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.

Yeah, that was my impression too, but they've added a career mode & tech tree now, which sounds promising. Still seems to be actively under development, though I don't think it's technically classed as EA. Erm, and it appears to be 60% off right now and cheaper than buying a pair of KSP2's shoelaces. I seem to have talked myself into buying it. Oops.

On a slightly optimistic note... (and I'm going to preface this by stating upfront that if development of KSP2 does by some miracle continue, albeit at a slower pace, I'll be here - I'll be as patient as necessary) KSP isn't the completely unique game it once was. Juno does exist now. I haven't played it myself (because, y'know, lil green dudes) but I've watched reviews by the likes of Scott Manley and it looks promising. It's not KSP, but it doesn't look a million miles away either, it's cheap and it sounds like it's progressing well? So all isn't lost. If herds of disconsolate KSP players are indeed left roaming the internet in search of a new home, it's hard to imagine that a mod won't appear at some point turning the astronauts green and producing a star system uncannily like Kerbol...

Apart from the human cost to the dev team themselves, that's probably the worst part of all this. Development of KSP2 killed off further development of KSP1. I'm not sure if there's a precedent for putting that genie back in the bottle and resuming development of an earlier game? Seems enormously unlikely.

It may be a while before they even want to hear the word Kerbal again...

Ah, sorry you feel that way We all deal with things differently. I absolutely will if that's the consensus, not trying to ruin anyone's day.

Agreed, but I wonder if the ultimate cause of this whole mess wasn't something simpler and more fundamental, right from the start. When KSP2 was first announced, something really jumped out at me from those early interviews with Nate. There was a feeling in sections of the community that the reason KSP1 still had bugs and framerate issues after so long was that the original devs were a bunch of gifted amateurs who didn't really know what they were doing. Nate wouldn't come right out and say that, obviously, but it was all over the subtext. We're not going to have any of those problems because we're bringing in a fresh team to redo the core architecture from scratch. And because we're using proper professionals we should have a faster, slicker, all-singing-all-dancing version of the game ready to ship in about, oh, six months? And that proved to be rubbish. The reason KSP still has issues is because it is (ok, was) utterly unique and therefore presents a unique set of challenges. Ok, so the original devs may not have known one end of a GPU from the other, but in all other respects they clearly knew exactly what they were doing thank you very much. That false premise, that KSP1 was coded in a fundamentally inefficient and amateurish way, shaped everything that followed. Harvester was side-lined. A new team was brought in. They started the whole painful process of trying to simulate an entire solar system from scratch... and found out that it was really, really hard. With just a touch more hubris, they might have had a good long conversation with the KSP1 team upfront and done things differently. I loved For Science, for all its faults, but there's nothing obvious here that couldn't have been done quicker/cheaper/better by simply building onto the existing KSP1 framework. Using the original team, supplemented with some fresh eyes to take a good hard look at what could be improved. The only thing on the roadmap that obviously demands a redo-from-start approach is multiplayer, and (with the benefit of hindsight) that clearly wasn't worth everything that followed. Even if some optimist did decide that it warranted all the extra work of making a brand new game, the KSP1 team would still have been the logical choice to spearhead the project. They could have designed the new architecture to be as compatible as possible with the old, for example, so that chunks of code could be imported wholesale with minimal effort. As it is, it very much looks from the outside as if they designed the new system to be completely different, then were forced to start cannibalising KSP1 code anyway because nothing was working right, and spent years trying to force square pegs into round holes as a result. One false assumption at the start. Lots of mistakes afterwards, sure, along with an enormous amount of hard work, but it could all have been so much easier

Sorry, sorry, bad taste I know. Massive sympathies to the poor team. But sometimes gallows humour is all you've got left...

Legend. Thank you so much! Really kind of you to take the time to go through all that. Does the bigger Heap not lead to a longer/more visible stutter when it does eventually get sorted out?

Um... I did say I need the idiotspeak version! What does Mono even do? What the heck is a heap and why do I need free space in it? Mono garbage collection is what we used to have before they brought in recycling, right? We're not all software developers... I guess what I'm really asking is, is this the kind of mod that will help the game run better for all players, or is it mainly for if you're, e.g., running a bunch of memory-intensive planet packs? Without understanding the technical stuff, I can't tell. Also, someone mentioned that the core game now handles garbage collection, whatever that is, better now, so I was wondering if the mod still makes a big difference?

Yes! Hell yes! For all its problems, I loved For Science, and anything would be better than the game being canned. But I'm not optimistic.