Skorj

Given the forced re-use of the KSP1 codebase, KSP2 reminds me of Windows 95. Probably a lot of cleverness under the hood to make it work at all, but the result can only ever be a buggy mess.

Better said as "someone with access to Nate's account was online". We have so little idea what's actually going on. Hopefully we'll get some more leaks in a couple of weeks.

For the rusting cybertrucks, my money would be on bimetalism. Wonder if they cleverly connected the body electrically to something more cathodic. Never understood the irrational fervor around Musk in both directions.

"Goodwill" is a technical term in finance, and as such should not be confused with any ordinary meaning. Goodwill is the intangible value of an acquired company, more-or-less what you pay for a company less the value of its physical assets (after debts and other things). Take2 has bought a lot of smaller game companies, and so a lot of money went on the books as "goodwill". Goodwill is treated as an asset to make the accounting balance. It can be written down when the acquired company are no longer considered valuable, though investors rarely care about that paper loss.

Most likely IMO, it's not the IG team who pushed out this patch. If this layoff went as usual for big corporations, almost all the IG staff were effectively terminated by the first week of May, just given pay and benefits through the end of June as a severance. Work would have transitioned to a support team at PD who does critical bugfixes for all the older games they support. It's normal at large software companies that after work has stopped on a released product (or major version), there a common support team that does any needed bugfixes to keep those old products working, or at least able to launch. We can't be sure of anything, of course, but the codebase transitioning to a support team would be a very usual outcome (with maybe a couple people from IG giving them advice through the end of June). If nothing pops up on any of PD's other games needing a fix, we might even get another bugfix patch one day. Sure would be nice to get the remaining parachute bugs and the "fall through planet" bug fixed, and anything else on the top-20 bug list the support team can figure out.

These were some of the more annoying bugs, so it's great that the fixes got pushed out before the end. It's doesn't look like they fixed the "fall though the planet" bug, though, or the delta-V inaccuracies. I can only hope the support team keeps pushing out bugfixes.

Still chuckling over that one. The artwork was a great touch.

Fun story there. The founders were broke after their first game didn't so do well, when they were offered free Amiga systems in order to make business software (by Commodore IIRC). They took the systems and used them to make Populous, which put them on the map. Lots of ground-breaking games from them. Lots of great indie games in almost every genre. Heck, there were decent indie games recently that were spiritual successors to Bullfrog's Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper. Not many vehicular combat games though - I would love a Car Wars-style RPG. I'd be surprised if we don't see a new game fill the vacuum left by KSP in the next few years, hopefully something with a new approach beyond "sandbox with missions".

If you act like a bad consumer, you get bad products. Sure, we're each just one person, but that means we each have one person's responsibility. There will always be a large group buying buying lootboxes on the FIFA shop, but I don't have to be one of them. I can't fix all the evil in the world, but I can do my small part not to add to it, and be content with whatever good I can do. Anyhow, AAA companies don't make good games in the first place, so there's not even a sacrifice to be made.

I had to look up Rare to see what games they made. I had to look up Take2 earlier in this drama. Games from AAA studios have been almost uniformly bad for so many years now, I just see these companies as graveyards where IP goes to die after its creative energies are spent. Much like Disney. Very rarely, a game from a AAA studio won't suck, and that will be big news since its so unexpected, but that's very much the exception. I stick with not buying games from any of these guys regardless. I had hope for KSP2 early on because PD was created to publish works from smaller indie studios. Turns out that hope was misplaced, and T2 was dumping a big steaming pile of AAA on KSP2 from the early days, which is a shame.

The simplest take is that KSP2 work has moved to a support-only group within PD. There were bugfixes in motion, and presumably that group is iterating on those bugfixes. I expect we'll get one more patch release out of PD. Pessimistic view: they won't figure it out, and we'll get nothing further. Optimistic view: colonies were nearly done, and the support team can finish the feature release. But I'd personally bet on a patch release, and then only a future patch if new crash bugs are discovered (due to video driver changes or whatever).

Just one nerd's opinion, but I don't agree that there's any uniform feeling across nerd culture about Elon. Instead, he was liked by one side of the culture war, then later the other. There are nerds all across the political and value spectrum, which is why any good nerd forum bans politics. The answer to your second question would cross that very line, and is best not discussed here.

