Wheehaw Kerman

Well, your call.

Be a shame if you quit. Things can only get better. If you want some hope, look at KSP2 EA at 4 months versus KSP at four months…

Is there any doubt?

Premature grief, arguably. Just spent an hour or so poking around with Patch 3. Things are noticeably better: framerates, usability of the VAB, getting around Map View (anybody notice the filters? Are they new?), decoupling not resulting in loss of vessel, and so forth. I expect this trend will continue, the moaning will begin to subside, and everybody will eventually pretend their meltdowns never happened and get around to enjoying the game.

Patch 1.3 has brought some optimizations in. Running noticeably more smoothly for me. I expect things will only get better.

OTOH, when you look at how KSP2 four months into EA stacks up against KSP in literally every aspect, it gives some indication of how far beyond KSP science KSP2 science could go. I’m looking forwards to your thoughts on KSP2 1.0 versus KSP 1.0, once the game has, you know, actually been developed to the point where it bears the comparison.

That’s a huge list. Looking forward to seeing how it translates into gameplay!

Look at the first Not Going To Space Today scene in the EA trailer - the craft basically snaps into individual Legos. It looked pretty good. And the trailer also had stress groan SFX. Hmmmmm.

Still not stopping having fun…

Incentive? Because it’s there!

Yup. I’m doing a lot of orange/bare metal. Really like the paint options in the game…

I really, really hope it does…

There’s a spectrum between literal interpretation and strapping JATO uni… wait, this is KSP, Separatrons to one’s ass in order to make the leap necessary to arrive at one’s desired conclusion, and that spectrum is fairly broad :).

As I say, we have the EA that we’ve got. But given that the devs have inside knowledge, and we do not, they’re still more credible sources than we are. I actually really like the idea of Nate telling somebody complaining about how their Kraken lure is wobbly to git gud. That’d be hilarious.

Agreed that I would have liked to see a bit more lead time on the specs announcement. I wound up having to play a few days on my old laptop before the new one arrived. 6 fps on launch was a bit clunky - comparable to some of the less optimized versions of KSP on my previous laptop, but still playable. I’m absolutely open to being accused of slight insensitivity towards the wants of people who can’t afford current hardware, but I’d rather this game be built with an eye to the future rather than legacy hardware. I expect to be playing it into the 2030s. And re adjusting our expectations, yes. It wasn’t that hard…

That’s some very entertaining speculation on your part though. I’m not going to go about accusing the more toxic naysayers of being bitter disgruntled former IG employees who were fired for poor performance, but it is a funny thought.

“Cosmic” is quite an overstatement. “Runs just fine on a current mid-range Dell gaming laptop” is more accurate. Ask me how I know :).

Fair enough. I work in an engineering-intensive highly regulated field. I’ve seen projects go long, over-budget, and sometimes fail. I’ve also seen them succeed, more often than not. At this point, the overheated forum speculation and prognostications of doom or ultimate success are basically worthless. They give us far better insight into the psychology and characters of the people making them than they do the future of the game. The most and only credible sources on the forums are the devs. Having heard some absolute [redacted] from project teams before, it is possible that they’re blowing smoke. However, what they are doing is consistent which what one would expect from a project in early EA: systematically squashing bugs, optimizing, and building out the roadmap, all according to plan. Which is what we all should have expected instead of throwing tantrums. We’ll get a progress upNate today, and a patch next week. We’ll see how they’re doing. As a sidebar, would I have been happier if Elon had bought Take Two instead of Twitter? Hell yes, although I wish he’d stick to rockets and electric cars and throwing his personal electric cars at Mars with his personal giant rockets, and selling people flamethrowers. Wish I’d bought one while they were on sale.

Measuring from start of development is actually a great way of highlighting the point I make: KSP was just kitbashed together as an unplanned short term hobby project by one guy based on fond childhood memories of launching little tinfoil men on fireworks. It also highlights the differences between the projects nicely. KSP a few months after development started was ready to go because of lack of planning and long term vision. It didn’t even have the Mün IIRC. It’s hard to measure, since we can’t know when the actual work really started, but KSP2 couldn’t be played a couple of months after development because it was being carefully planned as a long term major property with a plan with literally interstellar scale that’s going to give us other star systems, multiplayer, and give us a version of the game with the unrealized potential of the first. And odds are it’s going to get there a lot quicker than KSP took to complete development, given that it’s being developed by professionals as opposed to basically hobbyists. So why so serious about its future?

Look at it this way: KSP four months into its development was barely a demo, with a fraction of the features to come, buggy, ugly, and only hinting at its brilliant future. It did not have a lot of players, and no real roadmap, being developed by a small marketing agency. It took years of development to turn it into the game we love. KSP2 EA four months in has been rebuilt to make it a stable foundation for a bigger, better, game with much more ambitious scope, being built to a defined roadmap by a much larger more professional studio. It is vastly superior to KSP at the same age, and will mature a lot faster. Look at it in two years and tell us if you feel the same way.

And there’s also a silver lining with the EA: the possibility that by the time 1.0 drops we’ll all be out of school, making good money, and able to afford high end rigs… #optimism #silverlinings

I think that we’re all processing some level or another of disappointment and hope for the future of the game… And we’re all doing it differently, in tone ranging from calm rational optimism to less than perfectly Spocklike detachment. We didn’t choose the state of the EA, but we can choose how we react to it, and generally, I lean hard into optimism. It makes my life more pointless anger-free. And the forums? Well, IMHO tones of patient, rational, adult optimism in the face of the state of the EA are just plain more pleasant for others than miserable angry bitter pessimism. We’re all here because we loved KSP and want KSP2 to be even more awesome. That’s the key thing. I can deal with my feelings about having to wait a while longer for the full game without constantly venting them at everyone all over the forums.

Agreed. The EA is very playable. The bugs can be worked around and are temporary. The wobbly rockets aren’t a problem if you don’t build Kraken lures. In other words, solid conservative designs fly fine - wobbly rockets are a skill issue that can be overcome in other words. It looks great and will get art passes. The performance is fine on current hardware. And the rewrite, once it gets through the EA/debugging process, is going to be a great foundation for the rest of the roadmap. And the roadmap is what I’m excited for. KSP never did colonies properly, the ISRU implementation was simplistic, the science/tech tree system rudimentary and imperfect, and after 5,000-plus hours in the Kerbol system, I’m really looking forwards to interstellar. Less than a week to go before the next update!

Agreed that modders are gonna mod :).

Well, we’re going to find out in a week or so… and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more in the update than what we were told.