RocketRockington

I can already hear the apologist's excuses when it gets postponed again. "Nate said June - but he didn't s 2023! If they end up delivering it in July, that's 11 months ahead of schedule! You can't expect developers to do literally anything on-time ever or be able to schedule better than a person throwing darts at a calendar! Just be happy with your gourmet-steak priced petfood, it had the early-access label on the can."

Not having both high TWR and high ISP isn't just a KSP balance thing, it's a 'thats how physics works' thing. Both of them require more energy - in particular ISP scales to the square of the energy involved - better engineering can't really get anyone outside that mousetrap. Hence why interstellar vessels, even slowboat ones, need ways to dissapate energy inefficiencies (heat) elsewhere. This is something the Expanse just handwaves - the Epstein drive is just BS, whereas much of the rest of it is fairly sold hard sci fi. Tbh Id guess Uber Entertainment pitched interstellar as a new feature for KSP2 without really thinking through all the ramifications/difficulties of it (just like multiplayer) and now they're stuck trying to make a game with the promised features and making very poor progress.

Same reason 'everyone' exaggerates how much something is happening. To whit, from what I've seen there's one one person on the forum who routinely gets the time wrong, the person you replied to.

That's why I cited all the statistics available? Did you bother to read what I wrote? Allegedly progressing. There's no real evidence of that. As we know from KSP2s history, some random screenshots is evidence of nothing. In early threads on this forum, many people expected science to already be out. All we've got is a blender renders of a single science part - that's evidence of next to nothing. We have many many more screenshots of colonies and interstellar parts - from years and years ago - and those features are not out yet either. This is why people like me are here - to remind others who read these threads of how dubious claims by the hope-springs-eternal crowd are, given the history of the project.

It's pretty clear from player data - both play counts but also most specifically reviews over time - that KSP2 saw strong early sales. Most obviously powered by hype and brand loyalty to the franchise. And then once it became clear what people were getting for their money, it stopped being bought. A few people here may claim it was worth the money, but the player base data clearly indicates otherwise. Contrast it to KSP1 which has seen much steadier player counts and growth in reviews and followers. Anyway, this is an old argument, so I'm surprised people still want to claim KSP2 is worth the money despite all evidence to the contrary. I guess personal anecdotes trump data when it aligns with your world view though.

Yeah I know exactly what you're talking about. Re-entry heating may be too difficult to get right in a few months, but echo chamber technology was well within grasp.

There's just nothing to discuss, really. Minimal updates on a few bugs. People have generally moved on to other things. Don't mistake apathy for positivity though.

There's a possibility of course, but practically I don't think so. First, T2 would need to say 'we're going to give this to yet another developer to salvage'. They clearly didn't diagnose the problems at Star Theory very well the first time they tried to salvage this project - I'm not sure they really know what they messed up that time either. Then, the new developer would have to stop dev while they evaluate what can be salvaged and what can't. The fanbase would be further dissappointed and waiting around. And T2 is clearly not willing to be that patient Ultimately that's why we got this mess of an EA, in my view. And unlike others, I don't blame them for it - it's an impossible situation. They've been promising a game for years, the project is clearly not going well despite all the extra time and resources, there's no appetite to give another set of developers a crack - to them KSP is not such a valuable IP that it's worth taking even more time to get it right - so the only option is to bite the bullet on a release and hope miracles happen post launch.

Apparently not, since Uber got handed the KSP franchise despite having a terrible reputation, and Squad got shut down despite having a good one.

Have you played any KSP mods? This narrative of how broken KSP1 was and that we need clean code for the future is both clearly falsified by all the mods that have managed to do so many more things with KSP - plus the fact that Squad was constantly adding new features on a relatively fast clip given their team size - and by the fact that the 'pro devs' (poorly) copied most of Squads solutions, borked up half the things that they tried to do over, and generally did not come up with a better code base per the people who have data mined it - despite all the time and advantages given to the project. The overall assessment of T2 = bad, Intercept = good always baffled me as nothing seems further from the truth. What exactly do you base that on? What would a good publisher have done with a developer that was delaying over and over? What would a bad developer look like that is worse than what Intercept has managed?

