RocketRockington

You'd like to think so, but this isn't the Star Wars franchise, where it's gotten past the point where even a bad release to the flagship product can't seriously torpedo the value of the franchise.

Yeah I'm also extremely skeptical of anything the devs have said at this point. I also think there are some serious design issues with a resource system - namely, what to do with KSC rockets. If you have to collect resources to launch a rocket at KSC - that sounds just exceedingly dumb. Am I meant to set up iron smelters and copper mines next to KSC? Even if, for KSC, that's abstracted away, it seems weird for the space center to be waiting till I get enough aluminium to build my rocket. Conversely though, if rockets I build at KSC are 'free', with no resource cost - there's nothing to stop me from building a titanic rocket (besides KSP2s borked up performance :P) using the biggest parts, for any job. The tyranny of the rocket equation gets turned on it's head as now you should always do all work on the ground at KSC because stuff is free.

It depends. On the studio, and even the person, how much a lead keeps a hand in. But there is a trend in the industry, albeit this being anecdotal, that the 'director' role, as a part from the 'lead' role, is now above doing anything directly within the project and just directs others. Typically this is a questionably necessary role even on larger AAA projects, as I've found once someone gets divorced from day to day development, they tend to also suffer from lack of awareness. This is yet another reason I'm pessimistic about Intercept, as they had at least 6 'directors' on the project that I could find, before Paul's departure.. For a project that's only roughly 40-50 people, that's a lot of dead weight- though it may just be a case of title bloat. Director roles also tends to come with salary expectations that are constraining thier ability to hire two other working developers

Indeed. And I still go back to Nate's delay messages, for the sort of shady marketting techniques on display. Here is one of them again for you to refresh yourselves. So, the way that's written isn't a promise, but it's a clear implication that what they had at the time of the announcement of that delay was the issue with release wasn't 'none of our new features are even alpha ready'. No the implication was that they had them and needed to improve the quality, stability, and performance. That was posted on Nov 5, 2020. 2.5 years ago. If Nate was talking about the build that was released NOW and saying that, it would be a stretch, since the new features aren't even in the game to be 'woven together'. What the heck was he looking at 2.5 years ago - which according to many of the KSP2 hopefuls was a recent restart of the project. I am a dev. I do give devs the benefit of the doubt. But this is just bald face misrepresentation.

Elite Dangerous looks & runs better on a PS4 than KSP2 does on anew top end $3000 gaming PC, upgrading is not the issue. Its just the case that KSP2 currently does a terrible job rendering planets. Not even full proc gen like Elite Dangerous.

I'm not pessimistic just to be pessimistic. I'm pessimistic because the pessimistic version is far more, to me, logical and likely. There's no consistent version of events where the devs (esp. in the form of Nate S) were relatively honest (not perfect honesty, I still expect normal amounts of spin), the game was consistently developed in a professional manner, the team is not dysfunctional, and the only issues were COVID and the buyout. They have to do backflips to explain how Star Theory didn't utterly drop the ball (because many of the devs are Star theory vets) but somehow all the work Star Theory did couldn't be salvaged, so it's reasonable for the game to only have been developed over the course of 3 years. Most positive theories also rely on a combination of the 'mystery build' - this dev build that is so much better than what was released that had semi-functional colonies and multiplayer that the devs could enjoy but couldn't be released + the idea the devs were forced to release early through no fault of their own - despite the fact that the game was announced to release so many times. This reeks of wishful thinking. But it's the only version they can believe in to hope that the developer team is not dysfunctional - despite the state of the release - and will deliver the game they hope for in a reasonable time frame.

If they used a tracker that can't have a public component exposed to outside users, that's yet another lesson they failed to learn from KSP1.

Sure, it's not the same situation, but if it was a legal or policy issue of some sort, T2 would have made Squad pull it down. That's why I'm saying there's another reason.

I'm not gonna listen to one review. I am gonna listen to all the reviews in aggregate. Much much moreso than one guy screaming in all caps on forum who's proven themselves to be completely illogical. Also apparently they're busy trying to fix the terrible state that KSP2 is in, at least, unless they got laid off or quit because they didn't want to work for the... *cough* excellent leadership they found at Intercept.

Yeah oddly one of those 150 games happens to be KSP1. So it's perfectly reasonable be concerned that the shiny brand new sequel has 40% 30% and falling of the 10year old, not meaningfully updated in 2 years, predecessor's player count. Though I agree this could be merged with a prior thread.

