chefsbrian

Bit unusual to be a six-monther instead of a one to three year deal, but there's dozens of plausible explanations ranging from "Thats what we had the spare budget for in the org stack that inherited KSP2" to "We just need it to go long enough for a new org structure to properly inherit it later" to "in six months a decision about the future will have been made" to "In six months the new studio will take it over". Either way, the fact someone did it means someone both has the authority and care to do so, whether by explicit decree or by the cost being so marginal that it was easier to ask for forgiveness on the expense incurred than to risk asking forgiveness for losing the forum.

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.

Only things it really confirms is that I was completely wrong about everyone getting the boot and them just having a CI line into a steam depot (For distribution to local testers, nothing beats that ease). Everything else is still speculation, no real way to tell how many people were involved, for how long, or how old some of the work was before getting integrated. But I will speculate that removal of the launcher might be more optimistic than not - Private Division itself hasn't been axed yet, its still theoretically PD's game (And Star Theories) game until someone else takes explicit control, regardless of whether the org still exists - My old Sierra games still say Sierra Entertainment. So there is slim possibility that the launcher going away is indicative that there is positive movement towards it not being theirs anymore explicitly. I won't hold my hopes up, I can't imagine a competent company who'd dip their hands into this molten slag of a mid-development project, but still, the thoughts tickling the back of my mind.

Unfortunately, this is terrible financial sense. "We can throw money into a negative return bin by taking it away from a successful project" is how you end up with studio closures in the first place with everything hinging on "GTA6 needs to make more money then GTAV made in an entire lifetime of live service" which is just a huge company wide gamble. They're in this position in the first place in no small part because huge amounts of revenue were shoveled into other Take2 projects that didn't work out. The greatest example of this would be Embracer - Buying up companies and greenlighting big game projects left right and center, while setting up a major billion dollar revenue windfall - Only for that windfall to fail to materialize last minute, and blowing up the company. Not to mention, $140m is an insane budget to have put forward for a game like this in the first place. The industry estimates for GTAV's development costs were around $135m. That doesn't account for inflation of course, and its also fair to point out that the insane marketing campaign for that game nearly doubled the total budget, but I think it makes the point well enough even with its shortcomings, especially with the KSP2 marketing campaign being one or two videos per year, a youtuber event, and a roadmap graphic. Even in modern times, $140m is the ballpark development and marketing budget for stuff like Immortals of Aveum. Now that game did fail, but you can also look at that game being complete and functional - it failed because it was a mid idea, not because it was underfunded or undercooked. It'd be unrealistic to expect KSP2 to reach GTAV's $8 Billion USD lifetime revenue , and frankly it was unrealistic to expect KSP2 to work out on $140m at all, because unlike GTAV, KSP2 is not the kind of game most people want to play. If KSP2 was really given a AAA budget for a niche game it was already being set up for failure regardless of the development team issues.

As far as I'm aware, these apply to criminal charges leading to injury or loss of life, not "We couldn't finish the product". If the burden of expectation was this high on entertainment products, nobody would make anything - You could be sued for making a mediocre movie, or sued for releasing Suicide Squad. I struggle to see any situation in which an entertainment product could be held to that standard. If a publisher could get sued for not babysitting the developers of every project, you'd never see publishing houses take any chances. When it comes to a civil case about this product, you'd effectively have to prove to a court that a reasonable customer was not aware that there was a risk of the project failing - A very difficult claim right out the gate when the storefront prominently displays the usual Early Access Warnings, when there has been a raft of high profile early access flops both past and future. Its not enough to argue that a customer could have ignored the store page entirely and never heard of early access in their life, the bar is "Reasonable Customer", which is generally considered to include "Basic Familiarity with market" and "Reads the product pages". If you pass that bar, then you need to prove (And actually prove, not assert) that the product failure was deliberate mishandling and malice beyond what might reasonably be considered in the normal failure of a product or project. IE, you'd effectively be hoping against hope that you find during discovery that Nate kept a log of every bad decision made on the project and every bad justification that was given with full awareness that they were bad. If discovery turns up that the team put a good faith effort into building the product, that Take2 put a good faith effort into funding the project, and it simply didn't work out due to market realities, then that's that, its over. And unfortunately, the evidence is exactly that. Take2 via Private Division funded the game for years, to a fairly significant sum of developers, and only started pushing to see a return years later with the EA push - after providing additional resources and time to deliver on a scope expansion pitched by the team (Important detail as this indicates faith in the project, a malicious project wouldn't have bothered) to try and meet market expectations. They then gave it a good period of time to prove its wings, before a combination of evidently poor sales, poor reception, and poor progress joined with current market realities of expensive capital and declining revenues across entertainment, causing the company to pursue a wide ranging and market-reasonable reduction project. It'll be extremely hard to argue that KSP2 specifically was a malicious, mishandled project when they axed multiple projects and studios that all appeared to be underperforming, and now look to be axing an entire label that fit under the same problem space. The project simply lacks that single critical obvious malice failure moment that makes it irrefutable that they intended a bad or scammy outcome. Its absolutely possible to argue some widespread connection or conspiracy element, but you need evidence, not conjecture. Believe me, I wouldn't mind if the opportunities were better, but the reality is that no sane court is going to hold a videogame to Criminal Trial standards based off "The games unfinished, and they stopped developing it when they told us that was a thing that could happen".

