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[wpetula]

After some consideration and community discussion, all of my previous concerns have evaporated. I sincerely apologize if I sounded rude to the KSP community and developers. This was not my intent,  but I believe I came off as such. 

Would a moderator delete or discontinue this thread, please? Thanks.

Edited February 3, 2023 by wpetula

[Profugo Barbatus]

1 hour ago, wpetula said:

KSP 2 is coming out...without most of the features that have been promised. 

Correct, and this is my general concern as well. It is justifiable, but its not reassuring.

1 hour ago, wpetula said:

1. Too much community feedback. 

Not to beat this horse too much, but no. 'Community Feedback' is taken as a generalization and a nice marketing term to make early access releases sound nicer, we're mostly here as testers who'll pay them to do it. Wide feedback sentiment will be taken, and obviously broken balance choices will be taken, but we're not gonna see 400 devnotes back and forth constantly retweaking the same community complaint, and we're not gonna have devs spending 6 outta 8 working hours reading forum threads. For the most part, the people actually building the game will barely know we exist, they'll just have general sentiment filtered through the Community Managers or whatever middlemen handle it for them.

1 hour ago, wpetula said:

2. Problems modding.

This is always the case, even if the game launched fully featured, regular game updates would break mods. The exact architecture can also seriously influence this, forward thinking decisions like the resource management system already show promise for modding resilience, and I wouldn't be surprised if other systems held true to that as well. That being said, while modding is a focus, individual mods are not, and its unrealistic for the devs to give much concern to not breaking them at any given point, so long as they preserve the overall ability to continue building them.

1 hour ago, wpetula said:

3.  Rising expectations.

Expectations were already sky high, rumor is they already expanded the scope heavily after how well received it was, to meet those expectations. And if they are really missing expectations from the wider audience, EA gives them an opportunity to adjust. As I mentioned, while they won't be running individual complaints, they will be tracking and adjusting to community sentiment.

1 hour ago, wpetula said:

Though the roadmap was a little disappointing, I am still very excited to purchase KSP 2 Early Access this February.

I'll be buying it day one, no questions asked, I will play it exactly once, and then I will put it down until Science is in because frankly, its an absolute excrements state to launch in a lower feature state than the earlier game, especially a core feature like that. Rest of the roadmap gets a pass from me, but science is my salt point

[GoldForest]

3 hours ago, wpetula said:

KSP 2 is coming out...without most of the features that have been promised. 

This roadmap appears to be mirroring No Man's Sky development path, minus the surprise catastrophic launch. After numerous delays--presumed to be because of the pandemic and efforts to ensure the game is fleshed out at launch--KSP 2 will release at $50 promising that the stuff we've been most hyped about will eventually be implemented. No exact dates are given.

The devs' logic behind this approach is that because KSP 2 is an ambitious sequel to a beloved game, community feedback is crucial for the game to succeed. Thus, content should be added in chunks. While I agree with this logic, I still have several concerns:

That's the nature of EA. The features will come with time. The Devs are doing this so they can make sure every part of the game is as good as they can make it. Don't worry. 

3 hours ago, wpetula said:

1. Too much community feedback. 

The KSP 2 Discord is absolute chaos. So are the KSP 2 forums, but to a much lesser degree. So many people have so many different opinions on what KSP 2 should be. Thus, a question arises: if the roadmap is dependent on community feedback, how is any progress going to be made?

Firstly, no such thing as "Too much community feedback." There is only good feedback and bad feedback. And while many people have different opinions, Intercept will only really listen to the ones that fit into the vision, scope and direction of the game. As for suggestion, things like "Make warfare stock" or "Make a spin off game about X" will get ignored, while "Can we have a rogue planet?" or "Can we get a trinary star system?" will get considered, at least slightly.  

And the feedback they're mostly looking for is, "Does this thing work?" So, like the volumetric clouds system. It might work on Kerbin just fine, but people might find bugs with it on Laythe. So, the devs will have to go back and fix it and try again. 

3 hours ago, wpetula said:

2. Problems modding.

A long Early Access roadmap is not good news for modders. As features are added, changed, and deleted from KSP 2, mods are going to be constantly rendered incompatible or obsolete.

You're buying into EA. That's literally an expectation that mods can and will break. There's no avoiding it. Even outside of EA, mods will continue to break with updates. Incompatible mods are something that can't be avoided and shouldn't be worried about as the modders here are quite passionate about their mods and will fix them. As for obsolete mods, that's not a bad thing, that's actually a good thing! If a feature becomes stock, and it's done really well to the point that the mod is not needed, then that is a good thing IMO. Modders fill 'holes' in the game. If the hole is filled by the devs, then that's good. Yes, it sucks that the modder's mod is not useless, or at least not needed, but that doesn't mean the modder will stop necessarily. The stock version of the mod might have done something differently that people didn't like and so they'll stick with the mod. KSP 1 for instance. The stock robotics are kind of a joke. That's why people stick with IR. The stock alarm system is kind of washed down version of Kerbal Alarm Clock, that's why people stuck with KAC. 

