VlonaldKerman

Makes sense.

How difficult would it be to tie visual effects like clouds, rain, etc. to the weather simulation?

With the resounding success of KSP 2, which I can only conclude is full steam ahead given that there has been no communication to the contrary, and the roadmap is still on the Steam page for the game, what does the community want to see in KSP 3? For me, the most important thing will be a functional game with a fundamentally sound engine. But to each their own!

There’s no basis for a lawsuit.

Sorry you're dissapointed by KSP 2. I, too, splurged on a new PC for KSP 2. Right now by far the closest experience to what was promised for KSP 2 remains modded KSP 1.

Nobody is entitled to a refund. Why would they give you a refund? You bought the game at a discount, because of the chance that the game wouldn't get finished. If you are unhappy with the discount, you should not have bought the game.

Wait, which 5 points?

I disagree.

Before the game even came out, it was obvious to me that they were not releasing into EA to get community feedback. My first posts on this forum were partially about this. I concluded that since the game was so buggy they were not at the stage where community input was necessary. Thus it was forced out of EA. Thus they were struggling to meet internal deadlines for an undisclosed reason that had nothing to do with COVID. Thus, the game was in trouble. It does seem like the overall direction of development would have been much better if they had just consulted with people who worked on the code for KSP 1. They would have known that it would be impossible to deliver on the vision for KSP 2 without substantial reworking of the code base. But they were shunned, because T2 didn’t want the game to leak and ruin DLC sales for the first game. Pathetic. When all is said and done, T2 probably has lost tens of millions on this project. So this really isn’t the story of greed- more so a story of incompetence. Competent greedy people would have made better decisions. I feel like at its heart, KSP 2 is a software engineering project, not a traditional video game project. And T2 is not an engineering firm.

Gonna set aside some time and watch this Netflix style. This is exactly the sort of video we need right now. Thank you. It obviously took a lot of work.

It will run about as well as GTA 7.

By not officially shuttering the studio, they are preserving option value. It doesn’t necessarily mean they have any actual plans for it.

I suspect this will be fixed by the time multiplayer comes out.

Top ten moments when a guy didn’t know number ten:

It’s more like you fired all of your employees and sold the building your store is in, but you might let your little brother sell lemonade next summer under the name of your store.

5% is in regards to all T2 employees, not just PD staff. However, I still find his statements puzzling- how can a studio not be shuttered, if its offices are closed, and 70 people were fired, when there were only 70 people working in it? Technically he hasn't said anything wrong, since they are going to "support" KSP 2. But all this needs to be true is one more update coming out. I wouldn't pay attention to curated corporate speak. The numbers don't lie. 70/70 is a pretty big fraction. I dare say it is even close to 100%. Even if it's not 100%, but it's more like 90, any economist will tell you that the limit of X as X approaches 90 is 100, for large values of 90.

I suspect this issue will be fixed by the time the game goes into full release.

This guy called it 11 months ago (timestamp 11:34)- "KSP 2 will definitely be developed for another 12 months, but the game is basically dead."

The KSP “community” is one of the most passionate, engaged fanbases out there, and it was even more so before the KSP 2 phiasco. Its not often you get a video game fandom with so many relatively smart people who like solving problems and, even from a strictly business perspective, disregarding or damaging that is a bad move.

If they have known for a long time that the game is destined for failure, then I agree, they should not have kept it available for purchase. Luckily, even if they did, it seems like not many purchased it after the first month, so they probably swindled very few.

