Derpiesaurus

Essentially just the title. The buttons don't work

Are kids that are young enough to feel more enticed to watch the tutorials if they find the voice fun to listen to, seriously the targeted age-group of this game? It seems to have been built around that age-group, given the VA they chose, so arguably in this regard, yes? Next to no-one starts to get into orbital mechanics and space related stuff (to a relatively advanced level) before they are ~16, at least when averaging in a pretty wide sense, so not including the few people who completely stray away, or completely dive into it at a younger age. Given that, I imagine the core player-base of this game is above the age of 16, where this type of voice acting, and furthermore animation (although I personally do like the animation style), is just completely out of place. I think that the voice is painful to listen to, on one level because I am still struggling to find any associations between KSP 2 and people under the age of 13, and on another, because the microphone or mixing they did just hurts my ears. There's too much high end and it has that same painful sound you can sometimes hear in the letter S on some bad microphones. It might just be the EQ settings on my headset, but everything else on them seems fine, so I blame the recording for now. The actual content that is in the tutorials, and IMO the animation, looks really promising, but I might get into modding just to remove the voice over if no-one else does it before me...

Completely understand, and yeah I'm a sucker for UE5. TLDR: I just point out some things I was hoping for in KSP2, the main one being that I'm really hoping for realistic atmospheric scattering on Kerbin. and other planets. There was a video on the Discord of Eve with that effect, but even seemingly newer screenshots of Kerbin don't seem to have it. Atmospheric scattering and good looking clouds (honestly, as long as they interact with light nicely - like how clouds become orange or pink in a sunset - it doesn't matter what shape they are) are both of the big things I was looking forward to. But since I was hoping for those things, and they aren't really what I was hoping for (surprise surprise), it's mostly just me criticising. The reason I bring up UE5 so much is because most of the complaints I have about the trailer are drag and drop fixes in UE5. I'm using it as an example of how modern game engines make this surprisingly easy, and another example of it just popped into my head every time I was thinking of a comparison (can't say it looks sort of old for a modern game if there's no reference to what is modern).

Definitely possible that they look more fitting than the more realistic clouds you'd find in UE5 for example, but the clouds shown on the trailer just look like their colour was made to a static #FFFFFF colour, are slightly transparent and use a terrain height map to make their shape. They just look really bad; again, to me at least. For clouds to look good, I think they need to interact with light properly by absorbing, diffusing, etc, and have a noise pattern that is made specifically for clouds. I think they did this, in that most recent screenshot with clouds, since I think those ones look great, but maybe they just don't have up-to-date footage of them?

