So here are my thoughts on the difficulty of the beta, as a pretty seasoned player. The biggest thing is that, for the first time ever, the game actually HAS difficulty. You can't breeze through the tech tree in a handful of missions anymore, because you have to upgrade your buildings first, specifically the R&D center. The R&D upgrade costs are so high that you'll end up upgrading your other buildings along the way, too. This gives the game a reasonable feeling of progression, which it never had in previous releases. The limitations of the VAB/SPH and launchpad/runway also force you to make well designed missions if you want to delay upgrades to those buildings. So overall the upgradable facilities surprised me with how much they improved gameplay. What's bothering me right now is the cost of the R&D upgrade, along with the typical contract reward. Based on the average contracts I've been accepting so far, it's going to take about 100 contracts to earn the $6 million to complete the upgrades of the R&D center, maybe 50 assuming the average reward goes up and I complete a lot of "Explore" contracts. That's still a huge number of randomly generated, ultimately meaningless missions. As a side note, you can technically earn money through strategies, but $9 per rep and $10 per science are extremely low yields compared to the money earned from contracts. The biggest area where the game is still lacking is the contracts. The devs were hoping to repeat the success of implementing "Spaceplans Plus" when they integrated "Fine Print" into .90's contract system, however it still feels the same to me. I've done a handful of each new mission type on my way to the first R&D upgrade, and it's not that they've gotten old already. It's just that I doubt it would be fun to grind the necessary number of them to upgrade the facility again. Ever since they were released, contracts have felt woefully underdeveloped. The randomly generated text description of each contract is the perfect metaphor for contracts in general. When I read contract descriptions, I imagine the devs saying, "This is total garbage nonsense that we put not much effort into but you'll like it because ROCKETS and EXPLOSIONS and KERBALS and SCIENCE." So what I'm saying is that, if career mode seems too hard to players who are veterans and know what they're doing, it's because they just don't want to complete 50 to 100 of these meaningless contracts. Fine print is an improvement, but randomly generated contracts still feel completely arbitrary and the new contract types eventually get boring just like the previous types. If there were some kind of narrative built into the contract system, that might help. Currently it's "explore here, then here, now here," and that's just another aspect of contracts that reeks of lack of effort to me. Before I get too deep into this rant, the game as a whole has made leaps and bounds. The only reason the contract system looks so bad now is because everything else is pretty good. IMO for players who know what they're doing, boring contracts are the main thing making career currently feel hard and/or grindy. As a final thought, for newer players the game needs to do a better job of teaching them. I think it would be very difficult and frustrating to start as a new player with all Level 1 facilities. This is another area where adding a story to the game could help, by providing an early tutorial of sorts. I know "the game already has a tutorial" but even if people actually used that, the initial difficulty of career mode probably merits its own set of explanations to newer players.
