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KSP2 EA Grand Discussion Thread.


James Kerman

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5 minutes ago, p331083 said:

This was released because Take Two, the company that actually owns KSP2 promised its shareholders KSP2 would "release" q1 2023.

I would qualify this as basically the same thing as "out of money"

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35 minutes ago, GregA said:

I think the developers are out of money(or rather will have that issue soon), and are making the rather bold decision to release now in an effort to fund continued development

I don't think this makes a lot of sense in this particular situation as the developer is not self-funded, nor will they see any of the revenue from the store.  The publisher, Private Division, as a subsidiary of publishing juggernaut Take-Two is bankrolling everything and really have ultimate control over what is released to the public and when (and at what price).  Nate and crew are on salary, hired by the publisher-owned development shop, Intercept Games.  They have as much autonomy as the publisher ultimately permits them.

Take-Two's financial year-end is March 31, 2023.  KSP 2's been on earnings projections in investor guidance since FY'21, and Private Division absolutely had to get some kind of revenue on the books for this FY, or there would be some serious (unfriendly) discussions with the board and shareholders.  Several months ago, the dev. shop was handed a mandate to change tack and be ready to release a minimum viable product into EA or potentially risk project termination altogether.  No one (esp. Take-Two) wants that, but a company their size can cut bait on a multi-million-dollar project if it's seen as a black hole with no turnaround in sight (I've seen it first hand).

So you're def. right that this EA release was a financial decision, but not in a fund-raising way, but in an accounting/reporting way.  Maybe even in a cover-your-ass way for the publisher reporting upstream to Take-Two.

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1 hour ago, regex said:

Yes, this is an actual early access release, not a game released a little early.

Sure, but no-one could have even alpha tested this mess before early access release. If they did they would have instantly found a bunch of broken stuff. This is not fit for early access at a 50 USD price point. This is fit for internal alpha, at most. Did you see Matt Lowne actually flying the KSC in space? I've been part of the KSP 1 following since the Mun wasn't even there. Valued in player satisfaction (considering the leaps tech has taken since), this is worse. 

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You know what, I don't entirely dislike the new fairing system. 

Saw Matt Lowne struggling with it, read comments here that it wasn't good, but I thought it was fairly easy to make a decent fairing. I also like the 'enable fairing' option. Did loose my colour scheme when I used that option though:0.0:

edit: oh, it kinda freaked out when I hovered over it.

edit2: Oh I pressed something and my colours are back. Magic!

 

Edited by modus
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Ok...

Really pleased I bought it, really sad I don't get enough FPS to actually play it (but expected after seeing the requirements)

my (rather old) gear...

Quad Xeon W3550 @3.07 GHz

24GB RAM

GTX 1650  graphics

It 'runs', technically but it's more of a leisurely stroll through sticky mud with lead boots on.

Low to mid single digit FPS with all settings on low when flying Aeris K2 or Kerbal K1.

I suspect the main culprit is my GC, but I probably need a whole new PC given it's age.  

Getting mid 30's FPS in the VAB with Kerbal K2 loaded, so I can at least get the hang of building things for now.

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9 minutes ago, Snorkel said:

Sure, but no-one could have even alpha tested this mess before early access release. If they did they would have instantly found a bunch of broken stuff. This is not fit for early access at a 50 USD price point. This is fit for internal alpha, at most. Did you see Matt Lowne actually flying the KSC in space? I've been part of the KSP 1 following since the Mun wasn't even there. Valued in player satisfaction (considering the leaps tech has taken since), this is worse. 

Worse than early KSP? hahaha, okay sure, I ain't trying to convince anyone who thinks that.

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2 minutes ago, regex said:

Worse than early KSP? hahaha, okay sure, I ain't trying to convince anyone who thinks that.

Sure, considering the leap in technology. I think you missed that part. I'm not saying it's not beautiful. It is. But then again, so is my wallpaper. It's not playable either.

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5 minutes ago, saxappeal89129 said:

At least in Juno... rockets will blow up with 60-90fps... roflmfao

This game will never leave early access, it died on release.

 

Oh hey....

Is the best launch profile still straight up until 30k, then tip over 90 degrees?  

And if 3 intakes are good what happens if I make one with 873 of them??  Is it 870 gooder?

These landing legs look nothing like the ones on the title screen!  What happened to them?!?

I think I'll show basically any patience at all,  and at least see how they react to the first real full day of playtesting.

Heck, I might even give them TWO days before I make any kind of end of the road proclamations.  I'm feeling sassy.

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1 hour ago, Skorj said:
  • Other games being broken is never an excuse for this game being broken. 

Sure but announcing its in early access kinda does

1 hour ago, Skorj said:
  • KSP1 was released by a tiny indie dev team, trying to invent a whole new genre.  Now the genre exists, and there are standards.  No major studio game should launch in a worse state than KSP1, or Simple Rockets 2, or the other major players.  (Talking basic functionality, not "Talking basic functionality, not "amount of stuff to do in the game" which they were very up front about.)

