Pthigrivi

Its a weird bug for some of us where the spaceflight forum section comes up blank and you can’t navigate to any of the topics within in the normal way. For me its just on mobile. We can get here and by following notifications.

Im being nice. Consider my thoughts retracted.

Edit, deleting out of courtesy. It doesn’t really matter at this point.

I really appreciate you chiming in though I know there are limits to what you can say. I do just want to emphasize that so many of the game design and technical decisions made were so smart and I know thats gotten lost a bit in the last year for reasons that were not at all under your control. I know how much passion went into KSP2 and I just really appreciate how much you and so many others poured into it and it honestly makes me angry that the team has been treated this way. It not right, but I do hope you and everyone else on the team has found greener pastures. I hope you’ve all found places where art, design, and commitment to this craft is really valued.

Me too its super weird. Don't suppose anyone is likely to fix it now.

And just to undermine my own pessimism the true successor to KSP at this moment is actually Tears of the Kingdom, a massively profitable single player open world game that leverages the system of giving players a lego-like kit of parts and physics rules and thats what makes the puzzles fun. KSP2 absolutely could have done that and more with time, resources, and orbital mechanics, it was just that T2 has no idea what the difference is between a good game and a bad game.

I can't say I did. I thought they'd push through because it was nuts to cut things off right when they were actually getting things back on track. There was exactly one little thing that raised the hair on the back of my neck but it was just a couple weeks before the WARN notice. Y'know typing this I was about to make a very stupid prediction that all these live-service games were a fad and would go the way of Candy Crush and then I looked it up and Candy Crush topped out at almost a billion dollars in revenue last year. I guess I just have to accept that most consumers actually just have microsecond long attention spans? Like there just has to be an actual market for thoughtful, well designed games that teach you something and provide thousands of hours of time. I know it'll never compete with live service arena shooters but damn.

I didn't follow those other games. I did follow the development of KSP2 about as closely as was possible. Nate is the creative director. He oversees the look, feel, and overall design of the game. I personally think those aspects of the game were really pretty great. He got the tone and look of the game right, the overall scope was ambitious but definitely worthy of a true successor to the game. It's a little more controversial but I think eliminating money and simplifying heat were the right moves. I also think folks who say rockets should have been 100 rigid and shatter like glass are wrong, though obviously the amount of wobble at launch was also way overboard. Im also not personally crazy about the lore aspects of the game but I think with a more fleshed out mission tree and the ability to map points of interest from orbit the overall science gameplay would be a big improvement over the original. In short I think he did a great job at the things that were his job. He was also really personally passionate about KSP and that made him a good spokesperson in the videos you saw. Keep in mind there are lots of other people who had more power than he did, you just don't know their names or faces so you've latched on to Nate because he's a face you can focus your anger on rather than an amorphous megacorp and the social climate that allows them to abuse employees and customers alike. Those are the people who set unreasonable timelines, ignored technical challenges, and forced out an EA that was clearly not ready for prime time. Those decisions cost us the game we were promised, the people at IG their jobs, and in the end cost T2 and their investors money.

But so was Dakota. I just don't hold him personally accountable for decisions that were not on him or on relaying what he was told to the rest of us. That seems nuts and unfair me.

No, listen, what Im saying is we all hoped and believed KSP2 would slowly claw its way back and eventually deliver on the roadmap. Its not on you and its not on Nate that that didn't happen. The people responsible are upper management at T2 and PD who wildly mismanaged this IP from the very beginning.

The question is if someone tells you something that turns out not to be true, but they were themselves lied to and believed it and relayed it to you in good faith, is that a lie? Was Dakota lying to us when he told echoed the same? The alternative would be for them to add the caveat each time that we exist under a viscous and arbitrary corporate culture that will at any moment treat customers and employees like trash if it suits a short term boon for fickle investors.

Only in the sense that when you work for a large, capricious, poorly run company like Take Two nothing is ever certain. Im sure Nate was told that they were fully funded right up until they weren’t, just like Paul believed he wasn’t getting laid off until just before he was. Nate isn’t the liar here. Take Two is.

This may be part of your misinterpretation. The US is a pretty terrible country for workers rights and treatment across the board. That doesn’t excuse managers for behaving this way, but Id hope it would help you understand that neither Nate, Paul, Dakota or anyone actually working on the game has any real power to prevent this.

Or certainly a detailed set of tutorials. I actually think ideally the devs would have a range of experience levels playing the game so expert player/devs could explain what the eventual goal was, newbies could could raise their hands when something wasn't being explained well, and average players could help make calls on what reasonable expectations should be. This even kind of goes to some issues with the way the mission tree played out. I understood the plan was to make KSP much more approachable but the linear nature of the missions rushed players pretty fast to execute a manual precision landing on the Mun, something I didn't learn until well after I'd landed any old place on the mun and minmus several times.

