Mantarochen

I don't understand the DEV pipeline of this game. There are fundamental core-gameplay issues with the game, and you add stuff like grid fins and the matching mechanics before delivering a science update, a performance fix or several bug sweeping patches after each other. And this all is dated to June? what. Players stopped playing the game because the core is rotten, not because they were missing the grid fins. How is this even something that needs to be said. Who is prioritizing stuff over there?

Just glancing over the threads, what is the purpose of this? Every thread that has discussions about "what the hell" is going on with the development of this game gets locked, moved, merged or just disappears. If you want feedback and feedback alone, just close the "discussion" tab entirely and just keep the bug report section open. I do believe that pointing out that the game has sub 200 players at times is nothing a thread should get locked over. It sadly is the truth of the current state the game is in. And I understand everyone that feels the need to express their sorrow and yes, maybe even some salt about spending $50 on a game, that seems to have little to none development happening on. At least these threads could be a place for senior DEV staff to share some insights. Every other news channel of yours is basically dead, with no updates or insights other than" we are on it" to speak of. Which is quite sad, considering how the DEV staff propagated them being very communicative before the launch.

2 months in, with ~380 players at peak a day still playing, the devs "slowing down the rate of updates" and the previous 2 patches being a joke in terms of actual fixes, even patching in some more in some circumstances... -How is anyone still defending this piece of turd? I mean for real. I understand how everyone was hyped when the game released, even when it was buggy, because "it will get fixed". But at this rate? How long until take2 cuts losses? 3 months? 6 months? With the current trend in player numbers, the game will probably have peaks of ~100 players by then anyway. Sad to see such a (potentially) fun game with promising features go down the drain because of the clusterlove the development has been.

Just me and my take, but them stating that they will collect bug fixes bundling them into "big updates" is the wrong take in my opinion. The player numbers are already vanishing, with only the most hardcore fans left, and with every video I see, save game I start and hour I play, I am more and more annoyed by absolutely ridiculous bugs that should honestly be hot fixed right away instead of gulped up into a big patch. And with every bug that gets ever more dumb, I'm closer to uninstalling the game all together. Bugs like the game saves breaking, Crafts breaking up when loading a quick save, the wobbling of the rockets or the KSC teleporting in front of you mid-flight should be things that are patched within a day or two. Not WEEKS. These are literally game breaking bugs. I can see why bundling up performance improvements and gameplay changes might prove to be better, but bugs that break the game? I don't think that's the way to go.... I just don't think they can allow themself to keep bugs like these in the game for longer periods. They probably already made half of the people who bought the game refund on the spot by releasing the game in the state it is in, judging by the steam reviews and player numbers. That other half is a) annoyed by the bugs and leave over time, or b) hardcore fans that just don't care and play anyway. Hardcore fans won't make the numbers of the sales tho. Without the "general" playerbase I don't see this game being a success to be honest. And I don't see take2 keeping the lights on for too long sadly.

You can set the stores at different values for playernumbers, say "but there is a direct buy for the game" etc. If you just look at the numbers, you see that the game is losing traction. And that the traction it had wasn't good from the start. People trying to nullify the KSP1-KSP2 player number comparision by saying : "yes many players started with KSP1 again after they tried KSP2, so the numbers are inflated". That's december 2022. October 2022 had about 400 players more. KSP1 is on it's way or at times at the level of late 2022 in terms of player numbers. And these are the numbers that make me question the sales aswell. There is no way this game has more then 300.000 sold copies as some people claim. Not with ~2400 concurrent players with 24 hour peaks of ~4.000. The green line dropping like a rock is KSP2 btw. The fact that tomorrow is 1 week after launch and we still haven't even seen a hotfix, is well.... I mean really? Not even a hotfix for the save games breaking? Or the one where the KSC teleports with you?

Regarding the "release build", you're probably not too far off, considering the naming scheme of the updates that are pushed to steam. Some people on reddit hinted on a new patch coming, after"releasetest" "development" and "candidate" where pushed to steam in the last few hours The naming scheme of the pushes already tells you what version they were forced to push to live. With the "playtest" only being 2 days before the actual release.

[snip] The state of mind that the situation the game is in being okay, is the core problem. Not the people adressing the fact, or trying to tinker out why it is that way, and how it can be fixed.

Ehm what? I mean copium is hell of a drug but what else are these numbers other than statistics? That is literally the entire point of that picture. You can find the same numbers on the official Steam charts page, just not displayed as fancy. To confirm your point about the sales numbers the site is okay, even if the site says that the values are probably not correct, because the game just launched, as @MarcAbaddon said, but if I use the same site to display current player numbers, the site isn't a real statistics site? Aha, okay.