3 hours ago, wpetula said:

3.  Rising expectations.

Fans have waited patiently through delay after delay for KSP 2. Now, they must wait even longer for a complete game. Every additional delay results in greater expectations for the final product. If KSP 2 "does not deliver" throughout Early Access, the expectation bubble may explode violently, resulting in a No Man's Sky scenario.

If community feedback hinders further development, modders can't mod, and expectations and disappointments boil over, KSP 2 is in for a rough ride. 

I think most KSP players have their expectations tempered. And will continue to temper them even at launch of Early Access. 

Community feedback will not hinder development. It will help it move along. Like I said before, Intercept is mostly looking for feedback on bugs and if the system is good. Do the clouds work? Do they fit with the game? Are there any bugs?  Is performance, okay? Quick simple questions like that. After those questions are answered, they'll move on to the next system, then the next.  Modders will be able to mod. They might run into difficulty with game breaking updates, but again, that's the nature of modding and EA. 

[stephensmat]

4 hours ago, Profugo Barbatus said:

I'll be buying it day one, no questions asked, I will play it exactly once, and then I will put it down until Science is in because frankly, its an absolute excrements state to launch in a lower feature state than the earlier game, especially a core feature like that. Rest of the roadmap gets a pass from me, but science is my salt point

I would prefer science to be here on Day One too. But it's not a dealbreaker for me, at first.

When i started playing, I started with the sandbox. Had no idea what I was doing. Option paralysis was an issue because I had no measure of what each part could do. So I tried career mode and bankrupted myself quickly. Science Mode gave me a balance between the two, and let me learn how to upgrade my ships, bit by bit.

Now, when I play a new Career mode, I have all these ships saved in my lists, ready to use.

If KSP2 starts with a Sandbox mode, I'm fine with that. It's all beta-testing for new career.

Plus, Science is how we progress in KSP2 once the 'motherships' are built. We get something that can make the trip to two planets, and money becomes less of an issue.

In KSP2? Maybe the Kerbals go nuts is they're in space too long. Maybe the 'mining' means more than Science. Maybe we need life support modules. Whatever the progression is now, Sandbox mode is exploring for Stage Two and Three, until the Orbital VAB's become a thing.

[Guest]

5 hours ago, Profugo Barbatus said:

6 hours ago, wpetula said:

1. Too much community feedback. 

Not to beat this horse too much, but no. 'Community Feedback' is taken as a generalization and a nice marketing term to make early access releases sound nicer, we're mostly here as testers who'll pay them to do it. Wide feedback sentiment will be taken, and obviously broken balance choices will be taken, but we're not gonna see 400 devnotes back and forth constantly retweaking the same community complaint, and we're not gonna have devs spending 6 outta 8 working hours reading forum threads. For the most part, the people actually building the game will barely know we exist, they'll just have general sentiment filtered through the Community Managers or whatever middlemen handle it for them.

Feedback doesn't mean having the dev manually read every post and add everything that's proposed.

It means collecting data on how the players actually play the game and use it to make decisions, direct forum or chat posts are only a small fraction of that data.

 

6 hours ago, wpetula said:

Fans have waited patiently through delay after delay for KSP 2. Now, they must wait even longer for a complete game. Every additional delay results in greater expectations for the final product. If KSP 2 "does not deliver" throughout Early Access, the expectation bubble may explode violently, resulting in a No Man's Sky scenario.

The problem with no NMS wasn't the lack of features, was that the devs repeatedly lied about them. They were giving interview about the multiplayer system all the way up to launch, and it took players actually experimenting in the actual game and calling them out for them to admit that the game wasn't multiplayer.

That's an actual scam, a thing that's just a bit worse than a game launching in EA.

 

I'm not a fan of EA either, but I have said and repeated over the past few years that the main product here is the rewriting of KSP1 from a more technically competent studio, and it appears that that's what's launching next month. I don't care much about science or career, at least not the version we have in KSP1. I was already playing sandbox anyway, I'd like to see science and progression pushed back at the end of the roadmap rather than having them rushing to implement them and give us the same crap progression that KSP1 has.

[GoldForest]

15 minutes ago, Master39 said:

Feedback doesn't mean having the dev manually read every post and add everything that's proposed.

It means collecting data on how the players actually play the game and use it to make decisions, direct forum or chat posts are only a small fraction of that data.