I think they should have just kept updating KSP, not announce KSP2 until it was genuinely 6 months from a solid 1.0 release (so... maybe 2028 or so) and we'd have KSP version 1.30 + a couple more good DLCs + even more and better mods as the community interest in KSP1 wouldn't have declined - and then KSP2 would be this awesome new thing. Unfortunately, T2 wouldn't go for not booking revenue on a project for 10+ years.

That already happened with the KSP public bug tracker. People would upvotr and comment on bugs. And like all big trackers, when you triage them, you mark bugs with various statuses - priority, severity, what state they are in the pipeline, whether they need more info, etc. None of this was rocket science.

Except someone can read through and triage 100's of user reported bugs in a day (I know, I've done it before for a live services title). And some of those bugs will be something only the community might generate, because users have a wider range of system specs and play styles than a small internal QA team. It of course depends on just how buggy the game is - if the game is extremely buggy like KSP2 is currently, I agree its not that productive because the bugs are very apparent and the bottleneck is more on fixing them and regressing the game. But when the game gets more stable, it can be of use.

I don't think these numbers are at all meaningful anymore. First, because now even a small group of players or developers could meaningfully impact the #. IG leaving thier machines running it all night could be half that number though I doubt they're doing that. Second because clearly IG is going to keep KSP2 on at least some form of life support. It seems like they have another Kerbal project cooking so instead of a cancellation from low sales, which would abandon the IP and sabotage the franchise T2 paid for, we may instead see a stealth abandonment, with ever less work being done over longer time frames.

It depends on the project. Tbh, I think for KSP1, public bug reports actually were useful. Partially because some bugs were well written, and because some repro cases are difficult, and often because some portion of the community was investigating much more deeply than a typical user was/were allowed to through the EULA. Some of the people submitting those bugs went on to be hired by Squad and/or become part of their preview-test group, afaicr. The thing is, badly-written bug reports are easy to spot & bin. A public tracker also allows some portion of the user base who spots a bug report to add more info to a badly written one. Managing them is not too hard - mark a bug 'needs more info' or 'cannot reproduce' and either the poster will never revisit - or you'll get more info/better repro steps. Many other games - I agree this wouldn't be the case. But I think you're applying your personal experience in too much of a black/white answer, unless you've personally worked on a small indie title with high technical complexity with a somewhat-smarter than average user base. Now, for KSP2 - for them, I think a public bug database would just be another PR move, as you said - not because all the reports would be badly written, but because clearly they don't have the capacity to address enough bugs to make it useful. On the other hand, I think it'd be a better one than the investment they've been putting into PR with blender renders, trailers, and dev videos, given that it's currently EA and an EA that's mostly populated by hard core KSP fans, who want more meat on the bone and are sick of the over hyping and over marketting that has characterized the last 4 years, as evidence from this post which took the hype down from an 11 to a 5.

Seems like their time would have been better invested in either making more planets/moons for the Kerbolar system, or creating a procedural planet system like many space games, or just making it much easier to mod planets/add POIs. Whether the interstellar stuff will be fun or not - I'm dubious. If the systems for interstellar craft are intricate enough - maybe. But they've taken off many of the things that would make it intricate enough, like life support, permanent Kerbal death - or even just that its going to require generation ships and some sort of boot-strapping mechanic, vs just making it a sci-fi esque and silly interstellar resource transportation game, which is what I get the sense it will be.

It's likely because they did the opposite of listening to the community. They listened to their one guy on the team who's the superfan and got what they got. Dunno how else you go ~4 years from that gameplay trailer with a core system - how the literal parts are glued together - in the same state and only now investigate making things better. Just baffling. Oh well, I guess that's considered a 'dark conspiracy' now, something we shouldn't even think about because anyone who worries about the state of KSP2 is a conspiracy theorist.

