chefsbrian

Nope, pretty much any project that tries to touch anything that comes out of it would get sued into oblivion not just by Take2, but by the various middleware that's included in the project under license. Even if Take2 plays dumb and for some reason does this, everyone else down the stack won't because that's also their livelyhoods that just leaked. Corporate acquisitions are always hell, and in gaming its particularly bad due to the sheer nebulous value of IP and the way IP's rolled in and out of various hands like crazy over the decades. It wouldn't be unrealistic for it to take 3-6 months just to itemize and clarify what's actually being sold to a potential buyer, much less the actual buyer negotiations, and that's assuming they already have interested buyers. T2's not in a position where they are going to feel any serious financial pressure to offload PD right this second, their investors are eagerly looking towards GTA6 and that, barring absolute catastrophe, will probably keep them happy for a couple years. They can wait until they find the "right" deal, the IP and names don't cost much to hold onto.

If possible, I recommend applying for a refund if the game is still not working for you. Studio's shuttered, and there's still be no successor developer given the game, and its likely there never will be at this point.

Well if we're hyping/pitching ideas, the whole 'expanded' premise of KSP2 to me was always "Make an actual kerbal civilization". And that's where I'd go. The biggest controversial change I'd probably make is that vehicle assembly might resemble KSP, vehicle disassembly would not - I'd be baking things down into singular physics objects at launch/dock/undock to try and sidestep a lot of the worst of the physics problems. I'd also entirely be ok with a somewhat reduced simulation accuracy - my goal would be verisimilitude, not realism, it should feel like its working realistically, even if that means cutting out counter intuitive but realistic aspects. Structural failure may split up a craft into fragments, but they're non-recoverable or functional, and 'little' things like an antenna popping off wouldn't be in the scope. Ship works until it don't, then it comes apart permanently and preferably in a glorious fashion. While this doesn't make the space simulation vastly easier, it does make it vastly less error prone from edgecase physics schenanigans. Taking a functionally single-entity physics object and moving it off/on rails isn't going to incurr phantom forces the way a joint and spring system will, and only has to content with the usual floating point inaccuracies over time. Rather than breaking new ground, we've reduced the ship flying portion of the mechanics to mostly a known problem space, people have done this before. What I would want to expand more is the ship mechanics in so far as what parts actually 'do'. Early tech, modern era stuff would be very similar to KSP - multifunction tin cans, mostly barrels of boom with a few pieces slapped on for utility purpose. Short lived, single mission type craft. But once you start doing the interplanetary civ thing, with orbital stations and a moon colony and whatnot, I'd want to see the new unlocked parts open the realm for semi-permanent ships, and the design considerations they have - crew comfort, cargo, zero-g exclusive design sensibilities, etc. Think less Saturn 5, more Expanse. I wouldn't want this to be onerous, but the design goal would be to tie your colonial/civilization infrastructure into being useful for these new permanent ships, and limiting them at the same time. That orbital colony isn't just a shipyard with people in a can, but berthing for these new ships. They might not have the long legs to go across the solar system just yet, so hopping world to world and expanding to meet the needs of your ships would become a significant aspect. Mission planning and ship design for general mission categories would become more important than autostrut and "will that bend in half and explode at full thrust". We'd lose the flight sim design considerations, and gain new ones. I'd do this because space flight, dock, assembly etc is in pursuit of creating craft to go do things under a "build a civilization" concept - the thing you do with a ship is the part of interest, and the less places that the game development/design can fail in regards to that, the better. I'd instead focus on trying to make the science and expansion of the kerbal civilization more involved - Research should be a protracted thing, even with equipment, and bring some design considerations to the ships beyond slapping a cylinder on and calling it a day. I'd absolutely steal colonies and resources as KSP2 hinted at them being, although I'd probably drop flying supply routes in favor of a more abstracted system in the background, consuming resources to provide logistical support. Supporting the homeworld with its new little colonies, and using both together to expand and build up would be the main loop. Increasing your off-world population and returning new materials to the homeworld would drive unlocking new experiments to perform, experiments would drive a science system that yields new parts and colony options, and the cycle feeds itself. Locationally rare resources would make this cycle naturally encourage expanding out, and deeper techs with more exotic materials would unlock new parts for ships and colonies alike, under a tree design as opposed to a linear one - the fissile materials on the local moon would open up nuclear drives and power sources, but if you ignored them and dead headed to the nearest world to unlock fusion, you'd still be able to just use that tree. Having both could unlock intermingled options. I'm not sure I'd want to tackle interstellar at first, but if I did, I'd actually be inclined to abstract it somewhat. Rather than having all the star systems physically there at all times, you have the active one with the active ship, and everything else on-rails, ticking up to finish simulating when they're loaded back in. For the engine literate, I'd effectively treat them as separate scenes or scene data sets, with only one actually existing at a given time. Fly past some far out point in a given system, and its an interstellar transition, abstracting a prolonged maneuver to allow entry into the system you were flying at, at a velocity and time based on your ships capabilities and choices - if you have the fuel, you can do a full 50/50 burn and come out the other side as fast as you came in, or you could spend longer coasting, etc. If your ship isn't capable of reaching the star, or you flew really off target, etc, you are lost to the void. The main relevant element here is it completely leaves the simulated volume for that trip. This would all be highly experimental and I have no idea what would work or be fun in any high confidence. Its just my observation that over simulation here doesn't actually give us anything meaningful from a gameplay perspective, but incurs a lot of headaches. The long term goal here is that the player is building ships, potentially with more freedom on a part to part level due to reduced simulation accuracy, but a potential I could carry on with my thoughts for colonies and resources at a finer level of detail, but its late. I think what I would summarize is that if I sat down and decided to show Take2 how its done, I'd honestly not really be making a Space Flight Simulator. I'd be making a Space Civ Simulator, with flight as the main method of interacting with the world. Very different design goals at the end of the day, because I don't think full flight and vehicle simulation and the gameplay incentives/loop of a civ builder are actually the path to a coherent gameplay experience. We already saw cracks in this in KSP2 where there were some big nebulous questions about the onerous nature of setting up mining or logistics in a flight sim to facilitate colonies, and the solutions they proposed were to simply abstract away the flight sim. Rather than using that as a bandaid solution in the edge cases, I'd just embrace it as the actual solution to the problem from the get go, and design from that starting point immediately.

