VlonaldKerman

I’m saying initial date around Xmas, gets delayed to New Years.

I think there should be “oxygen” and “supplies,” and the fail state is fatal. MKS has it configurable so that kerbals either turn into colonists who can be rehabilitated or die depending on the user preference and it works well.

This thread is a good idea! My answers are in no particular order: 1) Life support- doesn’t have to be complicated, can be tied to a single or maybe 2 resources- the goal is to make time a valuable resource. Perhaps it can be configurable or disabled. I think it should be lethal at a certain point, but with a lot of alerts and stuff beforehand. 2) The new terrain system (I forget what it’s called). 3) Asynchronous rover driving a la Bon Voyage mod… I’m not sure how this is best implemented, because Bon Voyage is a little overpowered. Perhaps the rover can only drive a certain distance with the feature, and the player has to drive the first kilometer of the route, to prove that the rover can actually drive and handle well? Less sure about this one, but it could be a very cool feature, and would really create interesting design/strategy decisions along with life support. 4) Reusable booster recovery a la FMRS mod. 5) Vessel construction times… synergizes well with life support. No more instant rescue missions! There are some game-design issues to be solved (should there be a craft hangar? What about repairs? How to make non-tedious and how to modify difficulty to be more forgiving?) but I would PERSONALLY like it and this is my PERSONAL list… 6) Weather! Even if only cosmetic. Blackrack’s Duna sandstorms were very cool, even if they couldn’t actually impale Matt Damon. 7) Considering clipped parts when calculating tank volume… seems like a massive technical challenge, but maybe not? 8) Wear-and-tear. Like weather, this could be a purely visual effect, or have gameplay ramifications. Wouldn’t it be cool if your rover that’s been sitting on Duna for 20 years had dust on it? Could go all the way up to part failure. 9) SCANSAT features like surface mapping, etc. Good for scouting out landing sites with intentionality. 10) Testing mode. Especially if there are things like life support and construction time that make failure states more common and less recoverable, being able to test crafts and missions is important, and it breaks immersion to have to load up a different sandbox save with your crafts in it. Though, you can do that, so this is really more QOL than anything. I think that the unifying theme here is that the challenge is kicked up just a notch from KSP 1. I know that onboarding is a big priority, but new players won’t have to worry about LS for example when they are landing in the Mun. They might create a station in LKO to test out LS mechanics, before putting a base on Minmus, which is easier to land on but far enough away that it’s a good test bed for LS before their first Duna mission. In other words, the steepness of the difficulty curve won’t change, it will just have a higher ceiling, even before the player goes interstellar. I would also argue that persistent colonies are irreconcilable with the “one mission at a time” play style, so future dev decisions should not be made with the intention of catering to that desire. Therefore it seems very logical to introduce features that make time a valuable resource, and require the managing of several concurrent missions. But yeah, those are my ten! I also happen to be the arbiter of truth, beauty, and wisdom, so they are also the definitive ten! Boom! moar boosters

That would be extremely horrible.

Asking out of genuine curiosity/ information gathering: at what point did you become aware that the project was taking way too long? Because KSP 2 had been in development, as I understand it, for at least a couple of years in 2019. So they were, as far as they new (supposedly) 67% of the way through development at that time. Yes, I agree. I think, as others have stated, the vision for and direction of the game changed in 2019/20 at the same time as a lot of corporate shakeups. At that point, they should have been straightforward and honest with the community, rather than, “Nothings changed, new team, same game! Still developing!”

The claim that they just underestimated the time it would take to make the game is not just implausible, it’s impossible. Remember, when KSP 2 was announced for a full release in 2020, IT WAS 2019!!! “In this case it was 4 years” is very different if at that point you estimated it would take 10, but ended up taking 14, vs estimating it would take ONE and it ending up taking FOUR UP UNTIL NOW, WITH YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT LEFT. Not even the SLS took 4 years to do <1 year of estimated dev time. I also don’t buy the notion that they released the game on their own volition, in order to gather user feedback. A game intentionally releasing in a half baked state (even for early access) without prompting from its publisher and without oversight or objection from its publisher would be virtually unprecedented, I think. However, I’m not too pressed about him lying (I think) in the interview. What’s he supposed to say? As long as the stuff he said about the future is at least 80% true, it’s good news. And either way, I can’t do anything about it, so I’ll just wait and see.

I think the critical error was releasing the game before it was ready for even an early access release. For one, they did not need the community to find bugs, so I think they actually gained relatively little. I also suspect that the general impression that bugfixes are moving slowly is due to the fact that there are SO MANY BUGS that when 80 bugs get fixed, it doesn’t seem like it to the player. This is a function of the game still being so early in development- earlier than a lot of other EA titles. The bugs are also back-end and fundamental. I suspect that their pace of fixing bugs is actually quite good, there’s just a lot of bug fixing to do and we normally don’t pay $50 for a game that’s at this stage, so it seems unusual when it really isn’t. Ill argue FOR the release of For Science… I doubt, counter to the various hints at internal builds we’ve gotten, that many of the major game systems have actually been hooked up together yet. When they do get hooked up, there is bound to be a whole new host of bugs to work out and there may be things that are broken now that will only become obvious when science etc is integrated. So they should try to integrate as many things as possible as soon as they are built, and then start the laborious task of sorting through the tangled web of bugs. But I’m not a game dev, so take this with a mound of salt.

Big KSP 2 dub.

Not if the continuation of your project is contingent on your corporate overlords being satisfied with sales. This is the big budget version of an indie dev trying to get a loan. “Look, the EA is popular, fund me!” Except T2 corporate is the lender. I suppose it’s not literally crowdfunding, but it’s close.

Why did KSP 2 release when it did if it wasn’t about getting sales revenue at that time? Several long forum threads have been about this- but I think it’s pretty clear that the game was pushed out by corporate, possibly because it was taking too long and they wanted to be reassured that there was actually a market. If it was released because they wanted $$$, then it’s probably crowdfunding!

The fact that development started in 2017 does not mean that large parts of the game were not scrapped at one point. I don’t think it’s a scapegoat- I think it constitutes mismanagement and also dishonesty when they didn’t come out and talk about it and continued to promise that the full game was temporally close. Personally, I’m maliciously spreading misinformation.

For my money, I would rather get snippets of gameplay from internal builds that are more feature-complete than details on the inner workings of the dev team.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, there is a popular theory that development got restarted at some point in 2019-2020, likely because of unforeseen engineering issues or a different vision (different engineering vision) for the game. This would likely hit engineering/backend much harder than asset creation bc a lot of the models, SFX, etc would transfer right over. Given that they were shooting for a full release with no early access, all the features were developed simultaneously, giving no special priority to the one’s that would appear in an ideal “early access” build. This would explain why a) The cosmetic aspects (aside from technical ones like terrain detail) of the game (parts, SFX, etc) are so advanced relative to the engineering and feature aspects of the game, and b) Why so many “basic” features like reentry heat are missing from the EA build, while there are supposedly distant roadmap features in a relatively advanced state in internal builds. All we can hope for is that the apparent difficulty of KSP 2’s engineering challenges is surmountable to the point where they can deliver the ambitious, performant game that was promised. However, the reasons for skepticism are obvious. In other words, yes, I agree with @Lyneira.

Respect.

I think it’s pretty clear that the language of the rules are intentionally vague so as to allow for discretion of Steam on a case-by-case basis.