Just to preface, I have a lot of criticising comments which I can't help but want to express (pretty much the whole reply is that... just so you know), but overall I'm still excited for the game. I want to point out the lack of distance/atmospheric scattering on Kerbin, it is really needed. IMO it's the thing that really ties together an upgrade in graphics quality, but without it, all you see are the hugely blurred textures of the mountains in the background and a fairly flat unrealistic looking landscape (due to the lack of fog that allows you to get a feel for the distance). I also found that some textures look nice, but most of them seem to look pretty 5+ year old game-y to me. Kinda blurry without much detail. I really hope this is recorded on low - medium settings for textures, because modern games' textures, or even just updated games' textures (COD, Escape from Tarkov, Squad, etc) have some serious fidelity to them, and I'd expect KSP2 have similar quality, especially given the price, and that it's at that price for early access alone. Vegetation and rocks' scattering seem pretty lacklustre as well. I can't help but want to bang my head against something every time I see a lack of detail, now that Unreal Engine 5 is out. I'm obviously ignoring some issues here (the biggest of which is that KSP2 was already in development before UE5 was released), since otherwise all game studios would use it, but you can get away with virtually infinite detail, and infinite objects in UE5, with incredible path traced global illumination (it's called something like that), which means no unity shadow glitchiness. It would legitimately look like the reveal trailer, but in real-time. My point here is that I feel like there's not much point scattering rocks around if there's only a few of them every 50 metres, and those rocks seem to be blurry and have about 25 polygons in them anyway (unlike what was shown in a few of the "test scene" screenshots, which looked great [and is what you'd get in UE5]). One of the most recent screenshots on the Discord server has sort of given me hope here, but the clouds still just look pretty bad in my opinion, and not even stylized vs realistic bad, just in general. This is the main thing that's leading me to believe a lot of the footage could be old, and stitched quickly together to make a trailer, since the most recent thing we saw (that Discord image) looked great. (Can't help myself, but, ahem, another thing that UE5 has that you can literally drag and drop into a scene, is some of the most realistic, and customizable volumetric clouds to ever grace a game engine. The VFX seem pretty old-looking as well. The launch effects with the exhaust is made using a bunch of 2D textures stitched together and animated, it just doesn't fit into the world of super realistic looking space-craft and planets, for me at least. Same with explosions, it's 2D textures layered on top of each other. I hope I get used to it and come to like them, but after seeing the VFX in Squad, an 8 year old game, I feel like that has ruined all the VFX in any other game for me (these aren't even the best ones I've seen in-game, but I can't find a good compilation of effects apart from that one) Anti-aliasing, or the lack there of. Some clips have it, some don't. To me this adds heavily to the theory that this is just developer footage, which sort of leads me onto the last thing: There seems to be unnecessary effects added to the video as well as a pre-rendered scene of 3 Kerbals? To me it's pretty clear that the part of the 3 Kerbals getting blasted by exhaust is pre-rendered because of the depth of field, slight increase in lighting quality. Maybe they needed to render it out in order to capture the reflection in the Kerbal's helmet, but honestly in 2023, most games have some type of raytracing, this should be possible in engine, in a perfect world. The unnecessary effects are the dust added at 1:00 in the video. I suppose it works as a transition, but why add dust in a way to make it seem like the lander is causing it, if that's not part of the game, in the gameplay trailer...? EDIT: I forgot to actually lead from the previous bit to this bit, I meant to say that it's a bit weird to have old footage that doesn't really have all the graphics settings bumped all the way up, combined with rendered out footage that is more like a cinematic. All of this requires a huge container of salt, it's just my first impressions after seeing the trailer, I probably won't feel the same way for 80% of this post-launch. This may also seem more like a rant than constructive-criticism because of how much there is, but I think it's hopefully all constructive in some way, or at least attempts to give reason I feel that way? If not then, actually, my bad. I don't want to be that guy that just throws around complaints and doesn't give solutions of any kind, but I'm also a little too tired to go over it properly and consider it all again (was about to head to sleep and then they had to release this to keep me up for even longer ).

Well scrubbing is a fairly big part of launching a vehicle in real life; not pretty often I'd say, but often some launches I try to watch end up scrubbed due to weather. It's not super uncommon is what I'm trying to say . It would add to the realism, but you could also probably just time skip forward until the weather is gone and be good to go in 5 seconds. Or you could make it fun and launch during terrible weather. I would see it as a big plus to have actually dangerous weather, especially on more hostile planets (like the storms/dust devils on mars IRL). I do agree that it would likely make it all too complex, but it would be an awesome addition to the game I think.

I think they're either in the optimisation phase or they're just getting to it. From the looks of all the gameplay they've shared (which according to a few youtubers who did a small interview with the devs) it's fairly old and to me looks quite laggy, meaning when that was recorded they weren't optimising, I would guess at least. I doubt until they're done with that they'll be able to even have an internal recommended specs, let alone one to give to the public. So I suspect minimum / recommended specs will come pretty close to launch, and it'd be silly to put them out post-launch.

That is, unless you're using Unreal Engine 5! Though.. you're still right, since you did say "even in the best looking games on the market"

@VanamondeJust purely if it would make it easier to moderate, by removing this as a potential source of needed moderation. But completely up to you. If it doesn't really make a difference then I think it's good to keep unlocked as people may still want to chat about it

@VanamondeI'm kinda surprised (even though I probably shouldn't be) that this post had comments that had to be moderated... If you'd like you can delete the post or hide it (if it's possible to hide it?) so it doesn't have to continue to be moderated, as people have nicely answered my questions, so there's not much need for the original post anymore, for me at least. So it's up to you, if it would make it easier to moderate. EDIT: You could also lock it if you want.. Which I only just remembered you could do.. Would probably be a much less destructive way than the other suggestions...

