Monger

Short answer: Great update! Keep posting like this! Long answer: I have been a dev/sw architect for two decades now. As we all know, excrements regularly hits the fan, and you have to keep your customers away from spiralling into a excrements storm. Imho, what most customers want, is to trust you. They will follow you even with unpopular decisions, as long as they get the impression that you are in control, and you are listening. Give them that. Repeat what you have learned from the community, so the community feels heard. Then give a little insight into your daily work, that shows that you are professionals that know how to deal with things. Imho you don't even have to promise anything (or vaguely hint at some promise). Show a little of the process how you deal with things, and celebrate your successes.

I'll give you that this is my weakest argument. It's actually not so much about loading times, but rather the whole onboarding process: loading the game, loading the save, going to tracking station to get an idea what is actually going on, switching to a vehicle... There are games that make it incredibly straightforward to get into action. But this is not something specific to KSP, the whole genre is currently not sufficiently approachable to me.

I played hundreds of hours of KSP1, and then my son started playing it. So I was eager trying out KSP 2, but then I refunded. First of all, I didn't upgrade for ages. I bought multiple laptops that could play medium games, because, well, the family was growing. I thought I could make KSP2 work on lowest settings, but I couldn't. And looking at a few official statements I decided it was unlikely I could play this anytime soon. Second,while trying and seeing the first previews, I realized that the magic from the very first impression of KSP1 isn't repeating itself. Third, my life has changed. Time is very precious. If I have time to play, every minute in a loading screen is lost time. Fourth, this team is different than Squad. I would have loved to give them more money, as a thank you to the years of KSP. But giving Private Divisions this kind of trust upfront feels wrong. Fifth, my experience with Early Access hasn't been good so far. So many studios misuse this to fill their money chests. Far too many players lost too much money in EA for broken promises. For the sake of better games, we should raise that bar.

Yeah, that ain't good.

As appealing as the idea is: succeeding not despite but because of spectacular failure is kind of the main theme of KSP. That it also fits the desired development process might be coincidental.

Dear Devs, if you read this: json is an excellent format, but please consider zipping it. Zip Streams are blisteringly fast, take little CPU time, and save a lot on I/O access time.

edit: double post. Sorry.

That is a really common misconception. Cranking out mockups that look like the real thing is suprisingly simple. But it is also less than 1% than the desired final state. Often more like 0%, because you often toss away your prototype and start from scratch once you understand the lessons learned from your prototype.

This was exactly what I hoped you would do: take your time, collect and rank feedback, make a plan. Although I refunded at the fime being, this strengthens my trust in you. I really hope you can pull it off.

This is one of the topics where you can ask 10 people and get 15 opinions. For me, what made KSP so great was this perfect balance between light-hearted goofiness and nail-biting complexity about a topic that is so far from intuition as possible. It opened my mind, and made laugh at the same time. Can any game repeat that for me? I doubt it. Could a game repeat this for someone else? Possibly. KSP 2 needs its own message, its own audience. I wondered for years what this might be. I hope it's something along a positive futurism, a small glimpse into mankind's future. But that's just me.

Imho you can't know whether the launch was a success unless you know the goal. If the goal was to generate sufficient feedback to prioritize development effort in an early stage, then it was successful. If its goal was to get favorable reviews, then it failed. Honestly, if it is the former, and someone deliberately decided to weather the excrementsstorm until it gets better, then kudos, someone has balls of steel.

Unfortunately I was stuck in loading screen until I decided to refund. But yeah, I can recognize a strategy here. The foundation is rough, but it's there. Also, I can see a sound business plan here. You might disagree with it, and it is arguably risky, but it is recognizable. Imho the next three months are crucial to show that they can deliver and can stay in control. I will watch closely.

I never played KSP 1 with mods. I played hundreds of hours, and cursed a lot during them. There is a lot wrong with the original game, but the things that nagged me most were: insanely long loading times, especially switching between VAB and launch pad annoyed me every time. Weird glitches, stutters, ice-skating friction... Content never bothered me, it took me hundreds of hours until I got interested enough to visit Jool. What I hoped for in KSP 2 is a much more technical sound implementation that takes away all the small disturbances.

VRAM seems also to be an issue. There are rumours about memory leaks and/or wrong memory allocation. With a little luck these are quick fixes once you pinpointed them.

Simulation games often sell adequateyly for a very long time. Unlike Call of Duty, which makes most of its sales within the first month, you can have steady sales for years in this genre. Feedback rate is usually a lot higher if something goes sideways. So this also means, that very few players actually jumped the EA train. One of the main goals of KSP2 is to reach a far bigger audience, so that hasn't happened yet.c Of course if Private Divisions won't deliver, then this will go down in flames. But I wouldn't underestimate the boost that can happen if many players turn around and joyfully declare: wohoo! I can actually launch the game! Especially journalists love these rebound stories.