There's been no depot activity in any of the steam repo's since July 1st - if someones doing something, its solo and they're not pushing anything to any of their usual channels. The only other publicly tracked changes to anything visible on the steam is the steady downwards tick of the overall review score, which tracked to 37% back on Monday. This guy was just trolling for jesters, become a weird steam forum cultural thing to compete to appear to be the stupidest forum member to collect them. Popular ways include defending the seemingly indefensible, posting deliberate controversy, etc.

Probably for the best. There's not a single thing that he can say that wouldn't, at best, be a mass ban generating event. At worst, the sort of thing that ends up with people having federal agents knocking at doors asking about certain statements posters made. In return for all that, we'd get nothing. There is nothing he can say, nothing he can promise - both in the literal sense and in the authority sense. Nobody will believe a word he has to say, nobody will believe any apologies he makes are genuine, and he no longer has any authority or power to act upon any promises or statements he may want to make. For better or for worse, Nate is poison in this community and franchise now. He can probably never touch KSP again in his career, and quite likely can't touch the space genre as a whole from any leadership or authority position. Too much bad blood that people actually know of, words spread inside the general niche, and the likely same story goes for any early access or indie projects. He'd have to wander off into sports, or shooters, all mainstream stuff under major publishers where barely anyone knows about people like creative directors, to avoid damaging projects he's associated with.

Even the great spaghettifier has had to come to terms with whats happened. Fun Video though

Surprisingly enough, this is likely the bottom of the list and one of the first things that'd be spoken of - because in all likelyhood, none of this was really planned. The story that is, not the NDA's. A lot of these things are left to interpretation and future assessment based on new things that were added, and what the community responds well to. Maybe ideas went around the office, but KSP is extremely far from a narrative game, and the effort involved in that narrative would have been similar. Even games with major narrative bents both have narrative go public when they die, and verifiably have their narratives massively reworked merely months before release - Half Life Episode 3 with Epistle 3 is a great example of the former, and Half Life Alyx is a great known example of the latter. Odds are the extend of the story content was some art direction notes about how to design the easter eggs you can find, to avoid one being a gold statue and the next being something looking like a crystal computing array outta stargate. NDA's in practice (Theoretically they can say anything) generally cover material, quantifiable things - Specs, internal reviews and documentation, so forth. Trying to apply them to off the cuff discussion of the sorts that likely encompassed the story is difficult to actually enforce in reality. The likely biggest thing that'd keep it from leaking isn't going to be legal documents or expectations though, but just the fact that it was probably Nate who has the closest to ideas for it, and then a few bits of easter egg banter in the office. Everyone else probably just knows "We didn't have anything yet".

I look forward to the Shadowzone video on this AMA

Depending on the level of Trust you put in Take Two Interactive, this is correct. If you believe them more than you believe your own eyes, then KSP2 will continue to receive updates and the studio has not been closed. If you are more inclined to believe your eyes and the reporting of outside parties looking in, claimed sources etc, then Take Two Interactive axed everyone in Intercept Games and is looking to sell off the entirety of Private Division, the publisher arm KSP2 was under. This is with them also entertaining offers for individual IP's such as KSP2, and everything under the PD label is open to offer, it seems. Private Division has yet to manage to release both a critical and commercial hit, and instead has a history of middling games with middling sales, or critical hits with commercial failures. With overbudget millstones like KSP2 around their neck, this final outcome isn't hugely surprising. The speed and complete lack of grace by which it has occurred is surprising, along with the deliberate fog of war of pretending absolutely nothing is wrong.