This seems unlikely since KSP1 was running under Take2 for what, 4-5 years, and had a public bug tracker the whole time. I think it's far more likely they haven't gotten around to setting one up, or realize that it's kind of moot at this stage of development - many bugs reported now are already tracked and by the time they got around to reviewing public bugs it'd just be busy work clearing out a massively backlog of dupes & known fixed issues.

Exactly. A very unique case. But that one-in-10,000 shot is now what KSP2 fans have to count on for KSP2 to live up to their hopes and dreams.

And your personal opinion is all that matters. I'd take your post apart point by point, but it's pretty clear you're wearing some very thick glasses yourself, and it's not worth my time.

So, to be clear, you believe that a game that is built by a small team of devs and currently has a 94% positive on Steam, and is beloved by a large community, is the product of negligence. But you're making excuses for the developers of KSP2 in other threads, a game that was built by professional developers and currently has a 49% positive rating, which is tearing that community apart.

And then they announced they'd be shipping in late 2021. So apparently either they thought they're such wunderkind devs that they'd be able to build a new team and rebuild the game from scratch in 1.5 years - or they project wasn't actually restarted and the whole 'restart' aspect is a fan theory that only comes up to excuse faith in a project that's failed to deliver. If its the first case - then wow, they are TERRIBLE at planning, just totally wildly insanely optimistic to believe they could get all the features of KSP1 and all the promised features done in such a short time frame. If its the latter - which is much more likely the case - then they're also awful at planning and absolutely failed to see how much more they had to do and how long it would take. But it's not as bad as the case above.

What negligence? Do you have some pet peeve bug that never got fixed and you're calling that negligence?

I was talking about the times when you work for bad management - that there's generally no recourse to solving the issue.

It's not because they need the cash now - sure, they ideally want the cash immediately, but there's a difference between 'want' and 'need'. Even the business types at a place like T2 can understand that a game needs to cook for a certain period of time before they can recoup. The problem is that is likely that KSP2 was cooking much longer than expected. Note: This thread is not about the why or whether it's justified. Its just clear that from T2's expectations, the game should have released long ago, no game announces a ship in 2020 because they thought "Oh, our business partners expected us to release in 2023, but jokes on them, we'll announce SUPER EARLY for no reason". The problem is that the business side can't tell if the game is making legitimate progress or if money is being wasted endlessly by the creative types. This is due to many things, not all of them the fault of the business-side people. Yes, business people aren't always gamers - and if they are gamers, they aren't necessarily fans of a specific genre. Thus, it's typically up to some mediation between the developers/creatives and the business end - typically in the form of an executive producer. In KSP's case this is Michael Cook and/or Grant Gertz. These people are supposed to be telling the business people about the honest progress of their project, and sorting out budgets etc. And in turn, because those producers may be experienced with game development, but aren't developers themselves, they rely on the reporting from the developers themselves. This reporting can come in the form of meetings, various 'stage gates' like a green light demo, documentation, videos, gameplay show and tells, etc. With a good developer, a lot of this song and dance to keep the publisher on-side is kind of a waste of time that gets you the development dollars, because it's often an effort to surface how well your game is doing. However, with a not-so-good developer, this song and dance can become a goal in and of itself - faked demos, faked screenshots, builds that look good in a video but are held together with duct tape. This gets doubly bad when marketting gets involved because this material gets encouraged and then sucked up as promotional material for the game. And a bad publisher can also be responsible here - they can over-encourage useless reporting, delaying the team and wasting their time, or forcing the team to focus on unnecessary early 'polish' vs foundational work. It also gets bad because the mediary, the producer, has some mixed incentives. Even if telling the business guys 'we should cut this project' is the best move, that producer may have been working with the developer for years. Their work is now tied up with that developers work. And you can't prove a negative, so if that producer says 'we need to cut bait' they have 0 to show for their time, just like the developer, even if it was the right move. So they also can help sell the lie a bit. This is DOUBLY true if its an internal team - the 'external' publisher now also has a stake in the studio/team, and is even less objective about progress. So eventually the business people say 'ok what the heck' they look at a game that's massively overdue, that had promises made and promises broken - and even if the trajectory 'seems' good now, it could be more song and dance. And a 'hard' date can sometimes break loose a project that was stalled, or spinning due to changing features & scope. Sometimes. My guess is this is the scenario we're looking at with KSP2. It blew through too many deadlines, the business people said 'you have to ship now, no more extensions'. And my read is that Star Theory and then Intercept are pretty adept at the song and dance marketting, and - proof in the pudding - not so adept at development. And KSP2 did something even stranger, for a game being built in a traditional developer/publisher arrangement - announce multiple failed deadlines. (not counting indie games/kickstarters/etc, those often have weirder stuff happen) Projects RARELY announce a public release date and then blow through them, delaying by not just months but years, over and over. Fans often know a project is taking too long because they find out something is in progress and then wait for a public announce, but that's not what KSP2 did. Internal dates get blown through all the time of course, that's different. And the star theory debacle is an ok excuse for it happening once - but that happening several times points to some serious issues with project management or project-to-publisher liaisons. Someone was telling someone either pack of falsehoods or had wildly optimistic projections.

