Pthigrivi

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.

Unfortunately I think reality’s negative reputation is well earned

Meecrob hostile takeover confirmed.

I can’t be too down on fans who want to believe KSP has a future. It’s a great game and a great way to learn and understand fundamental physics. I very much do hold shortsighted morons at T2 responsible for gouging this community and having zero respect for their customers or employees. That much seems utterly obvious.

Brotha. You don’t know the names of the people who decide the budget, timeline, or fate of this project. Those are the people in charge.

^Definitely. I personally think the scope was really ambitious but great given what KSP1 was. I, personally, have little interest in multiplayer but I see the appeal. I also think while interstellar is cool getting the basic game down first with colonies and resources was the most important thing to making a really compelling play experience. If T2 + PD weren't comfortable funding the full scope just rebuild KSP1 with colonies and respources and add GP2. Make interstellar as expansions. Obviously we didn't even get to colony parts before IG got liquidated but again to me thats because T2 needed cash and wasn't willing to wait for a viable product and forced a premature EA. I think he was wrong on wobbly rockets and maybe some of the way workspaces played out but as far as the overall tone, ideas, and general design goes Nate did a great job. Thats me though. I always thought removing money and skills to make room for colonies and resources was smart. If you didn't you might feel differently.

Thanks! I went with an i7 13th gen and an RTX 4060 ti, not tipity top but plenty for my purposes. Its been fantastic so far but Im basically using it as a glorified xbox. Totally agreed about macs. Fantastic machines but I spent almost twice what I did on the PC for my macbook. Its still chugging nicely after 6 years but dang it was pricey.

Its from Tolkien The way the gold and the jewels and the arkenstone drove everyone crazy, the desire to heap up a big pile of it and lord over it like Smaug.

I can’t blame you for being frustrated. The situation is really disgraceful and infuriating on a number of levels.

Thats funny I landed on an MSI desktop. No problems so far but we’ll see. Im spoiled by macs. Like shouldn’t you just buy a machine and expect it to work? Is that crazy?

Yeah I mean its pretty clear they've laid off all of the people who would have fulfilled the roadmap to 1.0. If its sold to another studio it'll be years before they could wrap their minds around it and release something and if they don't it probably just stays mothballed in its current state, which is honestly truly terrible corporate behavior. Im quite sure I'll never buy another PD or T2 product again if this is how they treat their customers and employees.