I mean I do think KSP multiplayer is possible but aside from a few folks mashing it up around KSC—that is actually playing the game, traveling to other planets together and cooperatively building stations and colonies together—you absolutely need colonies and resources working as game elements first. Its also important to understand you’d very rarely be occupying the same space and time as your friends. It be more like a months and years long group bonsai project than typical multiplayer muckabouts.

Oops I posted this in the wrong thread. Here’s my thoughts on the SZ vid: Thanks SZ, great video and I really appreciate all the digging you and Matt Lowne have done. A lot of the fixation on Nate seems like wanting to yell at the manager of a restaurant because the food isn’t great, without realizing you’re at a chain restaurant and the foods not great because of bad ingredients and bad policy dictated by corporate. You should be yelling at upper management, but they aren’t there or visible to you so you take it all out on the highest up person you’re aware of. I think K^2 is one of the few people here with the relevant experience to understand the dynamics here. Its pretty obvious T2 surely did want to make money on KSP but never really understood the product because no one apparently paid any attention to the existing community. It was widely understood that KSP1 while incredibly compelling as an idea was a bit of a cobbled together mess with a lot of fundamental flaws and tech debt in the base code and really couldn’t be brought forward without major re-writes. I know issues with axial tilt, acceleration under warp, and multiplayer were widely known to be practical dealbreakers on this forum going back to 2017. Im actually really happy Nate by force of his shear enthusiasm was able to convince them that for KSP to succeed it needed a bigger budget really big changes. Had KSP2 been released in 2020 as a half-baked reskin I think the result would have been just as disastrous as what happened in 2023. Now I personally am not as convinced that multiplayer KSP would be as enduringly fun as folks think. I think the version of multiplayer KSP that might be fun is basically kithack model club—making cars and planes and other vehicles and racing and smashing them about with friends in real time. For reasons that have been discussed many times on this forum this doesn’t really work in space because of time-warp. Its not that there aren’t solutions to how people move through time, its that inevitably you are for the most part not existing in a real-time experience with your friends. You’re talking about a much slower, much less interactive cooperative game. That leads me to believe that if KSP2 was actually to work T2 aught to have brought on the KSP1 team much earlier and started with a ground up rewrite, understanding it was going to take 5-6 years and 40-60 million. Its not just the code though. KSP was always a fun sim but its a terrible game. If they really wanted to compete with Minecraft and Roblox they needed the fundamentals of science, progression, colonies, and most importantly resources. Thats what creates the fundamental loop of fly-gather-build-fly and a dynamic set of non-proscriptive, player driven goals. If all you could do is fly around and build the Taj Mahal minecraft would been forgotten in 2009. It's the free and open crafting system that makes it the slightest bit interesting. With one generic ore and the inability to build off-world KSP would never be the kind of open and expansive free-flowing building game it needed to be. I think multiplayer and interstellar should have been considered as they re-wrote the code but the initial release really needed to include that fundamental core game loop to be something new and compelling enough to warrant a sequel.

Sorry, I posted this in the wrong thread but its kind relevant here too.

To do what Harvester did was really pretty amazing. KSP is a truly unique and fascinating game and he's such a huge part of that, along with all of the original Squad members and many of the folks they brought on in the lead up to 1.3. I know it's not cool to say right now but I also think Nate and Tom and Shana and the intercept team had a really solid core set of goals for KSP2. I might have ordered the roadmap a little differently and leaned less on the lore-story aspect but thats personal preference. Keeping the core structure of vessel engineering and orbital navigation and applying it to colonies and resources and interstellar was exactly right. If T2 had given the time and resources to genuinely follow through it would have been almost exactly the game I'd always dreamed KSP2 could be. I just don't see a need to knock either one of them.

Oh I have no value judgement on this one. Ive not been shy in my criticism of Musk and SpaceX but this was just a casual observation about the calculus here.

"We file almost no patents, so nothing stopping competition from copying us." That's kind of interesting. Its an interesting kind of dichotomy of secrecy, where they can be very transparent in many ways (video tours of the facility) but most of the really hard to develop solutions like full-flow engine start-up can be kept pretty secret. Obviously the CNSA isn't really all that likely to respect patents anyway.

A long forgotten age of ice buckets and tide pods. I am sorry for the sad news. We were all very hopeful for this game. It's possible it gets salvaged in some way but probably not for a while.

But screw them if this is how they treat people. They’ll treat Civ and the people who make it the same way. I have zero confidence that there’s any actual interest in play quality or follow though. These people are vacuous bloodsuckers and nothing of value comes from that.

Im pretty convinced at this point they'll leave that roadmap on the steam page after firing everyone until there's a lawsuit more threatening than the sucker-sales of people who don't know its abandonware--which is never. I will never buy a product from PD or T2 ever again and I'll warn off everyone I talk to about games. These are trash people.

Man I hope there’s a hot hell for these people.