The metric they use to calculate ownership by just multiplying Steam reviews x20 - x50 might work with some COD or City Builder game where people leave reviews because they always do. KSP2 has an absurd amount of reviews by people who vented because the release was a disaster and people who review the game with "don't listen to the haters" as review. Everyone and their mum left a review on the KSP2 store page. Completly inflating the numbers this site uses to calculate the "estimated owners" statistic. This graphic tells an entirely different story.

Yes. There are other possibilities to get the game. Since Epic games doesn't publish anything in terms of numbers and the DEVs won't for their own site, Steam is the next best data source. Besides steam being by far the most popular with the most people on the platform. KSP2 was in the Top 10 most wishlisted games on steam. It peaked below 30.000 players. So there is no way in hell the game has above 100.000 copies sold on Steam. Even if you'd account for half the people buying, but not even starting the game.

https://steamcharts.com/app/954850 ? The game literally sits below Dota 2 in topsellers over the last 14 days, behind Fallout 76 , Company of heroes 3 and god knows what. https://store.steampowered.com/charts/topselling/US The 40.000 - 50.000 sales estimate won't be this far off. Or do you think 400.000 people buy the game to then not start it?

How do you get to these numbers? I mean like for real, no offense but the devs didn't publish anything (you can figure out yourself why) and every steam tracker on this planet, tells me that there were a max of 11.812 players in the game at the same time. With 2.179 playing right now. Do you think there would be only 2.000 players in the game right now when the sales scrape at the 6 figures mark?

With an all time peak of 11.812 players on steam, I can pretty much say without a doubt that this is bullsh*t. At least in terms of steam sales, the 400.000 figure is pure fantasy.

I highly doubt that. With only around 40.000 sales, let's round to 50.000, without even taking the refunds into account, they made $2.5M before steam took a cut, before the marketing is paid, before they flew out people to ESA etc etc. At this stage they are nowhere near ROI. Someone on reddit calculated that this launch just covered about half a year in terms of development costs, just based on the average salaries and the team size. I might be wrong, and I hope so, because I don't want to see the game fail, even if I am highly critical to what they launched and the price. My best guess is that take 2 is gonna cut the losses in a few month if the sales don't recupe. But for that to happen they need to fix the game. And fast.

Yeah, like I stated in my comparison between the two, it isn't. It's a mess. That's what it is. Remember "the forest" ? An Indie Game developed by literally 10 people, launched in 2014. Just as a little comparison to shut down the "it's EA so that is a good number" post. Name Copies sold Review on Steam KSP1 ~4.5 M copies sold "Overhwelmingly Positive" The forest ~5M copies sold "Overhwelmingly Positive" KSP2 ~40.000 copies sold in 24 hours (launch 24.02,23) "mixed" (inflated review score) Sons of the forest ~2.000.000 copies sold in 24 hours (launch 23.02.23) "very positive" Both are: EA games Aren't finished Have bugs Have missing features Both were delayed multiple times Have games before it in the franchise with ruffly the same number of sales and review score The KSP2 figure doesn't even include the mass refunds that probably happened, judging the steam reviews. KSP1 having more concurrent players then KSP2 isn't bad, it's alarming. Just as a fun example, here are "the forest" and "sons of the forest": https://steamdb.info/charts/?compare=242760,1326470 KSP2 sits at $50, Sons of the forest at $28.5 and people actually still defend the EA price of $50 KSP2 is shipping at somehow.... That for the "it's EA so that is a good number" statement. I think you can figure out yourself what these numbers mean.

Well that comparison doesn't look to good for KSP2 does it... KSP2-Green, KSP1-Blue KSP2 has about 1,5K players more then KSP1. Which is disastrous for a game that launched a few days ago. But that puts it in line with all the steam reviews if you subtract jokes and literally troll reviews to push the steam score like these:

After reading all the posts after mine went up, oh boi was I right. Jesus.... Almost like white knighting was an actual paid job. PS: What the actual * is the KSP2 discord supposed to be? If I've ever seen a bubble, this would be it. The bug reports tab is literally overflowing whilst the same excact people who wrote the reports tell you how amazing the game is and why it's "just EA". For everyone who wants some more insight for why the stuff is going down as it is right now, a fellow on reddit pretty much summed up the development history of KSP2 and what went wrong: And some technical details and analysis regarding the code and overall engine from a unity game dev:

The biggest problem with this release is the amount of copium/hopium that is spreading amongst the KSP community. Let's face the truth, the game launch was ruff, the game isn't finished, I'd say it isn't even out of the state a typical dev build for internal testing is in. The performance is abysmal and basic features from KSP1 are missing, let alone the promised features for KSP2. The Price is way, and I mean way, too hefty for what was put on the table and especially for being an EA title. I waited for the launch since years, took a day off from work on Friday to play the game. I was severely turned down by all the above-mentioned problems. But the game running so utterly catastrophic was the point that made me refund it. I don't have a bad system by any means with a Ryzen 9 5900X , 64 GB of RAM and a RTX 4090. I'd say except the CPU, my system is pretty much as high as you can go. Getting 39FPS on a Kerbal X launch dipping into the 20s with a €2000 GPU is just not acceptable. Not even for an EA title. The game has many obstacles to climb, and the devs will need to put mountains upon mountains of work in the broken mess they released. Inflating the steam reviews with straight-up lies and copium isn't going to make the game better. Flooding Reddit, the forums and other places with "buts it's just EA, don't buy it then...." won't save the game. It's just annoying. The game is a mess right now. That's an objective fact measured in the amount of bugs, the performance and the feature set. Don't hate on the devs, don't hate on the game, just accept the truth and try to stay objective in any sort of way. The 30th Reddit thread "that the game is just EA so stop complaining" is literal TNT for the community to go ham on each other. Greetings.

Thanks for sharing. DEVS or ESA must be trolling tho. Please @Space Scumbag, tell me the graphics and especially the frame rate are only this bad because you ran the game on a glorified toaster at ESTEC. I mean I just had a look at 00:39 of the video and that gave me 3rd person radiating pain. What are that ? Like 4 Large, 8 Small boosters plus the rocket, and the Frame rate is like what? 10FPS?

Upgraded my PC a month ago when I got myself a proper 144Hz 4K monitor. CPU: Ryzen 9 5900X on a Kraken Z63 MB: Asus Crosshair VIII Formula X570 RAM: 64GB DDR4 3600 Corsair Vengeance RGB GPU: RTX 4090 Gigabyte OC Monitor: 1x Gigabyte M32U, 1x Samsung generic UHD Curved 32" Storage: 3x 3TB Samsung 980 PRO Nvme pcie 4.0 KSP1 vanilla never dips below 180FPS, IF I dont go overboard with mods or launch a 800 part Rocket that kills your CPU. So all in all I'm pretty much at the high end except the CPU, with a less "top of the line" single core performance. My rig tends to perform really well on games that can use more then 4 CPU cores, and is a bit slower on older games that are optimised towards 1 core usage. I don't expect a flawless 4K 144Hz 99,9%tile out of KSP2 especially because it's launching in EA as a barebones game, BUT if I find myself in an unplayable stuttering mess at like 20-40 FPS, I will 100% refund this game on the spot. This hardware combined with the time the DEVS had to develop the game has to hit some bottom line that is acceptable for the hardware youre on.

Well, nice to hear some differentiating opinions. And yeah, no one really knows besides the devs. We'll see in 23 days. I'm waiting so long for this game already, the preview just got me a bit spooked. And yes, ofc you can't compare this to games from XX years, okay. Compared to them, even a unity tech demo looks good. I just feel like the postfx / processing looks off. And that's something that often translates across various graphics settings. That had me worried. You can have the best 12K textures, if your postfx is shiet, the image is blurred, over sharpened or lacks proper AA it's all for nothing. I love that style on ksp1, where you have ultra sharp AA and 0 blur whatsoever. Might look a bit worse but feels so much better gameplay wise.

Hey, I was wondering if I'm the only one that thinks that the gameplay footage so far looks really, really strange. We are less then a month from release and I have to admit... The footage we've been given access to thus far looks bad. I mean really bad. Not in terms of actual textures, but the post processing / Post FX is just killing me. I might be blind, but there is either 0 AA, or the image is scaled to 720P. Look at the hangar. There are gigantic steps everywhere, the edges look horrible. Whats up with the clouds? This looks like a bad ksp1 mod. And these are the good ones. I didn't include screenshots of the videos to save your eyesight. These are the ones that really make you go blind. Don't get me wrong. I know this game will start into EA. Which is debateable after the launch being postponed 3 years, but okay. But what makes me kinda go mhhh is the state of the preview material . And the ones that were shared are at like 21 FPS with brutally bad visuals, again in regards to postfx / post processing. Look at this video: at 0:30 4 small boosters seperate from the main craft. And the game literally freezes from that. Same as 1:37. And this is footage from the DEVs. Either the machine that is used to record previews is a glorified toaster, or we have a problem. My point isn't the textures looking bad. My point is, that everything is either chunky, oversharpened to the max or completly washed out looking like TAA smoothness dialed to 100%. I don't really care about the best 4K ultra sharp realistic graphics. I like KSP1s art style and simplistic graphics aswell. So well infact, I sunk ~ 4200 hours into it over the years. But what I've seen so far in regards of postfx, performance and processing is literally making my eyes hurt. What's going on?