During development (pre-release) I was cautiously optimistic. I was worried, but was willing to buy on day 1 and see. My general sense was "huh, looks like IG might pull it off". As soon as I started playing my sense of the game very quickly changed to "Oh. Oh, no. No no no." Once I saw the code quality at launch I expected the game to fail, and everything else has played out as I expected. I was hoping for better, but that was just hope. Fortunately I refunded in time. I didn't care that colonies weren't ready: I was content with the cash grab if it meant we got a KSP1 without the bugs, even just sandbox at first. But we so didn't.

The board has a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, the executives typically don't (and, again, it's the executives who make all the daily decisions about operating the company). And all that fiduciary duty really means in practice is the board can't legally do deals that favor the board members personally over the shareholders, it's not otherwise particularly restrictive. They can certainly favor reputation or employees as simply "best for the long term", since it usually is; they just make other choices instead. The Devil isn't where you think he is here, and the system as a whole can't be understood through oversimplification. Anyhow, like I've said, IMO the answer in gaming is to look for smallish indie teams led by someone with a passion for the subject of the game, attached to non-AAA publishers. Regardless of the reason, huge publishers will ruin everything except their true passion: very profitable cash shops.

PSA: you can just turn off EA titles in the Steam store. It's on the store preference page (scroll past the mature content filter stuff). Lots of cool filters there. Steam has a very "hands-off" policy about what's allowed on their store, and IMO it's the better for it. It would be nice if they enforced their existing EA rules, to be sure, but I'm not sure they could afford to pay people to do that, and better what we have now than rogue bots banning stuff seemingly at random.

I think there's a widespread misunderstanding about this stuff by people who don't manage investments for a living (i.e., most people). The board and the executives are different groups and sometimes at odds with each other. The executives make the day-to-day operating decisions about the company, the board is rarely involved in any active way unless the executives really mess up and get fired. Leaving aside the misunderstandings about the board, let's talk about the executive leadership of a large company. It is commonly the case that executives and even middle managers of large companies care about 3 goals (with the notable exception of founder-led companies, which sometimes have a long-term vision): Their compensation; The metrics by which their future compensation is determined; and Their personal success metrics, usually the size or revenue of the group that they manage. Not the quality of the product, not the customers, not the shareholders, not the employees, none of those things except as to game any related metric for goal 2. So, you'll often see decisions that from the outside seem utterly baffling and self-destructive, but that's only if you think in terms of irrelevancies like reputation or long-term profits. Executives at large companies are generally really good at optimizing for their goals, it's just that those goals are mis-aligned with anything useful to anyone else. Also, this isn't specific to companies - it's the problem with any large, old organization of any kind. IMO, fixing this would be the most important advancement for the future progress of humanity. In the mean time, the best shot at good games are founder-led studios where the founder is still chasing a vision of great games and the publisher isn't ruining everything.

Just follow Steam's advice to players, and it's fine. Excerpting: (Emphasis mine.) It's good advice. EA is not kickstarter: buy a game, not a promise and it works great.

Sorry, but I have to ask: what evidence can anyone find in the events of this game (or their previous games) that Nate "is a smart guy"? I don't understand why anyone would think that. He's a persuasive non-technical manager with a lot of passion. Anyhow, I've been involved in one way or another in many layoffs, and anyone senior was either deliberately kept in the dark to ensure nothing leaks, or was given strict instructions to act as if everything were normal until a public announcement, They never had any choice in the matter. Someone in T2 management surely knew the layoffs were coming and allowed false hope to be communicated, but that decision is both completely standard in business (gotta squeeze out every penny) and made well above Nate's level. Personally, I think someone at IG knew a few weeks ahead, because IG went unusually quiet after the March update, but they wouldn't have been able to tell anyone. What baffles me is the lack of clean-up of the Steam store page. Assuming the game has gone into maintenance mode, the roadmap has gone from wishful thinking to knowingly false, and that sort of thing tends to bother corporate legal.

This. Games fail. It sucks, but it's silly to blame individuals much when we don't know the details. Hopefully you don't read the Steam forums, but for a while there was a bunch of back-and-forth similar to "These are bad people who stole my money and failed, it's the worst injustice ever!" "First time? You must be new to EA games." Yeah, it sucks how it turned out, but if I'm going to rant it's going to be about the rather-larger amount I crowdfunded Camelot Unchained for. Even the best efforts sometimes fail, and that's without adverse publisher meddling. This one was actively sabotaged by T2 if ShadowZone is to be believed. Nate signed up to be the face of the project, so of course he'll catch the most rotten fruit thrown by disappointed fans, but personally I'm willing to cut even Nate some slack considering those revelations. That stuff was nuts.

