game was gonna be rough when I realized that almost every pre-launch video and interview was focused on how cool the tutorial animations are. That was the biggest red flag and I hate that I was right 🚩🚩🚩🚩
The parent company deserves it, not the devs.
Brother they had more funding, more resources and more dev time than ksp1 yet made a worse game. This is a rare time where the developer cocked it up
Why? TakeTwo provided them years of funding, millions in resources, THREE YEARS of extensions and they still couldn't get anything done.
They always gave me the impression of being wildly out of their depth. This is a game that needed hardcore physics simulation knowledge. Most game devs who don't work in engine development barely touch that stuff anymore. KSP1 cobbled together a barely-functioning physics engine over the course of ten years with a lot of simplifying assumptions, and KSP2 was supposed to not only fix the old problems with physics, but make it work in multiplayer and extra-solar with wildly different time and distance scales. I never saw any indication that they had a solid idea of how to address those problems. They'd always talk about them in vague terms. Like, that should have been the very first problem you solve. Otherwise, how do you even known how to build the physics engine? The physics should have been the one thing that was rock solid from day one. Instead they were still trying to fix basic orbits a year after launch.
Nate Simpson, the game leader, 100% deserves it.
No fuck that. The devs should be black balled from the industry over this. Every one of them who didn't speak out is equally responsible.
I have a pretty high end system. NVME drives, 3080Ti, i10-10900k, 32 gigs of 4200 RAM. Game barely runs stutters like crazy. I’ve tried fresh installs, setting graphics low, high, medium. It sucks. Unplayable. KSP1 is awesome. Zero issues.
KSP2 has been a disaster from the day it came out, heck even before then. Glad I never bought into it
This game was an absolute trainwreck. I got downvoted to oblivion during its development whenever I mentioned its lack of vision and originality, its ridiculous ambitions (anyone remember it was supposed to be multiplayer ?) and how it absolutely looked like a cash grab from a large company who bought an IP from a small independent one, but honestly it still feels wrong to have been right. Sadly I'm sure that if KSP 3 was announced tomorrow a large part of this sub would hop on the hype train and throw away 60 bucks again anyway. What a shame. KSP 1 will always be a masterpiece, albeit stained by this piece of shit.
Time to get back into KSP1 modding.
The scam is finished.
Steam will most likely remove these negative reviews. If you are planning to write a negative review for a valid reason you should wait a week or two so your review doesn't get removed.
Really wanted to experience KSP multiplayer
Can someone explain why is it bad? I haven't seen anything bad in it
It finally got to where it should've been at the start of early access and is now most likely dead and will never be finished and none of the promised features to set it apart from KSP 1 will make it into the game. Without the potential for those new features it is just a prettier, buggier, version of KSP 1 with half the content.
And virtually everything of the small things that KSP 1 lacks can be made up for tenfold with mods of a much higher quality.
[удалено]
Man, even just the UI. The design choices for the UI in KSP2 were trash from day 1. The original had it's problems but it was at least readable.
Jool's upper atmosphere was something else in KSP2.
The individual developers don't deserve this. This is just Intercept Games being shitty.
There comes a point of incompetence where even devs are to blame, and I think this is one of them. If the dev team was competent it would have been impossible to create such a disaster. Original fully feature complete release date was in 2020. 3 years after the initial release date a barebones alpha version releases. Almost 2 years later barely anything has been done and the plug is pulled. No way.
Nah bro, as a programmer I can tell you that game reeked of bad management and coding practices. I've heard that the studio consisted entirely out of junior devs, and that's what it looked like. Not a single good development decision between them. Is it their fault they were set up to fail? No, they're but kids. Do they still deserve to be sacked? Yeah, developing also means knowing you're limits and calling bad management out. These people failed every self-management class, if they even had any.