Game dev isn't quite that crazy. Share prices do reflect sales and sales do reflect quality of product, to an extent. Marketting can distort that somewhat, and of course individual projects can be cut or continued for cuckoo reasons. I think game devs bigger dysfunctions all have to do with how hard it is to measure the product before release, and also the value contributed to the product by individuals. Measuring after release is more straightforward. However, there's still a lot of dysfunction there. People can blow a lot of smoke to get themselves promoted far beyond competency. They can leverage smoke and mirrors to get themselves moved up dramatically for something they might not have had much to do with. And getting a project successfully funded or through the dev process is often a process of developers and publishers selling each other on a variety of falsehoods. The quality of the work does matter when its a knowledgeable publisher talking to a knowledgeable developer, but thats always something put into jeopardy by the aforementioned bozos getting themselves put in charge on either side of that equation. And taking responsibility for your mistakes - that's always a suckers game that only conscientious people engage in.

My experience has been the same. If you try to correct issues early, you're a Cassandra and nay-sayer. If you beaver away quietly working on something that is mismanaged, you suffer to either deliver undeserved rewards to your management, or get blamed for a failed delivery. Or, you become what you hate sucking up to bad management where dung always rolls down hill so you're just not at the bottom.

Typically companies do layoffs before the FY ends, not after, because they're trying to make their projections look better. I wouldn't be surprised if there haven't been more layoffs already, but people just haven't made a post or even updated LinkedIn.

All of the above, and then some. First, because of the dishonesty. Unfortunately, pretty standard in the games industry to overhype, but Kerbal is meant to be special - it's a game that inspired people to change their careers. It had a large positive community. The developers didn't need to lie about how awesome it was going to be, like it was COD:MW ver 68 or Madden 2142. But instead they hyped and hyped with dev blogs and videos, while under the hood they were clearly not getting things done. Every time a new delay was announced, most of the replies were 'take your time, make it right' and the posts from the devs were 'we're delaying to make it right'. But they must have known they were massively behind schedule, and it wasn't about making it right, it was about getting anything working at all. Second, because it's clear that no matter what was said by the devs, this is still just a product to them. I genuinely feel like the Squad developers - both at the beginning and at the end - loved the product and did their best, despite their small size and inexperience. Having a corporate behemoth buy it out - well, we knew it would turn into just a product in their lineup, but we were given the impression its still loved, in some fashion. But that's clearly not the case, it was pushed out the door half formed and with silly things like wobble rockets, and now the community just has to hope that enough people paying a $50 'investment' will get T2 to finish it. I feel like the community is essentially being taken advantage of, and yet people still have hope, despite those hopes clearly being abused to sell a low-value EA for a premium price.

His post: As usual with Intercept coms - there seems to be a lot of spin here. I was surprised to see this particular layoff, as KSP2's primary problem seems to be the need for more time developing the software - I would have expected to see other roles like artist or producer be laid off before their tech director, even if those roles are typically lower salary. That said - given they have 6 open roles for software engineering, perhaps it was more of a case of this being a purely managerial role and thus viewed as a cost saving measure when people are needed to 'burn code'. I just hope this was a proper move by his employers, and that he isn't a sacrificial lamb to cover for dysfunction by more senior management.

Paul Furio (cool name btw, mad max vibes), thier technical director, which typically means the person in charge of the engineering team, and often though not always in charge of the code itself, either left or has been let go, may be the first sign of layoffs happening at Intercept itself. That last bit is speculation, of course, but his LinkedIn was updated to reflect the departure in just this month - so it had to be in the last 7 days - so it'd be a big coincidence. Even if it was a voluntary departure, it's not a great sign typically to have such high turnover on your engineering team, including key people like your multiplayer lead, your physics engineer, and now the head engineering honcho, that I know of.

I thought he was more on the discord, spam-liking screenshots anyway