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KSP2 Video and Interview thread

Klapaucius

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in Prelaunch KSP2 Discussion

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nikokespprfan

nikokespprfan

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On 11/8/2019 at 1:01 AM, drhay53 said:

According to a "call with investors", KSP2 has been delayed until FY2021.

https://www.pcgamer.com/kerbal-space-program-2-is-delayed/

I couldn't find a deeper source than the article itself that is making the claim, but I find PC Gamer to be reputable. I didn't spend too much time trying to track down the call or a transcript.

EDIT: here is the earnings report and quote.

https://ir.take2games.com/news-releases/news-release-details/take-two-interactive-software-inc-reports-strong-results-13?field_nir_news_date_value[min]=2019

  • Announced that Kerbal Space Program 2, the sequel to the beloved original space sim, is in development and is now planned for launch on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One during our fiscal year 2021. The original Kerbal Space Program has sold-in over 3.5 million units worldwide, and earned a Metacritic rating of 88 and a Steam user score of 91%.

 

For the sake of keeping the source of sources up to date with the latest sources. The discussion thread for this development is here.

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  • 6 months later...
nikokespprfan

nikokespprfan

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OK, lets round up more KSP2 news and commentary sources. It has been a while since sources where collected here. If I forgot something, please contribute. EDIT: phew that was a lot of work.

The initial Delay beyond the Fiscal Year 2020

There is a discussion video from @ShadowZone, published on the topic above, on November 8th 2019.

Spoiler

 

Print-only PC gamer article & other Info Reveal

First, there is a video of the behind-the scenes of the KSP 2 trailer, published by the KSP main youtube channel on 28th Oktober 2019

Spoiler

 

Then, on 20th Febuary 2020, this same channel published a KSP2 feature video about next generation technology and engines.

Spoiler

 

Then on March 5th, PCgamer had an interview with @Nate Simpson. Here, Nate discusses the studio's ideas about what is and what isn't physically plausible, among other subjects. They also talk about the website AtomicRockets.com, which is no KSP news source, but it is a relevant source that the KSP team used for inspiration for future tech engine concepts.

Spoiler

AtomicRockets Website: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php

Around the end of May, a PCgamer article came out, written by Wes Fenlon, which is only available in print as of writing this post. As such, I cannot find any links or references for direct access to the source. We do, however, have two videos indirectly discussing the contents of this article, those video's being by @Matt Lowne and @ShadowZone, both published on 29th May. We also have screenshots posted on Imgur, brought to the attention of the forums by @prestja, who is working on a transcript. The article discusses new information revealed about the details of KSP2. The article has a KSP Forum Discussion Thread here.

Spoiler

Shadowzone's video also contained an extra tidbit in his main reaction: 

Quote

Oh, I forgot to add something in the video: I asked whether or not they are now going to give us an Early Access period since the game is delayed so far back. There was no definitive answer, unfortunately. Thought I should let you know.

 

Spoiler

  Imgur Source: https://imgur.com/a/7sv1Kcc

 

On 5/28/2020 at 9:45 PM, prestja said:

A large info dump regarding Kerbal Space Program 2 has been posted to Imgur here. As a site note: we're getting nurseries!

TLDR

  Reveal hidden contents
  • Life support is seemingly confirmed with greenhouses mentioned.
  • Nurseries will permit Kerbal reproduction once milestones are achieved
  • Career mode has been replaced with a new mode internally called "adventure mode" which does away with funding and instead focuses on giving the player objectives they may optionally complete in addition to letting them discover the galaxy at their own pace. World firsts are emphasized, and science points make a return.
  • Colonies are integral staging grounds for interstellar progression.
  • There is finally a proper pause button.
  • Post-flight reports will point out areas the player's rockets can be improved upon.
  • G-forces are now listed for each individual Kerbal.
  • Rocket subassemblies are robust enough to produce one incredibly complex component in the VAB and simply attach it to an even larger rocket through symmetry rules.
  • Parts are arranged into size tiers within categories (finally!)

Transcript (work in progress)

  Reveal hidden contents

The Big Boom

Ext: Space. The camera pans across a desert landscape, the faint flow of starlight refracting through a layer of atmosphere at the horizon. Stirring synth chords and a bass drum aren't quite repoducing Also sprach Zarathustra, but the tone is the same. Mysterious. Ominous? The vibe is unmistakably 2001. 