Agreed. Let's hope there's no reversion to form when the community isn't a raging bonfire of discontent. It'd be nice to get more insight into progress on actual features as well. If they were committed to transparency, we'd know more about science now besides a couple of blender renders. Though I don't think community feedback means much to them until it reaches fusion temperatures, the community strongly disliked wobble rockets since it was visible the 2019 gameplay video, but only now have they listened.

DLC#1.

People generally don't do that, quitting a job is usually a more personal decision. The amount of control that a publisher or upper management exerts to push out a bad game - and often the amount of mismanagement that leads up to such a decision - tends to drive good developers away and instead keep the 'yes' men around who are more concerned about managing up than building a good product. It's kind of odd that KSP2 is having such a huge problem with keeping/attracting good engineering talent - mostly you'd expect this to be the sort of project a game dev would love to dive into vs FPS #3538. But they lost multiple engineering leads, a whole engineering team at star theory, their physics programmer, their multiplayer lead, etc. Engineering seems to have seen BY FAR the most turnover on the project. And they've had engineering hires up on their page for ages. Fortunately they got an influx of engineers from Squad - though it also seems the lead designer from KSP1 decided not to move over to work with Intercept.

Sure - but there's a difference between a feature that already has parts that implement it - eg: a new engine - and what you're citing. That's why I explicitly pointed out that the parts that are mentioned in the post are not demonstrating a new feature.

A: I didn't ask for more comms myself: B: I am just pointing out a discrepancy - Nate seems to be upselling 'parts' to be called 'features' when features is what the game is missing. The PR/marketting hype is lighter this time, but it hasn't gone away. C: If the community hadn't complained - and the complaint wasn't just 'we haven't been told about bugs in progress enough', though that was one complaint - we wouldn't have gotten any redress. The kneejerk reaction from people against any post that's negative is so tiresome, especially when it's a strawman arguement.

However, Nate does mention 'Features' 11 times in this post. Noting he didn't want to share about them early, to give promises, but then he's had a change of heart due to the anger on the forums... and then doesn't actually talk about any features. Despite the claim that this patch is delayed so long due to working on features as well as bugs. And no - I don't think a few parts are actually new 'features'. That's what the game industry calls 'content'. Features generally involve new systems. You might call the airbrakes a new 'feature' but they're not - they're a part that leverages the aerodynamics feature, and if its anything like KSP1, they're not greatly different from a control surface, they just deploy and cause a lot of drag because the control surface is deflected so far that the AOA is very high. You can do all of that with tuning curves in KSP1. So I can see why some people would actually expect both more communication about actual feature development - or news that a feature was actually coming in the next patch, rather than some nebulous future. Me on the other hand, I don't expect anything like that, I'm just hoping they'll fix enough bugs that it'll be an adequate sandbox for people to do more than just build planes fly through obstacles around KSC. It's almost like KSP2 is a stealth version of HarvestR's Balsa model flight simulator rather than a successor to KSP at this point.

I wouldn't hold your breathe. While the added transparency is nice...thank you to people like @PDCWolfand @Alexofffor being persistent enough to keep posting and getting through to the devs despite all the vitriol aimed at you. This post is far more transparent - but it's also transparent how slow it's going, how long it's taking for issues to be addressed, how uncertain they are about fixing many of the major issues that shouldn't have even been in a release 3,4 months later. I expect updates to keep this pace or slow down even further after this - especially if you can keep the community happy with just somewhat better status updates, a minimalist version of what a public bug tracker would actually be doing for everyone. This seems like the poster child of how much traction you can get out of lowering expectations to the basement first and the offering a tiny glimmer of hope.

Hopefully this will head toward the EA people wanted, where the community was involved in the development process, rather than the prior 3 months of hyping and PR speak that seemed primarily oriented toward pretending everything was fine, papering over the problems with jpgs, and encouraging sales of this underwhelming EA.