RocketRockington

Let me help you out - cringey claim of killing the Kraken he tries to walk back - but other claims of improving performance and physics over KSP1 that are not walked back and should have been.

Agree to disagree. I see very little true passion in this project. I see a lot of attempts at making it more mainstream and trying to broaden the appeal (eg make more money) and certainly the release was a cash grab. And tbh I don't see why you'd believe that either. T2 paid for the franchise and I don't think it was at all because they loved Kerbal for kerbal. Instead they saw the oppurtunity to sell a AAA priced product to a large, dedicated community (5million + users) for a a low-AA development price. Then they contracted another developer - not the originals - to do this updated version. And I think they lowballed the contract, sincethe original ship date they contracted for was likely the 2020 date (just 2.5 years of dev), and Uber entertainment not exactly having a sterling reputation and being financially strapped due to multiple development failures at that point. A few people on the IG team may be passionate about it - or good at convincing people they're passionate about anything they work on in front of the cameras -but that's not the same as passion product where the majority of the team is passionate about it - and even if the original Uber team had been passionate about it - half of them were lost on the T2 takeover and then new people hired in over time. Also, do you really think a project like KSP would lose its physics and networking engineers if these two core positions were both filled by people who were passionate about it, vs people who were just hired on to do a job? Two key roles that are very relevant to core KSP2 features. Apparently both hiring and retention was a serious problem, at least amongst the engineering team, per this comment on reddit by Paul Furio, which doesn't speak to a great deal of passion amongst the engineers at least - or speaks to very significant countervailing forces.

"The roadmap is not a promise. It's just a set of goals. Nothing any dev has ever said should ever be construed as a legally binding promise" - T2 legal department + half this forum that likes to argue semantics.

I think most of them went to writing and animating cartoon tutorials.

Want to link your review so you can share the pain with others, might help

It also has a very open and honest developer who didn't lie about the state of the game to try to get you to make an overpriced purchase, who genuinely interacted with the community and took suggestions and feedback that made it into the game rather than ignoring it while working on thier own 5 year roadmap of features while BSing with fluff AMAs, and most importantly, despite low resources - things improved fast enough to keep the players interested and hopeful. This constant comparison between KSP1 and KSP2 early days (though it's not like it's genuinely early for KSP2) just makes KSP2 seem so much sadder.

Fortunately, while people still seem to (very) occasionally ask reddit if KSP2 is worth buy/playing, noone comes to this forum expecting a serious answer, and when they do there wre people like you to tell them the truth.

100% agree.

When was the last time there was a thread that actively discussed science, or anything else? The only really active thread I saw was the money vs resources thread, and even that seemed to be pages of repetitive counter-arguing.

Pretty sure the hype train already crashed a couple times, we're on the third iteration. This version has a low seating capacity, not very fast, and takes a lot of effort to get going - but on the other hand, it's fueled by pure stubbornness, so it'll keep going when all else fails.

I think we'll get retry heating, but not science. I think if there had been any significant progress on science, the tenor or Nerteas AMA would be different. And they'd show more - last I heard they'd planned a video interview about the orbital decay bugfix (though now that's delayed too right?) so if they're scraping the bottom of the barrel that deep for anything to do videos about, science must be well behind. I don't really get why it would take this long, since they've also said it's going to be similar to KSP1 science, unless every single engineer has just been doing big fixing, but based on their trajectory and past willingness to share literally everything they could think to share about, that's my take.

The reddit has basically stopped talking about it lately. I think one thing people have forgotten is that the opposite of love often isn't hate - it's indifference. Rekindling interest when trust is so low in the PR for KSP2 is going to be an uphill climb.

Nothing.

So much better to have a UI that looks like its from the 1980s instead, amiright?

I was hoping for the bones of KSP1 to be improved by KSP2, not discarded for more gamified, dumbed down systems. And fwiw I've played RP1 games where heat and internal conduction did matter, using a retuned version of KSP1's heat mechanics (realheat mod) + some extras for boiloff and such. Both for high-mach planes and space planes, where parts had proper occlusion from airflow due to FAR and not the same silly occlusion system ported from KSP1 that's now in KSP2, another starling display of not improving anything Very interesting stuff, very relevant to space. Could still use better UI.