I vaguely remember bouncing off Stationeers too, but I can't remember why, but studios sometimes get better over time. I don't think they'll be making a spiritual successor to KSP in any case, but I'd be happy to see any physics-sim based rocketry game with some sort of progression system. You definitely need to be good at tutorialization to make a KSP-alike and have any chance of broad success! Really, I think making a successful KSP-like game is all about tutorialization and a well-structured early game. Don't make it a puzzle around how to build a rocket with enough delta-V to get to orbit, since we know 95% of players will bounce of the game there. Guide a new player through it and up through first Mun landing; tons left to figure out and do past those basics. There are experts in tutorialization out there to hire, for a studio that realizes the "first 2 hours" experience is everything, and no player with a hope of eventual mastery should get stuck during that time.

As long as you don't have multiple people hand-flying craft within the same physics bubble, it's actually straightforward. That limitation could then be addressed as a game design issue: make sure there are ways to avoid that while accomplishing all the game's missions.

I think it would also be fine for a KSP2 creative director to say "I found docking so tedious in KSP1 that I used mechjeb, so we're going to add a part for that". (Heck, I enjoy docking and I'd add a docking computer for people who don't.) The point IMO is that someone in charge of a sequel to any game should have played the original to death, loved it overall, and have a very informed opinion on every detail, plus have solid data on what players statistically enjoy or bounce off of.

I believe the main reason people want multiplayer is air-to-air combat. The planes people aren't on these forums much, but they're a significant chunk of the community. Technically, multiplayer is relatively easy for two cases: each player in their own physics bubble, or everyone together with at most one person controlling a craft, e.g, everyone running around on the surface setting up colony buildings, which I personally think could be great fun. I don't think time warp is the problem people make it out to be. As long as the game has a properly intgrated and full-featured alarm clock system, as it should in any case, then each player can just have an alarm for when they need to do something, freeing anyone to timewarp between alarms. Sure, you'll have the problem you always run into in games with both a ship design part and a "normal gameplay" part, but groups of friends have navigated that since the dawn of gaming. It's the air-to-air combat part that you'd have to design for from the start, but I think as long as joints were done KitHack-style, it's a solvable problem. One advantage of KSP is any weapons would be physics projectiles in the game, not hitscan, which gives a lot of design flexibility for handling them. I think people would be delighted even if guns in particular were laggy and didn't work so well, as that's far from the core of KSP gameplay. Just put some hooks in for mods to make missiles that work smoothly seeking their targets, and that's all modders need. Plus of course plane parts as a whole could wait until the rocket game was stable, but you'd want to accommodate them in your engine design from the start. Honestly, I think the bigger challenge for colonies and the game as a whole is making a fun progression system, one that allows for very flexible play while providing clear objectives for new players. Get that right at release, and the game would be quite successful IMO.

If T2 cared at all about the future of the KSP franchise, they'd be doing what City Skylines 2 is doing to try to save that franchise. Clearly, T2 has written off our dear Kerbals as a lost cause, probably blaming the failure of KSP2 on the IP being bad.

This seems an odd take to me, but maybe I misunderstand you. The "beginner way" is to use mods to make it easier, or do it for you. In any field, the expert way is to find the least-effort way to safely and reliably do a task with no preconceptions about any "right" way. To me, expert docking is when you line things up so well on the way in that you don't need lateral thrusters, just come straight together burning late to slow down, flip and bang docked. When that actually works, it's high skill and low effort and not much time to be saved. And certainly no fussing about with alignment indicators. Are you calling it the beginner way to switch control briefly to the target ship and line up the docking port? That's the least-effort way, though. Maybe you're saying you like to do "docking challenge runs" and do things the hard way just to spice things up? I get that, though I prefer my pointless self-imposed challenge elsewhere in the game, and letting docking be quick and easy. Anyhow, my point is that doing things the vanilla-game easy way is the default mode of mastery, and changing where the game's challenge lies is a subjective, personal thing and not a requirement of being an expert.