I don't believe we are born with the right to our investments paying off- and an EA title is an inherently speculative purchase. It's not my fault, nor your fault, nor T2's fault if someone doesn't understand that EA's are supposed to be discounted, in part, because there is a risk the game will never actually be finished. Moreover, introducing regulation could kill speculative projects, which some people want! You don't always know if there's a market for your game, and sometimes, launching an EA is a way of increasing market efficiency. It causes more games people want to be developed, at a cheaper average price for game studios, because they don't have to full commit! The problem here is that there is a discrepancy between what people think they value, and what they actually value. In fact, people are willing to pay for games they rationally know may never get completed. That doesn't stop them from being dissapointed if it doesn't pan out, but it would be wrong to say that people are regularly scammed by an EA game. I think minimal rules like this could be okay. But it would have to be used sparingly. And, to my knowledge, things like this already happen, like in the case of "A Day Before" which was an actual scam. However, the line between people being scammed, and wasting their money (which companies are allowed to profit from), is often thin. If they call KSP 2 finished tommorrow, then I agree, there should be refunds. I agree, I just think the devil is in the details. People regularly make bad purchasing decisions, and it's tempting to extend consumer protections too far. Should we refund everyone who's purchased Balance of Nature because it does nothing? No. In fact, I would argue, that by releasing an early access and getting you hyped, I have provided a service. If the game gets cancelled and this happens over and over, and you keep buying, it would seem that you actually value this service in its own right! I think this is actually what often happens. People enjoy hype trains. There's a business model in that, and the fact that people complain when the train ends doesn't make it illegal to sell it to them. What do people actually value about EA games? It's hard to say. Pricing, for instance, around games is ludicrous. Games are more engaging than movies, and cost a fraction of what movies do on a per-hour basis. Realistically, a lot of games could be $150. The point is, Steam in its current form has only existed for like 15 years, the video game market is changing rapidly, no one knows how to price anything. It's a bad idea to introduce regulations at this stage. We should wait 10 years and see if people still fall for the abandonware trap, at a minimum. I think we agree in general, but perhaps we have different setpoints for when to let time take its course, versus introduce new rules. With respect to KSP 2 specifically, I decided a long time ago that I would buy the game, even though I gave it a 50/50 chance at best of being completed. It was still worth it to me. Other people would not have considered this to be worth it, but they thought (in my view, irrationally) that everything was fine and the game was on-track. Now they're dissapointed, and many want to get bailed out of spending $50 over a year ago. I don't think there's any reason, at this stage, to do that. There was certainly no shortage of information to influence their purchasing decision, and there were many people expressing the view that turned out to be (approximately) correct in the end. This is a perfect example of a situation where no one has been scammed. That is, unless they somehow pretend that the game is finished now. THAT would be a false statement.

Am I the only one who thinks there should be no restrictions on EA games, that if EAs from big publishers suck, we shouldn’t buy them? No need to meddle with the market. I think people are willing to pay a relatively small sum (tens of dollars) for the possibility of a good game, and that is why they do. If that’s a problem, take it up with people! They do tend to ruin everything.

The fraction of people liking the game is surprising given the fact that the game has a 24-hour peak of less than 400 concurrent players. My favorite new thing about the game is the music. I also appreciated when they added hit boxes to the parking garage after community demand that was cool of them.

Unfortunately there is a small cost to them doing this, and little discernible benefit. I expect they probably don’t quite know yet- they are probably conducting a review of the code based to determine if the project is salvageable. Or perhaps they are simply preserving option value.