@SnarkVery well written! I absolutely agree now that it would be easier to deal with, and are likely to receive better feedback from a carefully selected group of people. However I'm still not sure anything can beat a whole crowd for finding bugs (maybe not reporting them though), which in my experience tends to be what remains when a game launches. There aren't usually any deep technical problems with the vision of the game, or the general function of things. It's usually just small bugs that are found through rigorous testing. So I think some type of open.. something, would be useful, but yeah the way I explained one of the possibilities, it wouldn't be very viable. I still think though, after all the answers here, that polling the community on things for KSP2 would be a good idea. I've definitely narrowed the scope of the polling in my head after reading everything, from whole features, down more to what I'm about to explain here: I think they could still use polls to ask some questions (these are examples rather than things that might actually work) like "How long should it take for a new KSC to be built when colonising?" and then giving options like "2h", "4h", "12h", "24h", for people to choose from. It could be a good gauge of how long the general community is willing to wait and be satisfied with things like that. Though I'm open to being corrected about that too! It does appear that Intercept has already been pretty open when they want community feedback, as said by someone who commented here. So with the issues that occur with open betas in mind, they pretty much are already quite close to the ideas I had in the original post. Coming back to the example of the Minecraft snapshots that I used in a reply.. I reckon something like this is exactly what all games should do. I originally said it may be worth trying to be this open before the game is launched, but then everyone would hoard to the test game and scramble the bug reports and feedback like you said. I now realise that the only reason this seems to work, is that Minecraft's core playerbase seems to be kids, that are less likely to be up to date with snapshots, or even care about them. These snapshots are also specifically updates, not a new game, so there's less hype there as well. So the end result is that the users that are testing the snapshots, are usually adults, that have a good amount of knowledge on Minecraft and usually are "savvy" enough to file good reports. I think KSP 2 should employ a testing method like this, after they release the game, as it truly seems to be a great method. So all in all, pretty happy with what they're doing, development wise, and I very much expect there will be some sort of NDA covered closed beta regardless, so my only hope now is that they do something like snapshots as I think it could be great, but I imagine they'll have a good method anyway.

I think this is a big part of the "delay", which is actually more of a pushback, than a delay, that people misunderstand. There is a good possibility they're just pushing the game back to really polish it, than because they have to. I have never once in my life seen such a positive community when it comes to "Take literally as much time as you need, give me a good game". I think the development team really understands that, and are taking their time because of it. I have very little doubt that we'll get a good game at launch. And anyway, a bunch of funky bugs in a game like KSP is fine imo as long as they're ironed out in a couple of weeks, because they usually make it funny for about that long, before they get tiresome.

I may have to do some digging because conversations about that sound like a really fun read. Yeah, especially with the great answers you've given me, I do think now that it's the least risky way of doing it. And because they've already sort of asked for feedback on things that are necessarily going to be added (or I assume that's the nature of them), that's pretty much good enough imo to answer the question about posting ideas for feedback. I hope they just do a decently large sized group of people for a beta test, rather than only select Youtubers and stuff, as famous != great tester necessarily (Unless you're Scott Manly that is, he's legendary. Which reminds me that I think we need a petition for him to be the voice of the tutorial.. but that's a whole other topic).