They're asking for help in fixing that, hense early access

1 hour ago, Skorj said:
  • $50

We all saw what we were getting, whether it's worth the value is up to the buyer. Selling it for less in my opinion would be dumb in the long run and I'm happy I got a $10 discount

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15 minutes ago, GoldForest said:

Is it just me or does time move while you're in the VAB? I walked away for like 30 mins, I swear it was light shining through the windows, come back, it's dark. 

Am I crazy or is thay what happened?

I will have to watch for that, interesting if it does.

1 hour ago, jacksawild said:

I like it and it already improves on the original in a lot of ways. Given a bit of time, it will fully surpass the original.

Oh Yeah... I dont see myself playing KSP 1 at all now.

I want to be on this ride all the way though :)

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S'pretty janky, but I've not encountered anything that's bad on a fundamental design level, just poor implementation and the usual expected bugs. SAS is pretty bad. Timewarp needs work, with the 'smart' behavior of timewarp to encounter not working  when it goes to max timewarp, then starts slowing down at the encounter so that by the time it spools down I've already all but left the SOI. The new VAB is really nice, but the new UI constantly eats inputs and behaves in a relatively unintuitive way. I don't mean 'old muscle memory' but that things like 'centering the camera' centers the part in screen space, but the parts window means your actually offset significantly and it 'feels' wrong.  Or how you can't drop parts blindly into the menu to 'clear hand' and have to drop them specifically in the little bin in the bottom, which might take a few clicks to register.

Usual physics bugs too, coming out of timewarp caused my lander to ping off the surface and have a terminal encounter before I noticed, since I was watching my course. Watching my course was apparently pretty useless, because after landing, my lander refused to generate a trajectory path, so I was blindly eyeballing that encounter. Proud that I made it within 5km still, but issue persisted after a quickload.

Definitely janky, but the reassuring part of all these issues (As much as 'its broke, jim' can be reassuring) is that none of these are insurmountable problems. Its a bunch of janky behavior, but its janky cuz of non-design issues, its not bad because it was built bad. Most of these issues here are just tuning, coding, and catching the kind of situations that only wider exposure brings out.

The only thing I don't like, that has been brought up already and is a poor design decision, is the VAB Parts list and Part manager interface. They're good ideas, but why the hell are they so big. Its ok scale for a laptop user, and maybe the UI scaling just didn't make the EA cutoff, but on a 27 inch screen, it takes up 1/3rd of the part manager vertically to display the 3 options for a single engine, its ridiculous. With UI scaling it will be great, but right now its miserable. Same with the VAB Part list, give me a 'compact' option that just shrinks down the elements to half or quarter size. I'm still getting most of my info form the extended details pane anyway, so I don't need to see the part in super high detail to figure out "which one do I need". 

Edit: Oh, and let me rebind the Aerodynamic overlay please, F12 is the default steam screenshot key, and its a pain to screenshot twice just so the second one actually closes the popup.

Edited by Profugo Barbatus
F12 rebind plz
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Have finished a run to the mun and back. Two issues, wondering if anyone else has seen this.

Landing gear (LT-1 Wallaroo), compresses very far. Fairly light lander, just a 2 seat lander can (Tuna) with 4 gear. 2 on one side completely compress. Would be good if they were firmer.

Docking ports produce a lot of acceleration when undocking, enough to deorbit when undocking around the mun.

 

Also, less pressing. Kerbals really love sneaking into unoccupied seats. Apollo like mun mission, no matter how many times I open to remove extra kerbals from the lander can, they seem to be back in those seats after every revert or reload. 

 

Everything else went well. Performance is still pretty good. Still performs well with larger saturn-v like rockets.

 

Also, love being able to move directly to and from other KSC buildings. Any reason the Tracking Center is greyed out in the VAB though? Also, can't name vessels with an "M" in the name. Typing name, seems to still use some keystokes. Pressing M even while typing name opens map.

Edited by SolarAdmiral
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I dont like it, too cartoonish for me which is a bit of a disappointment,  I cant seem to get the hang of any of the build controls have some window with a capsule and a mouse pointer moving around in it I cant get rid off . The VAB is terrible I know its early access but I wont be playing it hopefully they fix the cartoon like appearance of it, this reminds me of early PC games  not something from 2023

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5 minutes ago, Virtualgenius said:

I dont like it, too cartoonish for me which is a bit of a disappointment

KSP has been cartoonish since 0.7.3 :D

5 minutes ago, Virtualgenius said:

I cant seem to get the hang of any of the build controls have some window with a capsule and a mouse pointer moving around in it I cant get rid off .

They're not too much different from KSP 1. If you can be more specific with your issues we can help you with them.

7 minutes ago, Virtualgenius said:

The VAB is terrible

Not constructive criticism

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38 minutes ago, saxappeal89129 said:

 

Uh no... this is false, they lied to us about the state of the game, it's not just "bugs", if that's all it were I'd be ok with it. With how much of a resource hog this is, there's no way in h*ll you'll ever be able to create larger ships, bases, or effectively play any sort of multiplayer; won't happen. Unless you're waiting on 6000 series GPUs, or "Quantum Lake" processors from intel roflmao.