Just to add to this, Intercept could use an algorithmic system that filters forum posts based on keywords, most repeated phrases or whatever. The system could flag anything with the word "Bug" in it and moderators or admins of the forums will look at it, see if it's a legitimate bug report, then send it over to Intercept for review. The system would allow the filtering of bugs, positive feedback and white noise. 

[KSACheese]

The way I see it, feedback is less about the individual reports from players and more of the consensus of the individuals. We already see that now, with posts such as "add weapons to KSP", mentioned previously, garnering a generally negative response from the community.

[tstein]

On 1/29/2023 at 8:41 AM, GoldForest said:

Just to add to this, Intercept could use an algorithmic system that filters forum posts based on keywords, most repeated phrases or whatever. The system could flag anything with the word "Bug" in it and moderators or admins of the forums will look at it, see if it's a legitimate bug report, then send it over to Intercept for review. The system would allow the filtering of bugs, positive feedback and white noise. 

A specific thread  where all bug reports should go is simpler and in EA is probably enough... at least in the firs tmoment

[Scarecrow71]

Wasn't there talk at one point of being able to submit bug reports through the launcher?

[DrCHIVES]

2 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Wasn't there talk at one point of being able to submit bug reports through the launcher?

Pretty sure I saw an update to ksp1 the other day which addressed an overhaul to the launcher in preparation for exactly this.

[DeadJohn]

On 1/28/2023 at 11:46 PM, wpetula said:

1. Too much community feedback. 

Assume that the team is competent. They've used the internet, know what a mess communication can be, and have thought about ways for filtering feedback. The roadmap isn't "dependent" on community feedback but it will consider that feedback.

On 1/28/2023 at 11:46 PM, wpetula said:

2. Problems modding.

Modders see the roadmap and can adjust to it. I hope modders stay away from features that aren't in-game yet, for example avoid mining mods until after the exploration phase of the roadmap. Let the feature be implemented in EA, wait a while to see if feedback revises that feature, give the devs time to revise that feature, and only after the feature has stabilized think about modding it.

On 1/28/2023 at 11:46 PM, wpetula said:

3.  Rising expectations.

KSP1 is still a good game. I'll likely buy Early Access but mostly play KSP1 until science makes it into KSP2. A lot depends on how much time passes between each EA phase.

[Pthigrivi]

Im gonna fill in here because the Hype thread has enough trouble staying on topic. I personally think the EA process is really smart and breaking off and layering in each major system seems like a really good way to get concerted, somewhat focused feedback and is probably the best way to achieve a good game. Most of the build-order on the roadmap seems pretty logical and obvious, but there were a couple of things that stood out to me--science not being part of the initial release and resources coming so late. I think I know why they've planned it that way but there are pros and cons.

1) Science waiting till the 1st update: This one is not terribly surprising. I fully expect there to be a huge batch of first-day bugs (there always are) and for things to be a bit shaky as the first few hot-fixes roll out to patch them. This might even take a couple of months. At the same time thats happening I expect there's going to be a wealth of feedback on core systems, ideas for how to improve UI, basic to advanced flight information and how its presented, overall engine balance and visual improvements, aerodynamic issues--all that. I imagine the thinking is they'd rather just get the base foundation of the game as tight as it can be before introducing science and tech trees because it means more players will have time to test everything the game has to offer more quickly. The drawback, as pointed out in the Hype thread, is that for new players the best place to start is probably Science mode, at least initially, so they can learn the game without being completely overwhelmed by hundreds of parts out of the gate. I think that just can't be helped, but hopefully within a few months science mode will be out and (hopefully) the base game will be running more or less smoothly and we're off to the races.

2) Resources coming after Colonies and Interstellar: This one was particularly surprising to me when it was announced. Again in some ways I think it kind of can't be helped. You're certainly going to need colonies before resources have a place to be processed, but the plan is to wait until the second star system is introduced to build in probably the most complex system in the game. Again, I think the primary motivation is to allow the largest possible number of players really stretch their legs, check and test most every colony and engine system at no cost before they noodle into the incredibly difficult process of balancing resource abundance, distribution, and harvesting and processing rates. They'll have a much better idea how easy or difficult it should be to produce He3 and huge interstellar engines once they see the kind of vessels players typically build. 