What's your point, w/respect to moeggz statement? That HarvestR made one bad call, therefore all his opinions should never be listened to? I mean, he did only create the game that sold 5 million units and sparked many people to go into aerospace careers, which gets used to teach orbital mechanics and his characters went up to space on a legit space capsule. KSP2 wouldn't exist without him. But sure, go ahead and try to discredit him. Maybe we can stack up the current IG leadership's record of success vs that? And also, maybe if you asked him now, he'd change his mind about dV. Because he clearly can learn with time.

Yeah - tbh not all the KSP2 posts are mocked either - people doing craft shares or videos are just fine, whether they're sharing bugs or genuine accomplishments. Mostly its the 'why is everyone so mean to KSP2' posts that get mocked. And of course, the chorus of 'no, no, not for years, no, heck no, only if you are a masochist, no' when people ask 'Should I buy KSP2'. Oh well, off topic here. But to be more on topic - I do wonder what happened to re-entry heating. my personal guess is that it wasn't actually close to done at all near EA release, the design was just half-baked so it looked like it might be close to done, but then when Nertea took a look and realized what was there, he had to go redesign it.

Or you get to go back to the product that's genuinely good, feeling vindicated that corporate nonsense failed again and getting to appreciate the existing product that's great - and hope that if/when someone tries to do a more genuine sequel, that mistakes of KSP2 aren't made again. That's what I'm hoping for, because unlike @moeggz's hopes, I believe that 3.5 years of pretending that everything is fine and wonderful, no mea-culpa or true change in heart is ever going to be forthcoming - because the same people are in charge. It would have been a perfect time to discuss what went wrong with re-entry - why someone would have said 'its coming shortly' and been so dramatically wrong about such a near-term and theoretically well-understood feature. But that's never been IG's behaviour, nor Star Theory before them. They're bunkering down, still singing kumbaya, hoping to ride out the negativity from their repeated failures to deliver on the hype they worked so hard to generate, and the broader community is just getting angrier about it. If you look at reddit, the largest community and one that isn't being sanitized by IG/PD staff, the early views on KSP2 were very split - early on, it was a flamewar yes, but from both sides. Now the war is mostly over. You routinely see Dakota's comments getting downvoted, the posts that excuse IG the same, etc. This bunkering might pay off they were in the process of delivering at a rate that seemed like it would be enough to pull themselves out of the nose dive they're currently in - but that would require overdelivering for a bit to show that the course was corrected, not making baby steps toward being a more capable EA developer. They aren't delivering content nor fixes at anything like the rate that a capable EA developer is, though, and any progress toward that currently feels like going from an F to a D-. Progress of a sort, but enough to start generating sales needed to make up for their burn rate? Not from my perspective. Ah the age old 'they had to start over again' thing. Delayed 3 years? They started over. Whole road map delayed more? They started over again. Sure. Maybe. But having to start over again over and over - especially when you thought you were close to done - is not the sign of a good game developer, especially once you already put your product in front of the community and started charging money for it. And of course, no mention of why or when they started over - it's always 'velocity is good, morale is great, no problems here, its the community's fault for expecting words to mean what they sound like'.

@moeggzYou can't expect the KSP2 apologists to be polite when they don't face nearly the sort of scrutiny that the 'haters' do from the powers that be - and they know being rude and getting people to fight in threads they don't like gives those same powers the excuse they're looking for to lock them. Win-win from their perspective, they get to trash talk AND they get to silence people.