Then, peeking out over the edge of a cliff, we see it - a colony on the dusty orange surface, futuristic apartment buildings on a lattice of steel support beams flanked by rows of solar panels and greenhouses. A long runway for space planes suggests how fresh supplies and colonists will reach this output on the Planet Duna, while the ramp at the end of the runway immediately makes me want to ruin the ambiance by strapping a rocket to a rover and seeing how far it could jump. The Kerbals, I think, would certainly understand.

Flying to the Mun adn beyond is just the beginning of your progression through the solar system and, eventually, the galaxy. To reach those far-flung stars, you'll now be able to establish orbital and planetary colonies, staging grounds for the next leg of your cosmic journye.

"[Colonies are] capable of producing colonists through a method that we will not describe, for everyone's sake, after something that the player initiates called a 'boom even'", says lead designer Shana Markham. Throughout Kerbal's new career mode, which the developers have nicknamed 'adventure mode', making discoveries and unlocking new technologies will trigger these boom events, which kick off various effects across your civilization. In a colony's nursery module, for example, that means making new colonists. "You know, discoveries make kerbals happy," Markham says.

The goal of adventure mode is to provide a far more ambitious campaign for players to embark on, building ships powerful enough to leave the solar system. The structure will include specific missions, but creative director Nate Simpson says these will feel more "compelling" than some of the first game's missions, which would direct you to fly to a specific latitude/longitude and trigger a part on your ship. "Those felt grindy. We're going out of our way to make the mission goals for adventure mode feel meaningful: real firsts that feel unique relative to every other goal in the game."

Simpson says adventure mode has a lot in common with the first game's science mode, which gave you unlimited funds but made you earn science points to advance the tech tree. In KSP2, the missions will be there for players who want them, but you can also set your own goals. "You'll begin to collect science and trigger boom events as you explore what's out there," Simpson says.The campaign is "explicitly designed to be non-punitive" so you'll never reach a fail state where you've" [article cuts off here]

[article resumes] unstable, explosive rockets. Simpson says that with each addition KSP2's developers have tried to distinguish between "constructive failure" and "frustrating failure". The new tools are meant to ensure failures allow you to learn something (or at the least laugh at Jebediah Kerman's horrified face as your rocket corkscrews back to the ground at a thousand miles per hour).

"We don't want you to make the same mistake twice," Simpson says. "We want you to make lots of different mistakes." And now when you make those mistakes, KSP 2 will have a lot more help to offer.

Class in session

Truly getting into Kerbal Space Program inevitably means spending hours delving into YouTube videos on rocket science and the game itself. Even if you have a physics degree, there's still a steep learning curve to understanding how the hell to work Kerbal's interface. KSP2 fixes some obvious oversights and make the user interface a whole more elegant.

Flight tools are now clustered together in more logical ways, with navigation on the left and time controls in the centre, a place of prominence that reflects how important fast forwarding will be as you start launching long interstellar journeys. There's now a pause button, which I fervently hope gets a tool-tip that says 'DONT'T PANIC'.

Pausing will be one of the main ways players access KSP2's greatly expanded tutorials, which include a mixture of interactive tutorials to guide you through using interface elements, and animations that give you a crash course in rocketry. The example I saw adeptly explained high thrust and low thrust rocket engines with a pair of kerbals biking up a steep hill (see left).

"We're trying to create a system where the player comes to the tutorial with the desire to gain a specific category of information," says Simpson. The tutorials will be context-aware, so if you pause after leaving the atmosphere, for example, you'll be able to easily pull up a tutorial on how to execute a gravity turn to escape Kerbin's orbit. You'll perform that maneuver in 'VR space', then go back to your real rocket and put what you learned to good use. Hopefully.

"Teh big thing for me is that these are actually bite-sized, so you have a whole tutorial section about going to the Mun, but it's broken up into a large number of subsections, so you can learn and practice a specific piece," says Markham. And the game will make suggestions, too. When a launch inevitably goes awry, the post-flight report can highlight a tutorial based on what went wrong, so you'll learn as you go.

Given how much of the joy of Kerbal Space Program lies in discovery and personal achievement, there is a risk in over-explaining. The dev team is well aware of that pitfall because they've already stumbled over it. In early tutorial iterations they leaned too far into telling players how to play - the most straightforward tutorial, after all, is to tell someone exactly what rocket parts they need to reach their goal - but realized that the gratification comes from figuring it out yourself. "The important thing is to provide people with puzzle pieces and informational context, but don't tell them how to make the rocket. Concepts, not prescriptions," Simpson says.