Again though, this does come with drawbacks. The biggest Im guessing is that the resource update may more or less require players to start a new save for all the systems to work properly. Presumably before resource harvesting exists reactors won't require fuel, because where would it come from? Likewise if (as many of us hope) there is a simple LS/Snacks system with greenhouses as soon as you install the resources update these will be lacking inputs all across your game. With no resource cost for colonies players are likely to go hog wild building huge cities that they have no way to support. I don't think it's bad that resources will probably mean players start a new save, after all if you've been playing Sandbox EA you'll need to start a new save to experience the science system as well. Near the beginning and near the end are probably the best two times to nudge players into starting anew so they can really experience everything in full. But, it will make other systems like science difficult to balance through most of the EA process because right at the end there's going to be huge new host of resource scanning, mining, and processing tech to unlock that won't be accounted for in the balance. This probably means running science a bit hot through most of EA, hoping that the excess is soaked up when players have a bunch of drills and factories to unlock. The other thing that occurs to me is that if there is a simple LS system its probably best introduced with resources because that will be a natural kind of break for players to start over anyway. Boom events on the other hand probably want to be introduced with colonies because they seem critical to population growth. 

[Snark]

I can't really speak to points #1 and #3, since I don't know any more than anyone else about that (though just speaking personally, I'm not especially concerned, for reasons that are probably not of interest to anyone but me, so I won't bother going into them).

However, regarding this point:

On 1/28/2023 at 11:46 PM, wpetula said:

2. Problems modding.

A long Early Access roadmap is not good news for modders. As features are added, changed, and deleted from KSP 2, mods are going to be constantly rendered incompatible or obsolete.

Citation needed.

Based on my experience creating mods for the original KSP for the past 8 years or so, my expectation is precisely the opposite.  I expect modding KSP2 to be great, and I don't expect mods to be breaking all the time, and I look forward to making new mods as we progress through the roadmap and new features become available.

My rationale:

When I first started modding KSP, the game was still on 1.0.x.  Now we're on 1.12.x. During that time, they've added tons of stuff to the game, including pretty big sweeping architectural changes such as when they made everything localizable.

And you know what?

As a modder, it's been an incredibly seamless experience.  Whenever a new major KSP release came out... my mods almost never broke, at all, even across multiple major KSP releases.  As in, I didn't need to touch one line of code, or even recompile.  The same darn zip file just continued to work.  And on the (very) few occasions where I did need to make an update-- such as when KSP shifted the major version of the .NET platform it used-- the amount of work I needed to do to get the mods going again was trivially lightweight, and I was back up and running with a new published version of the mod within a day or two, at most.

In short:  KSP version updates did not inconvenience me as a modder, and did not inconvenience the users of my mods, either.  They didn't break.  They just kept working.

(I did occasionally have a mod here and there that became obsolete, because I wrote the mod to address some shortcoming in the game, and then those rascally devs went and fixed the game so that my mod was no longer necessary, but I view that as a good sort of "problem" to have.) 

In fact, AFAICT, this was true of almost everyone's mods, not just my own:  I use other people's mods too, and those generally kept working after a KSP update.

The reason for that is that the new updates mostly added new stuff rather than changing how old stuff worked, and the engineers-- who are competent-- made a reasonable good-faith effort not to hork all the mods.  Because they know mods are important, and they know lots of users use them.

In fact:  having a deep roadmap for KSP2, with big additions planned, makes me more confident about the stability of modding rather than less.  Why?  Because if the engineers know ahead of time that they're going to be making great big major additions to the game, they have a lot of incentive to architect it in a way that is not going to force a complete rewrite of the architecture every time.  They don't want to rewrite all their code any more than modders do.   (Source:  have been working as a professional software engineer for 25 years.)  This gives them a reason to plow effort into cleanly modular separation of code.  If they don't have to rewrite their code, it makes it less likely that modders will, either.

 

In summary:

For me to assume that KSP2 is going to be a rougher ride than KSP1 was in that regard, I would have to grant all of the following assumptions:

• That the KSP2 team doesn't care about modding.
• That the KSP2 team hasn't learned any useful lessons from observing the KSP1 experience.
• That the KSP2 engineers are not good at their jobs.

I believe none of those to be the case.  I believe that they really get it when it comes to modding.  I believe that the team gets it, and I believe that Nate Simpson gets it.  I mean, really gets it.  I've met the guy in person and had a chance to interview him one-on-one for half an hour, back in the day, and he's one of the few people I've ever met who's more of a raving KSP fanboi than I am-- he loves this game so much it's palpable, he practically vibrates when he talks about it, and this does not strike me as someone who's going to drop the ball.  I asked pointed questions about modding, and it was clear that they want the KSP2 modding experience to be even more amazing than KSP1, and I believe them.

I could be wrong, of course-- I don't know what the future holds any more than you do.  But "it'll be fine" feels to me like a pretty confident assumption, based on having been there and done that with modding KSP1 over most of the past decade, and nothing I've seen or heard from the KSP2 team has shaken that confidence.

So anyway, those are my reasons for thinking that.  Out of curiosity, what are your reasons for thinking it'll be problematic?

[Vanamonde]

Thread closed by OP's request.