Yeah this is a good point. I can see how it would be pretty easily get flooded with all sorts of opinions on things; though that's why I think polls could work so well, because they can still choose x amount of options, but the community could help choose the generally agreed upon best. Though, balancing and predicting the PR nightmare that could potentially occur from stuff is a good enough reason not to do it to me. This is one thing that I thought of that could've been a problem, which is why I tried to word it the way I did. But for the most part, in my gullibility, I trust when companies that I know well when they say upfront and directly "We will not store this data". If it's hidden in terms of service under article 532 page 73, then yeah It's kinda sketchy. But I do think that this may not be a popular view on it. (the spaces are in relation to your's, rather than quoting each bit, to save space I realise this doesn't really save any space, so it's kinda unnecessary but I've already done it so meh) Very true, and I can't think of any time they asked (just bad memory.. or I haven't seen it), but it's pretty cool to know they have asked for feedback already. I think it might make more financial sense to go with what the people that are likely to buy the game want, but that could easily lead to a better theoretical experience, but a worse playing experience; so yeah, risky... I definitely could be wrong, but I don't think it's a bad idea to show a wider community the game before release, for feedback. They definitely wouldn't have to, proven by the success of games that don't do that. But if you look at the snapshots they do on Minecraft, it gives the community so much time to give feedback and bug reports, and the updates come out brilliantly and at a very acceptable amount of bug free. (Answering this with the assumption you're talking about the mention of Battlefield 2042, so do correct me if I'm wrong). Bare with me since I know Minecraft is another mention of a multiplayer game. I 100% get that all games would need differing feedback and testing - and the reason BF2042 did that is to test servers and player interactions like you said. I think finding bugs and feedback of gameplay loops would still require the same sort of testing though (giving out temporary stripped down copies, or full copies for testing), just maybe not directed towards multiplayer. It's more the practice of the testing that I'm looking at in the BF2042 example, rather than the specifics, which is why I mention Minecraft above. I don't mean anything specific about it, just that they have people test for months and months, and as far as I know, always have had a great reaction to updates.

Genuine question to try to understand why they might not do this, as I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't be purely positive. If they're sure about features like multiplayer, colonies, etc, why don't they just show off their current implementation and read the comments on the forums. Or even better, make a poll that needs some personal identification like a phone number for a verification code (without them storing it obv, but to avoid bots) and asking the community what they think about the feature in it's current implementation. If they're making the game to serve the community that is most likely to enjoy it, what downside would there be to asking them what they should change to make the most people happy? A poll for feature implementation could be very easily seen as just development and subject to change (because possibly changing it is the whole point of the poll) and would be hard to twist into a promise and fact that people would get angry doesn't actually happen. Beta tests would give them great data on all sorts of different system specs, play styles and a much larger team of bug finders. It could even be incredibly limited, to just even a single feature, as to not basically give the whole game to people for free, for however long. All of this would go to further guarantee a good experience for money at launch. I don't see how in a hopeful future of decades for the game, it could be a bad thing for a couple of months prior to allow a couple hundred / thousand people get to beta test, or vote for polls on features. The few early months of exposure to the game would be well worth it in the long run, and give people significantly more confidence in pre-ordering and just buying in general. This would all be assuming they did it early enough in the time remaining until release to actually change things, unlike Battlefield 2042 for example, where I don't believe they got the information early enough, and didn't seem to try to act on it at all - that's why that game is a failure (EA even said it, not just me). Just to restate: I don't mean this post in any sort of argumentative, rhetorical way, as to push for them to do this - I am just genuinely interested in people's opinion on as to why this might be a bad, or good idea.

I'd consider early 2023 to be a time within spring, which extends a bit further, but yeah it's not as much new info as I initially thought it could be. I suppose it does guarantee it's before March 31st, and that allows me to concentrate my hype on the time rather than be hyped without knowing how long I will wait (which makes me want to bang my head against stuff). Here's for March 15th!

In the earnings call it says KSP2 is launching in Q4 of FY2023, which from my search means a time between January 1st 2023 - March 31st 2023. Going to a 3 month release window, from a 12 month one, seems pretty good to me. And because they're likely to grab all the time they can get, it's pretty much guaranteed to launch in March - so there's also sort of a release month. All of that is a lot more specific than "Early 2023", as well as official, since it came from the earnings call. There's also up to about 10 months more development time that they've got. Given a guess of about 2 years of development prior to announcing in 2019, that's a total of about 5 - 6 years. Idk how they could delay again, so my hype train is going good.