Kerbal Space Program 2 is clearly going to be a far easier game to start playing, but the changes to the UI and a proper campaign mode should excite its loyal kerbonauts, too. What I'm really dying to know - and unfortunately saw precious little of - is what awaits outside the Kerbol System, and what it's going to be like exploring it with friends in multiplayer.

Space walk with me

I learned precious littel about just how big Kerbal Space Program 2 truly is, but I did come away from two days of interview with some clues. The dev team is around 30 people and still growing, and that's not including support from publisher Private Division's QA team, who the developers praised as being seasoned Kerbal fans and very helpful. It's easily the biggest team Kerbal has ever had behind it.

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Coronavirus Pandemic

For future reference, the coronavirus pandemic starts to become an influence at this point in the story. While its first outbreaks already started in January in China after having lingered for one to two months, the outbreaks didn't come into full effect in the western world until about February-March-ish and early May (the spread in time indicating the period of the virus becoming a problem). From now on in the reporting, this pandemic is playing a role mostly in the background, but it needs to be noted.

Further Delay

According to a PCgamer Article around the 20th of May (officially 16 days in the past as of writing), the game was further pushed back to the Fall of 2021. The article contains a twitter statement made by the Kerbal Space Program Twitter about the subject.

Spoiler

Article: https://www.pcgamer.com/kerbal-space-program-2-now-aiming-for-launch-in-late-2021/

 

Studio Change Controversy

This story begins before the Print-only PCgamer article (mentioned above), with a press Release from Take Two Interactive and a video on Kerbal Space Programs' main Youtube Channel, published on 20th of Febuary 2020. (haha 20-02-2020, what a funny date--- oh, I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself.) That day also saw a PCgamer article on the shift. EDIT: Then, on 28th of May, the KSP website introduced the new studio intercept to the playerbase with a post on a few quotes on why the name is so fitting.

In short objectivity: Take Two Interactive had owned the intellectual property rights since 2017, which where developed by the game studio Star.Theory, where all the game devs worked. Somewhere in between is an entity called Private Division, which is a publisher focusing on indie games. What has happened here is that the game was moved from Star.Theory to a newly Private-Division-set-up studio called Intercept. 

Spoiler

Press Release: https://ir.take2games.com/news-releases/news-release-details/private-division-announces-new-seattle-area-development-studio?field_nir_news_date_value[min]=

Article: https://www.pcgamer.com/kerbal-space-program-2-moves-to-a-new-studio/

 

Immediately following this, @ShadowZone discussed these developments in a video a day later, including the feature video from above that was posted on the same day.

Spoiler

KSP website: https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/dev-diaries/introducing-intercept-games/

Eventually though, more information came out about the studio change in a Bloomberg article by Jason Schrier on June 3rd 2020:

Spoiler

 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/kerbal-space-program-2-release-disrupted-by-corporate-strife

This was amplified by @Matt Lowne video on the same day, noting in his video description that the events are 'allegedly'. All of this was met with heavy discussion in pretty much all the places you'd expect to find it, including here on the Kerbal Forums. @ShadowZone also posted on this particular Forum Thread, and came out with a rundown and thought-through of the events that have unfolded in a subsequent video. At about the same time, @Nate Simpson reacted to this controversy in a post of his on the matter, where Lowne also commented.

Spoiler

His video description also contains a bunch of references on events discussed in the video, which are relevant for KSP's history, which I will copy for the sake of collecting resources.

  

On 6/4/2020 at 10:21 PM, Nate Simpson said:

Nate Simpson here -- I'm the creative director for KSP2, and I've been following the passionate discussion taking place on this forum. There have been a couple of emerging narratives that I'd like to address here.

 
As some of you may know, I came into this role primarily because of my love for the original Kerbal Space Program. I go back to the .15 days, before EVA was even a thing. I remember when Jool was born, and I remember the first time I used the (all-new) NERV engines to get there. This was a game that scratched a creative itch that no other game ever had. For me, it started a life-long love affair with space technology, and enlarged my understanding of the real world. One of the many joys of this job is that I've gotten to meet, hang out with, and even work alongside the people at Squad who are making sure that KSP continues to be the greatest game of all time.
 