Its more likely than not that the forums stay up. Put simply, the forum costs are a margin of a margin of a cost, but provide a great metric to point to while they try and sell KSP or PD as a whole. Even if it just sits for years in their backlog of IP that they're open to proposals for, the KSP property is worth millions, and keeping the forums likely costs in the realm of a few thousand a year. Invision licensing isn't all that expensive (on the corporate scale of things - my dayjob pays a thousand dollars a year per person for just one platform a couple hundred people use that isn't even revenue generating or customer facing, a few grand on forum software is nothing), and Take-Two's already going to be well invested in cloud and hosting infrastructure from the rest of their business, so the guts of the forum become a menial occasional task to deal with. It wouldn't be surprising if some of the issues we've been experiencing lately was their team shuffling us off onto the cheapest, lowest tier hosting they got - The forums are valuable as a sales tool, but nobody is gonna be selling it on "and the forums run buttery smooth". The cold bean counter calculus says that unless the KSP IP is deemed unsellable in perpetuity and never worth resurrecting, that the forums are a worthwhile continued expense. The only reason to shut it down would be a serious breach/perception damage (Not people being salty and mods removing stuff, but like a hack plastering adult content everywhere) or similar outside of normal expectations disaster.

No, but considering he was lead everything in the earliest days of KSP, then the lead for the KSP team right up to its full release, and then repeated that for the entirety of Kithack with a sub-ten person team, the prognosis of assumptions is good. I don't need to speak much about KSP's wider perception and reception, and Kithack has been very well received by its admittedly small audience - Harvester seems to have a knack for success in niches. And atop of that, he either has a now repeated history of bringing on the right talent for the job to make a good game, or he himself is the right talent for the job to make a good game. Outside of pure solo devs its almost impossible to separate the two, but outside of nerd fights on the deepest corners of the internet, the functional difference is of little relevance, because both lead to good games being made. Nothing anyone makes is guaranteed to turn out well, but so far Harvester has the history of results to back up the idea that his own return to the space flight genre won't be a disaster. Contrast this to Nate, who outside of the obvious and most recent events, has at best a spotty history whenever in a more leadership role in the industry, and I'm not surprised people are jumping for joy at the mere prospect of Harvester being interested in returning to the space.

Curious to see where this'll go, but I'll be completely honest that I'm not super interested at first pass. Not that the game would be poorly built or vaporware or anything like that, but I'm a systems driven player and Harvester is a very sandbox and self-motivation designer. I prefer games where I've got concrete goals to work towards, and relatively defined methods to advance, develop or exploit to get to that point, while Harvester likes giving you a pile of toys to find the fun in. Part of the reason I was excited for KSP2 was that colonies, resource routes and interstellar all indicated they were connecting more systemic elements into the game. I'm sure Harvester will make a good game, he's got quite a few under his belt at this point, but I don't think it'll be the game for me to replace KSP2 with.

Too busy single handedly laying the beat down on a ten billion dollar company for bad RMA service. The fate of KSP2 might come up in passing, but its not really hardware news relevant, and "Another Early Access Title Fails" isn't worth much commentary until more concrete reports of what happened come out at best - and by the time they do, the relevancy might be weak enough that Tech Jesus doesn't give it much time. Unless someone has some nuclear hidden material on what happened, it just "mismanaged project goes over budget, has funding pulled as numbers no longer make sense". The better story honestly is Private Division as a whole possibly going, an entire publisher poofing is more his space.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/simpsonnate/ < You can look for yourself if you have a linkedin account. You can see the activity and bidirectional recommendations at the bottom to confirm its not someone spinning up a brand new account to dance on a mock grave. Difference of values then - Whether Nate was lying to us because he was covering his own butt or willfully or naively covering for others (malicious interpretation) or lying under pressure from an employer (benevolent interpretation) the fact remains he lied to us, in pursuit of ensuring people kept paying for [Edit: Or supporting/believing in, I should add] the product. In the malicious interpretation doing so is just wrong. In the benevolent interpretation, its a case of doing bad unto others at the behest of a malicious entity, presumably to preserve what he had or dreamed. The difference of values simply comes from whether you think that he was justified in lying to others to prevent fiscal consequences to himself from losing/leaving the job. I've made it clear which side I fall on, but sane people can disagree on this at the end of the day, and not be evil or anything for it.

Best of Luck to Nate, but I hope to god your next position isn't a leadership one. You're clearly missing something in that special sauce, and another project or two mentoring under someone with a better grasp of it would probably do you far better than anything else. Probably, but I've learned the hard way not to dismiss the steam depots updating. Last touched two days ago, and they've got a slightly important holiday in murrica this week, so it wouldn't be unrealistic for it to not see a push for a week or two. It'll probably stay dead, but I'll be poking in weekly or so just to see if the needle moves again.