Pthigrivi

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.

Yeah I've learned good methods now but if even on default difficulty you can get yourself into some annoying cycles of dealing with them manually (god forbid) if you don't time things right. I mainly suggest turning them down for new players so they don't have to worry about the ticking clock and can play and experiment with different builds and get used to how everything flows.

OMG yes. Factorio is one of the best games of the last 15 years, plus 2.0 should be coming out later this year (fingers crossed). I'll warn you it is dense though and there's a bit of a learning curve. I'd suggest turning biters way down or even off until you get used to the controls and process. Edit-- but take that with a grain of salt I suppose as its not for everyone. If you like problem solving and can handle a bit of math it's the kind of game that you can play for thousands of hours without getting bored.

Oh absolutely--KSP is a niche game and would probably always be a niche game. Frankly BG3 is a niche game, it just happened to be a good one. The amount of time a game takes to develop obviously can't be unlimited but I have never argued it should be unlimited. I have argued they should have taken 1 more year. One more year development doesn't really change what its up against. It's always going to be up against a range of niche titles with varying quality. What I've said again and again is all that matters is how good is it when that time comes so it can hold its own in the pack. Would I expect T2 to wait 15 or 20 years for that? No. Would one more year have been smart? Probably.

Oh I totally agree FS still included day one bugs, the structure of science gathering was good but a bit skeletal, over-rigid, and had pacing problems. I would have liked to see better mapping and LoS coms networks. Those are the kinds of things I expect from an EA release, and those are the kinds of things I'd expect to be addressed over the following year or two. You asked how much longer but I said exactly how much longer in the post you referenced--one more year. They released after 6 years (including lost time to the studio-rebuild) and they should have waited 7. Thats the answer. Yes Im talking about impatience on the part of T2. Many players were impatient too but all would have been forgiven if the release product was decent and the follow through was there. You and I agree thats not what happened and that sucks. Except it is now 2024 and KSP really doesn't have a major competitor. I've tried Juno but its frankly joyless and jankier than KSP1 was. KSP carries a certain magic in a bottle by combining hard science with a light-hearted atmosphere. With colonies and resources I think it could have been a truly incredible game that made money for decades. That's been cut short by short-term thinking.

Times up for what though? Your personal expectations? Its not unusual for games to take 6-10 years to develop, especially when there's a studio change in the middle. You have personally been following all of these release dates very closely. You frankly seem more focused on that than anything else about the game. Out in the general world of gamers though no one cares. They could have delayed it another 3 times and no one would care. All that matters is what the actual play experience at the time of release is like and how it grows and is supported following that. Obviously what they released last march wasn't it, but if they'd released what we currently have it would have been a whole different story. Exactly one thing killed this iteration of the game--impatience.

I mean I would think at this point the best thing would be for you to take your own advice and just not place so much credulity in what developers say when it comes to timelines. The much beloved Factorio has been promising an expansion for years and we still don't have an official date. No one cares. Elon is constantly making basically absurd projections about how long things will take and no one cares. That part of it just doesn't actually matter. We do at this point know how long it took to bring the game from zero to a buggy but decent foundation, something that could have been released as an EA release, and it was between 6 and 7 years. That number doesn't surprise me, and it shouldn't have surprised T2. Instead of just cooling their jets and giving it another year to bake and then actually making decent project with long-term prospects for growth they flushed millions of dollars down the toilet. Thats because the their stock has been in a slump and they need to show a decent body count to investors to restore confidence. Those investors don't care if KSP2 is good or not or makes money or not 5 years from now. They'll be long gone by then. They have no real interest in the long-term health of T2 or anything else. They want to buy low and sell high as quickly as possible. And so runs the world away.

Well thats actually more hopeful than I'd dared to be. I mean you do see properties like Baldur's Gate bounce around before they find their true home. It'll be years before we see something real but I'd been expecting another 2 years before 1.0 anyway. Whats another 5 or 10? Maybe it'll come out around the same time as ES6.