From the very first day that my co-developers and I got a chance to put together a proposal for this game, my main purpose has been to imagine and define what KSP2 could be. It's real kid-in-a-candy-store stuff, and I have no illusions that to get to all of it will take at least as long as the original game has been around.
 
But there were a few things that we had to get right from day one. Of course that included the big new features - colonies, interstellar, and multiplayer. Equally important was the need to enhance the first-time user experience, tutorials, and user interface to make the game easier to get into as a newcomer.
 
But as important as all the new stuff is, it's equally important for us to preserve the magic of the original game. Its sense of humor, its commitment to physical realism, its stealthy teaching of rocket science. Also, its flexibility to different styles of play, and its ability to appeal to players across a wide spectrum of interests and abilities. I hope that I'm doing a good job of advocating for all of these perspectives -- though it has often been helpful to get feedback from the community when we're exploring what does and doesn't work (yes, we know how you feel about the navball).
 
I say all this now because it sounds like some people are concerned that this project has changed -- either it's canceled (it's not) or it's going to be a freemium game with microtransactions (it's not), or it'll be debased in some way (it won't be). I want to make super clear that nothing from our original vision for this game has been altered in any way. And I want to be extra, super clear that we've never once gotten any pressure from the publisher or anyone else to change, add, or remove any feature from KSP2. I especially want to call out Michael Cook, our executive producer at Private Division, as somebody who has been supportive of us from day one and who I've seen get visibly giddy during conversations about Z-pinch fusion devices. He's one of us.
 
We're still working hard on this game. As usual, we have more stuff we want to show off in the coming weeks and months as we continue to bring new systems online. For most of us on this team, this is a dream come true -- a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work on something we truly love. That has not changed, and I hope it never changes.
 
Thanks for your patience and understanding. I look forward to playing this game with all of you.
 
 

 

On 6/4/2020 at 10:59 PM, Matt Lowne said:

I can’t help but feel partially responsible for some of the hysteria surrounding the KSP 2 move from Star Theory to Intercept, and I am glad that spirits within the dev team remain high. I am disappointed that some viewers interpreted the news as a sign of cancellation or other deterioration of KSP 2’s development. The focus of the reporting (and my video) was to highlight the business side of Take-Two’s hostile acquisition of the KSP 2 development, which is something I still feel is a wholly negative thing and is part of an aspect of the publisher/developer relationship across the games industry that I hope will continue to grow better as the industry matures.

I wish no ill-feelings to any of the KSP 2 developers, and I am still wholeheartedly excited for the sequel. I have no doubt that your collective passion will result in an incredible sequel and I am very excited to see what you and your team produce.

 

And that brings us to the present moment. We will have to see how the situation unfolds.

Miscellanious Sources

A PC gamer article with a rundown of what is known about KS2: https://www.pcgamer.com/kerbal-space-program-2-release-date-multiplayer-everything-we-know/

 

You may have noticed a lot of PCgamer, ShadowZone and Matt Lowne sources. I had also looked at Scott Manleys' Youtube Page, but I did not find any relevant sources there. I don't know of many others whom I can expect to have relevant sources. Do you know interesting people giving their take on KSP2 development, or other sources for KSP news? Don't hesitate to collect the sources in this thread so others may find them later.

Edited by nikokespprfan
added KSP website studio announcement
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shdwlrd

shdwlrd

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Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, nikokespprfan said:

It has been here all along.

Hey, if you think this is important, you can help out by posting KSP2 news sources whenever you discover them. Keeps the archiving work light for all of us. :)

I did look for it a while ago. (Februaryish?) I didn't see it. My search-fu isn't really strong, plus it doesn't help that couldn't remember the title of the thread.

Edited by shdwlrd
stupid auto correct
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nikokespprfan

nikokespprfan

Posted
Posted (edited)

  

10 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

I did look for to a while ago. (Februaryish?) I didn't see it. My search-fu isn't really strong, plus it doesn't help that couldn't remember the title of the thread.

To be honest, I couldn't find it either, and I had to search in my activity history. So yeah......

 

EDIT: I have put this thread in my signature so people will see it (see below). I hope this will help people find the thread and help out. It wasn't like it said useful stuff there before anyway.

Edited by nikokespprfan
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