KincaidFrankMF

Probably not, if only for the principle of the thing. But I logged something like 700 hours in the game, so I can't reeeaaaaally complain about VFM for myself. It's just dishonest.

Agreed, especially for the price. You can't sell a tweaked version of an indie game for $50 without, you know, everyone feeling totally ripped off. I wonder if that also contributed to the feature-sparse nature of the EA release. I totally bought into the notion that they must have at least started by trying to build from scratch, simply because so much of the first game was completely missing. I wonder if the dev team felt utterly embarrassed by what they were being asked to do (i.e., rip us all off) and essentially tore out everything that would have given that fact away. And/or, they tried the messy compromise of trying to create a new game within the shell of the old one. Having ripped out the engine, the seats and the upholstery, they weren't able to replace them in a timely fashion, because they weren't able to hire & retain the necessary technical expertise.

Ah, hadn't actually tried that myself. Just gave it a go and it's much simpler - just turn the Kloning Kabin on then Klone away. Sounds like a conflict, yes.

Not kerbals as such, no. But the KSP IP that T2 owns doesn't really amount to much when you break it down. No one "owns" rocket games, and kerbals are essentially just minions painted green... They own the name and the brand, but I can't see anything stopping anyone from creating something similar.

https://x.com/JundrooGames/status/1794126640898863170

Did you allow the mummy kerbal and the daddy kerbal to kuddle for a full day? (I'm not making this up lol) A notification should appear to that effect, then you click a button underneath the first one. If that's not working, a manual install might do the trick? At least it finally answers the question: where do little kerbals come from?

Worked out well for them. But yes, that sounds about right. Sure, but they were at least familiar with the code. That seems to have been a major factor with the teams that followed.

What baffles me is why they didn't just wait till Breaking Ground was finished and use the same team? They could've used the time to, I don't know, make a plan.

Another one to add to the list of off-world construction mods is SimpleConstruction. It's essentially a stripped-down version of EL, designed to be easier to use. I haven't used EL, so I can't really compare the two, but SCON works really well

One other thing that occurs to me. @ShadowZone so you're saying KSP2 was designed from the outset to be an on-the-cheap reskin of an indie game? But IIRC (anyone?) from the first announcements it was sold to us as a full price AAA game. So Take Two decided to take us for every penny they could get, then penny-pinched the project to the point where it couldn't possibly succeed, got stuck in the sunk costs fallacy, and eventually lost millions on the project. I'm just... speechless.

Awesome video, thank you so much @ShadowZone for revealing at least some of what TT should be telling us and clearly never will. So the devs spent all these years doing the equivalent of taking a car apart on the garage floor and then failing to put it back together again while TT blindfolded them and kicked them repeatedly in the balls? Wow. This has to be the textbook case of What Not to Do in game development I had so much sympathy when I thought they were trying to redo it all from scratch and just found it far more difficult a project than they anticipated. This is just sad. One thing I disagree with is that Nate's goals for the project were overly ambitious. Maybe so for a from-scratch development, but starting with an already working copy of KSP1 and building from there? Everything they were trying to do except multiplayer has already been successfully achieved by the modding community. No one forced them to do open heart surgery on the code in an attempt to update it to the latest version of Unity - sure, that would have been nice, but it wasn't necessary. Honestly, the roadmap is downright humble for a reskin of KSP1.

When HarvesteR suggested starting with a colony sim first, my first thought was: he'd be burned at the stake by the community for even suggesting it. But if it was pitched as a spin-off rather than a sequel, as "Kerbal Colonies", that could work. An achievable goal, easily monetised in the short term. And then expand backwards from there, making further colonisation the point of all the rocket stuff, until eventually you end up with KSP2 without actually promising that from the start. It could have worked. I think that's a little harsh, but only a little. The new science system in particular really improved the gameplay, for me, by providing an actual reason to go places. But then they hid it behind a science UI that literally couldn't have been worse if they tried, and I'm not sure most people got far enough into the game to appreciate it. It's certainly not enough to justify the vast pricetag, or even the original KSP1 price. I think that's what ultimately killed it. Far, far too ambitious, so that everything ended up half finished and nothing was really in a state fit for the public, until someone made the fatal decision to push it into EA at nearly full price. Whoever made that decision ultimately killed the project. After that they were stuck making the game for a community that felt actively ripped off, and nothing short of amazing was ever going to be enough to convince large numbers of people to buy it. FS! was ok but a long way from amazing - and it didn't provide anything for marketing to work with because a science loop isn't new. Maybe another year would have brought that wow factor. You can certainly chart a trajectory that goes abysmal->not bad->awesome. Sadly the actual trajectory turned out to be distinctly sub-orbital...

True. But oh, the gleaming future that awaits the fourteen-year-old boy playing KSP for fun...

Well Bob, what I did in KSP2 today was weep into my coffee...

Probably not a coincidence, I agree lol I haven't tried it yet (still working through a KSP campaign) but it's still under development, so maybe they'll get the formula right eventually. We could also be seeing something broader and much more hopeful starting to happen. KitHack expands on the theme of model-building, though not space travel. Re-Entry is a much more realistic NASA Simulator-type game for the purists. Flight of Nova is a more SF approach to space-flight-with-proper-physics. Rocketwerkz are clearly interested in making something at least KSP-adjacent... Something similar happened with Elite, back in the day (showing my age here lol). It took what felt like an age for sequels to come out, and they were pretty disappointing. The IP then went dark for twenty years.... but in the meantime, it inspired an entire genre of games too numerous to even list. Not that I'm suggesting KSP is going to be quite that influential, but still. If the IP does indeed die off, but inspires an entire genre in the process, that would be a pretty hopeful outcome, even if none of the young pretenders quite scratches the itch right now. Thanks for the mini-review! Very helpful.