I think there's a "frog in boiling water" phenomenon playing out here. Remember, the game was announced in 2019, slated for a full release in 2020. Throughout its development, devs portrayed each successive delay as simply a "delay" because "excuse." This lead many to believe that at in 2019, the game was in a state that one could reasonably say was a year away from release. Even if it was seemingly two years, or even three, there is simply no explanation for how the game could be in its current state, given this information! This is why many feel "mislead." It is also probably a contributing factor in the project's cancellation- does this often happen to competent dev teams, in your experience? Only three years ago, when the game was delayed, the community unanimously agreed, "take your time, do it right." Our collective headspace was one in which the game would be released in the coming years. Fast forward to now, and we were popping champagne at the devs adding a tech tree and reentry physics into a buggy mess! That's quite the fall, and I'm sure it doesn't play well internally, either. Take Two know that the difference between KSP 2 and modded KSP 1 (KSP 2 was pitched to them) is, ideally, quality of life, stability, and performance. Implementing a modded KSP 1 experience with these three aspects required a ground-up redesign of the game, which is why they decided to go through the rigamarole of starting from scratch. Therefore, the features which actually matter, both to the community, and to whoever is assessing the progress of development inside, ought to be the core internal engineering challenges which the devs face. There is no hard evidence that they have solved any of these problems to a satisfactory extent, four years in. One can easily imagine a bloated, tangled mess of a source code which is probably easier to trash and redo than to fix, and that is simply a bridge too far for corporate. In fact, given the inexplicable events I described above, it is likely that this is the second time they've ended up in the same place, with few or no core problems solved more than 50%, and an indecipherable mess standing in their way. In short, their problems with feature rollout are FAR, FAR worse than, "we said it would take four months, it took eight." We're already at, "we said it would take a year, it's already taken 5, it'll probably take at least 3 more." And the specifics of what is taking so long may well be horrifying. The question is not whether or not they are planned. The question is, will they ever not be missing, without another restart in many areas? And if so, at what cost? Again, this is good, but none of these features require any of the substantial innovations which prompted the game to be made in the first place. When you take what we have, and you subtract what they could have done much more quickly and cheaply but updating KSP 1 and charging those millions of players DLC, you are left with probably less than nothing. By no metric does this qualify as a "success", especially from a business standpoint. If you already have a bowl of pasta, and there is free cheese on the table, and I give you a new pasta with cheese and charge you $50, I would expect you to leave a negative review. Otherwise, maybe I need to start an Italian restaurant! In all likelyhood, the behind-the-curtain of the game is in a poor state, which would explain the lack of communication. After the phiasco that was KSP 2's development thus far, any semi-competent publisher would want to fight the fire. I doubt that there is any honest communication they could give us which would alleviate our concerns. Allow me to introduce you to my friends "Madden" and "Call of Duty". That's directly from Steam, and it's on every Early Access title's store page. We knew what we were buying. And if you didn't... somehow... after all of that... well, I don't know what to tell you. It's pretty clear to most of us. But I digress. <...> So, if the game itself isn't the problem, why did it fail? In my opinion, the community. Us. I actually think its the opposite. Consider the review bombers. At least they bought the game! According to https://steamdb.info/app/954850/charts/ anywhere between 240-564k people bought the game, compared to 5+ million sold of KSP 1. Considering that the KSP fanbase is disproportionately filled with passionate fans who have a tolerance for bugs, many of whom have programming experience themselves, this is probably a dissapointing figure. Moreover, this number hasn't moved much since release. Nobody's buying the game. And I'm glad you're enjoying it and playing it, but you are a part of a vast minority. As of the writing of this post, there are only 199 people in the game on Steam, with the 24-hour peak being 378. If the KSP community, as a whole, was full of people who bought the game and left negative Steam reviews, KSP 2 would have much better figures (units sold, namely) to justify its continued development. Apparently there were about 70 people working on the game in some capacity (including out of office). At any given moment, there was probably one dev for every 20 active players. KSP 2 has received millions in funding from a major publisher with a bottom line. Want to play in the big leagues? You need more than 300 concurrent players. Even by Early Access standards, these are pathetic numbers for a cult-favorite IP with millions of fans. "Early Access" is not a blank cheque for having tons of bugs and sparse features. Consider Manor Lords, developed by a single dude. Or any successful EA title. If I sell you "print("hello world")" for $10 because all the missing features are planned, I'm ripping you off. And, to that point, when a consumer is wondering, "Is this game worth buying" they mostly (rightly) care about the following things: What is in the game Price How long will it take before the game is finished Will it ever get finished? Very little is in the game compared to KSP 1 with free mods. Even less was in the game when it received most of its reviews. The game has taken at least 5 years, and will probably take many more. These facts, combined with several other red flags which I've outlined elsewhere ad nauseum, signal that the odds of the game ever being completed have always been less than 100%. I think a dispassionate look would probably yield a figure closer to 50%, at any given moment. And finally, there is absolutely no excuse for an alpha build (make no mistake, that's what it is and has been) to be $50. Many people understandably expected more from a $50 experience- the price sends a message in itself. Especially to loyal fans who want to trust their beloved franchise. Finally, with regards to expectations set- The devs have repeatedly made misleading, even demonstrably false statements about the nature of the game. I've thought about making a grand compilation of these, and I tried to do so in conjunction with the community here: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/217291-actual-quotes-for-substantiated-arguments-thread/ however the thread was shut down. You can read the thread, and the reasoning for shutting it down, and decide for yourself. Although, if I had to guess, if I compiled every demonstrably false statement (let alone misleading ones), I would probably end up with 10x what's in that thread. There are several interviews on Youtube from 2019-2023 in which Nate Simpson and others make claims about internal builds of the game and other things which are flat out impossible, and it was certainly very dishonest to continuously delay under the pretenses of "COVID" and "we're taking our time to do it right" which was the line for a while. Remember, there was never going to even be an early access, until some time in 2023. I contend that even taking into account material which was released immediately before the EA launch and post-launch, there has been dishonesty at multiple levels. I'm not going to say malicious dishonesty, because I don't know enough. Even supposing, though, that they never truly told a lie, and the state of the EA was clear at the time when people were buying it, it is NOT a fair or "honest" business practice to claim a product will be ready for YEARS, and then announce with little warning that only a prototype will be ready, and days before it goes on-market, reveal that it is barely functional. The EA seller - EA tester relationship is built on trust. Trust that the concerns of the community are being heeded, and trust that the game will eventually be completed. These issues are magnified when the EA is $50, and the company behind the game is a huge one who isn't going to actually run out of money like a small studio might. No rational person would trust that the development of KSP 2 will continue successfully and to the end, while delivering on all of what was promised. Even if you like the devs, and think they care about the game, which I do, their track record is simply not there. And when the communication is as described? You can forget it. \ That's what killed KSP 2. A long, expensive, fraught, unpredictable, dysfunctional development period for a product with a niche market. A total, justified, breakdown of trust between the Dev team and the once enthusiastic, engaged community. Low hundreds of active players. No end in sight. A lack of the technical progress which constituted the impetus for the game's creation in the first place. Not the community, capitalism, greedy executives, or 1,200 bad reviews on a game whose predecessor sold millions of copies, a full 15 months after the products release, and AFTER the announcement that the studio was already shut down.