Meanwhile these forums were discussing the finer points of non-binary Kerbals ROFLMFAO.

Played fine for me on my gfs laptop with a 2070 mobile, and played poorly but bearable on my laptop with a 1650 mobile and i5 9300h. That said they were pretty transparent but you're free to hate if you want. 

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There was a lot of bugs, leave the VAB and come back to be able to retouch the wings, Don't look at the ground. only half the pan in VAB is working. move widget is to cluttered/small. to name a few. But what broke me is I had a simple plane on the runway with 1.2 TWR and the rapiers hit a brick wall at 405 m/s, in a dive! I'ma put ksp down til next update and see what gets fixed first. Still looks promising.

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Just my .02 but I REALLY think KSP2 should have been a 1 week playtest release for free every qtr JUST like Ironmace studios has done with Dark and Darker which has generated a TON of interest over the last four playtests released.... I feel like it would have been a MUCH better reception and appeased us KSP1 fans for sure while the game received ongoing bug fixes and optimization...  Once the game was in a better state, charging the $50 or even more wouldn't be as hard of a pill to swallow and would garner better reviews and far less complaining.  With all of the neg reviews and refunds I just hope sales don't take a huge hit.... worst fear is 2K deciding to pull funding of future updates.

It's not even to late to revert to this type of strategy if they wanted to.  Just offer it going forward to those that refunded or haven't bought and decided to keep the game in it's current state yet.  The playtest would allow more than enough time in one week periods to gather constructive feedback and data from players with no negative ramifications other than delayed sales.

Edited by Hattrick
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I admit, reading and seeing reviews of people falling through Minmus, among issues, is disheartening.  

Early Access was supposed to have the core game relatively solid, with the originally-promised features 'to-come.'   I feel like falling through planets, exploding at random FPS, should have been things discovered during a Beta, or even Alpha test of the objects.  

My concern, is that after 5 years of development (longer, if you count that the genre was already ground-broken once by the same title), all they have to show for it, is a simple rocket-launcher with customizable parts, that is still in what looks to be "Alpha" stages.  

Early-Access is ok, but at this stage of development, my only real complaint is that $50 is for a finished module.  This is not a finished module, and $50 is too steep a price for where the level of development currently is.  

What $50 is - is an early-investor price.  This is a different kind of marketing that may have saved a little face.  Had they marketed two years ago, say, as "$50 for early-investor status - get merch/gear, early access and status-of-some-kind" or extra content in game at official launch, say, that would have made sense.  

$50 for early access only, however, without any kind of kickback recognizing that you're an investor, not just a player, at this stage, is an oversight on their part.  Not too late for them to recognize it, but they should make that tack soon to avoid hitting the rocks.
 

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1 hour ago, modus said:

You know what, I don't entirely dislike the new fairing system. 

Saw Matt Lowne struggling with it, read comments here that it wasn't good, but I thought it was fairly easy to make a decent fairing. I also like the 'enable fairing' option. Did loose my colour scheme when I used that option though:0.0:

edit: oh, it kinda freaked out when I hovered over it.

edit2: Oh I pressed something and my colours are back. Magic!

 

Yeah I am starting to like this as well, it isn't as bad as I thought it would be

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Right now, the Steam approval looks as following:

2149 users made a steam review.
48% percent of them gave a positive review 1368 users).
52% gave the game a negative review (1504 users).

Less than 50% are recommending the game in its current state!

I am an avid fan of KSP1 with over 2000 hours in the game and the firm decision to buy it on release day.
I am postponing my buy after all the videos and reviews in the last days for the following reasons:

- 50€ price tag is equivalent to a AAA title, fully developed
- performance issues here and there
- core features are not working
- missing content is not a factor. I would have gladly paid if I can build better stuff in KSP2 than in KSP1 right from the start and use the old Kerbol system as a playground.

I can live with missing content as depicted in the roadmap. But not with a barely playable game with massive performance issues. Releasing a product for this amount of money in this kind of stae should not be rewarded. Not from a major studio after the franchise has been here for over ten years.
From my point of view, the reason for early access is that you can test things with a wider audience for things you cannot test inhouse. Not for finding essential bugs and with a horrible optimization.
Comparisons with KSP1 early access are moot in my opinion, because the basics should have been ironed out by now. Especially after 4 years of development.

If the game is released in this state after many years of development, there is no reason to believe that follow-up content is coming swiftly.
 

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44 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

KSP has been cartoonish since 0.7.3 :D

They're not too much different from KSP 1. If you can be more specific with your issues we can help you with them.

Not constructive criticism

The Vab is a dark dingy cluttered space which i am having trouble finding things the representation of parts looks weird to me from KSP1 I cant seem to find the aircraft hangar either 

I love KSP 1 it got me through covid lockdowns would have gone insane without it 

KSP 1 was great but it went through a series of development changes   so I am hoping by just waiting this will become something i love as well but at the moment not loving it 

Once the modders get a chance to do there thing I am sure it will be great

 

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