We just don’t know any of that. Im one of those idealistic artists who had to get real and support a family. I ply my trade (design/architecture) and hold the line when it comes to honor and right livelihood best I can. Still, when the money you move (move, not earn) hits 7 or 8 digits the world goes a bit sideways. My wife calls it the dragon sickness. Its just greed—the colossal, unthinking greed of investors. Its everywhere and inescapable. Its a subtle vampirism sucking the life out of everything we do, and as soon as you touch real money it preys on you. I have no doubt whatever that Nate is personally devastated by how all this turned out. He played the good soldier as they marched him up that hill and then they screwed everyone he knew and everything he cared about. Ive been there, and its honestly hard to get out of bed after that. If you’re a real human and actually care about the people around you money will ruin your heart.

Dont forget also that many of these folks relocated their lives in many cases from other countries to work at IG, under the umbrella of T2. I just find the corporate culture that makes those kinds of personal demands and then casts those same people aside with little warning truly reprehensible.

I will say to folks who have placed a god-like imagination of financial omniscience on higher-ups at major companies or even ‘the market’ at large the following: Many of these folks are my clients. Some of them are very clever. Some of them are clowns putting on an act until they get caught. Most of them got there by luck, good contacts, and or nepotism. Some of them are actual idiots. The system we live in produces many things but never pretend that it is a meritocracy. It is not. A company worth a billion dollars absolutely should be planning ahead 20 years but they don’t. They plan as far ahead as the next report to investors and much like the system writ large investors are a collection of clever people and overentitled morons. They don’t know what they’re doing either. Its just a school of scavengers scrambling over each other for whalefall.

Look, Nate is just the creative director. He’s the highest person up on the totem pole who’s name we happen to know. I think Nate made some directorial mistakes for sure, we all do. But there were also a huge number of really smart and inspired decisions from the very beginning. But in the end the creative director is not the one who decides when a game is released. The entire executive structure at PD and many at T2 are involved. I have little doubt the folks at IG were essentially given a date and forced to make it work as best they could. Of course we have no idea for sure what the internal dynamic was and probably never will. Im just not willing to cast blame on one dude without knowing that. From the very beginning he’s been incredibly passionate and creative and I for one believe he’s a decent dude doing his best to make KSP what it could be.

Yeah I mean some of this is subjective and speculative but I agree with most of it and definitely with the overall thrust of the analysis. Even in my own small company projects have revenue cycles and often start with long periods of time in which we aren’t billing much or at all. If you take short-cuts and screw up the process and deliverable product the result is you lose out on almost all of the potential gains. The decision to force a too-early EA probably meant a small percentage savings in initial dev capital but cost them essentially all of the potential profit. This wasn’t a decision based on a 5 or 10 year profit analysis and certainly hurt both PD and T2 long term. This was yet another short-sighted move based on some upper exec showing cash on the table quarter by quarter with no concern for or understanding of the long term consequences.

All good questions. At a certain point counterfactuals are impossible to predict. I do think though most of the worst offenders then and even now don’t really require the full playerbase to identify. These are all common enough for QA. Wobbly rockets were more than a tuning problem—its hard to say. But at least with the basic foundation of science and progression there would have been a game to dig into.

Im sure there are many who feel that way. I played through FS and had a great time. Yeah there were bugs but I would expect that from EA. If those got cleared up along side new content over the course of this year I think we’d be on a good track. I just don’t ultimately think that matters. Only weirdos like us follow the inside baseball of who said what when about release dates. What matters is the actual experience when its released. What we got last year was beyond rough and it killed growth. I think what we have now would have been good enough for day one.

[Snip] Ultimately I think it came down to a single decision—KSP2 should have been delayed a year. If we got the game we currently have as the initial EA launch we wouldn’t be having this conversation. There would have been bugs, yeah, there would still be missing pieces, but we’d have a solidly playable foundation for growth. With a few updates and colonies in the fall I think a lot of positive momentum could have been maintained. Ultimately it was a lack of patience.