Just as the more determined of the apologists have taken the contrarian view and will grant infinite patience and understanding now matter how absurd the contortions required to grant IG the benefit of the doubt are. Potato potato. Is hanging out on a game forum, discussing an EA stage game where the devs are clearly on their own road and not at all paying attention to the community, a productive use of time for anyone, whatever their opinion is? I personally find it cathartic to share my thoughts, but I'm not under the assumption that I'm changing anyone's mind or doing something productive with my time. You asked a question of 'why' but you yourself seem fairly locked in on your own take too. These have gotten somewhat better, but my sense is that it's more 'we literally can't gild the turd more because the release is the release' When they talk about long term plans - and when you look at the pre-release communications, especially over the years, it seemed like they BS'd as much as they possibly thought they could get away with. Even Nate's more recent comms about how the delays are for better QA (next release - major showstopper got released and had to be hotfixed) and for feature work (no feature work is evident) still rub me the wrong way.

Making it harder for people to see is why it was done.

So I've played plenty of EA titles. There's a lot of differences between what I'd call a 'good' EA title and what KSP2 is. 1. Delays are fine, but those delays have to be put in context of how expensive the title is, how unique, and how good the current state is. Delays when the title is a shoddy mess and priced like AAA are much less forgiveable, especially after heaps of other delays. 2. If an EA is 'finding its way' that's more forgivable than an EA that's trying to replicate features from a prior sequel, for which no true fan input is needed and no delicious surprises are forthcoming. 3. Above all else, EA development should be honest & transparent. An EA title should have a level of humility. It should be able developing the game that will eventually be sold to the masses, and asking for honesty/being honest with the EA adopters. EA products that try to sell themselves heavily, especially in more and more disingenuous ways, are a terrible practice. 4. There should be improvement in practices, not just a perpetual acceptance of bad estimates - if you've predicted badly 50 times in the past, why should anyone trust you? Gets to point #3. Star Citizen is a joke because its relentlessly late and every time a dev tells you when something will happen, its been wrong. KSP2 is no different. All of the above is in service to the early adopter community not feeling lied/scammed/rugpulled/etc. If after the star theory thing happened, the newly formed IG had said "Hey we need to fully restart the title, or we need 3 more years" or whatever - people would have been somewhat upset then, but not nearly as upset as people are now. Instead we've been fed this constant line of 'everything is super great, we just need a little more time' when things are not super great. So naturally some portion of the community has stopped 'trusting the devs' and takes everything they say as a bald faced attempt at deception in service of further flogging our favorite franchise for a few more bucks, and not giving us anything that will ever be worth the hype. So ultimately, what many of us is a moral failure - just blatant business-as-legitimized theft, late-stage capitalism at its worst, vs what an EA was supposed to be with developers getting funding for their dream project that they're in the process of refining. There are a lot of us. Read the reviews. Go to reddit, a community of tens of thousands of daily actives , vs the hundred or so here. See how few people are playing. Just because the ksp forums are sanitized with draconian fevor, doesn't mean that the average sentiment here is the general sentiment. The apologists don't help matters with disregarding statements like that, they just add to the flames.

People who only listen to the part that involves KSP2 should be aware that HarvestR is much more eloquent in other parts of the video, not a ton of pauses and tripping over his words and repeating himself. it's not because English is his 2nd language, it's because he's genuinely struggling to say anything about KSP2 that won't make him sound like a hater despite what he's clearly thinking.

To give you the non-flamey answer. Yes, you can turn off reentry heating, but it's a challenge that should be present with any half-decent space sim. Among other features that you can turn off in KSP1 - fuel being used.. Craft breakage. Gravity. Does that mean that all of those should also be non-critical pieces of the game? Moreover a lot of the issue is that after 3 years of delays, an EA missing many features from even KSP1's early days was released, and one of those features was supposed to be back 'in a matter of weeks' - which might be a minor thing if other aspects of the game were in good shape, but because it's one of the rare cases of a dev actually saying some non-nebulous thing will be done in a non-nebulous time frame, it's easy to point it out in the course of a discussion, because everything else people would reasonably imagine SHOULD have been done by now doesn't have any specific concrete mention (like say - having anything in the roadmap done, for instance), and therefore the apologists people will just shout 'It's EA!' endlessly as if that justifies the state of KSP2 after years of delays and hype and promises and the high price and terrible performance yadda yadda yadda. So that's why it gets mentioned a lot more than perhaps just the feature in and of itself might seem requires.