Nonsense, I'll never criticize someone for taking a stance and standing by principles - I'll only ever do so if they attempt to harass or bully me or others into doing the same. I won't go so far as to say I'm giving Take2 the boot, but I'm definitely giving anything EA from any of their publishing efforts a hard pass, they lost that priviledge in my eyes. I'd also say no day-one buys of any of their games, but that's a bit hollow because I'm already doing that for every major publisher at this point, EA or not. Studios have repeatedly promised that they'll release first and fix it later, then never really fix it, so now I give it a couple weeks. Already hurt Take2 that way with one of their games, Homeworld 3 - Seems pretty meh, needs a lotta work, and Take2 owns Gearbox now. Fight your fight my dude, and remember, you don't need a big coordinated anything to make things happen - A thousand lone wolves is just as many sales lost as a thousand-strong single point, and has the advantage of not even bringing PR to their failures that they can try and spin into a blame game. If what you're doing is right, others will follow naturally, and it'll work out in the end.

Before science, I held the position that if the game wasn't in a stable place with a meaty science system update before the one year anniversary, that I considered the project to be seriously troubled. Science was lackluster, and the game was still very unstable leading into February. That's the closest I came, but even then I was operating closer to "they will struggle to deliver anything good, mods will need to save the game" and not "Take2 initiates a RUD with the entire indie publisher label". So while I wish I could say I saw it, for ego if nothing else, I really can't claim as much.

While there's no harm in asking steam about an improbable refund, I would advise against spamming them with endless requests for the same thing after they've been rejected. If you get to the human layer and they say no, then you should probably stop. They can, and will, flag accounts as malicious refunders if they feel that you're abusing the system, and harassing their staff to try and change an outcome they have no control over is one of those criteria that can get you flagged. Steam doesn't have access to PD's bank accounts to shovel out on a whim - Part of the 14 day window is that steam still has your money and is actually able to give it back. Months or even a year later, PD long since walked off with it and Steam doesn't have anything to give you. Mass ineligible refund requests also don't trigger steam to do anything, and I'd imagine if for some reason Gabe took personal interest in this situation, that anything discussed between the two is confidential. Steam isn't going to stroll out and somehow force PD to tell us anything or do anything or act on anything, this isn't some good vs evil situation where we "win". We bought a product with an attached promise that they would try to add more to it, attempts were made to add more to the product, development stopped as it didn't work out. No different than all the failed MOBA's and hero shooters over the years that launched with ten years of content plan, delivered two seasons, then went into maintenance mode because it didn't work out. Buyer beware doesn't mean PD was justified in axing things, or that any of the bad development of the last year was somehow ok or acceptable, but it does mean that as consumers we were provided the tools to know this was a risk, and the bad outcome came up. There's no entity that has a responsibility at this point to somehow make us whole, and the consequences of these actions will be on Take2 and its subsidiaries reputations, and we all know that the average consumer isn't going to draw a link between this game and the next PD early access title.

Please do, bring us back to the days when we had feature updates and content releases to talk about

This back and forth discussion is actually exactly what the creative director is supposed to resolve - not just "do we need a part for this" or any of the other implications of docking vs automation, but the root of this comes to a very fundamental question I've seen constantly torpedo people talking about how to play KSP1. If you play KSP1 purely Vanilla, then the game is equal parts a simple rocket design game, with a flight simulator aspect and a mission planning aspect. These three elements mostly share equal weight in the balance of what a player is 'expected' to do. But once you start modding KSP1, its extremely easy to start shifting it so the game is primarily a rocket design and mission planning game, with a weak emphasis on the flight. Whether that's through abdicating flight responsibilities with tools like Mechjeb, or integrating them into mission planning and ship design with those programmable flight computer mods, or just making them less relevant with advanced parts and distant targets, like with the outer planets and Near Future propulsion - Your specific flight reactions become far less relevant than your careful trajectory planning and designing a rocket who's nuclear pulse drive doesn't melt during the prolonged burn. These are fundamentally very different ways to experience the game, where a player who prefers to engage with spaceflight as an equal partner to the systems will think everyone else is cheating themselves of half the fun, while the automation player who just wants to put together his mothership to go execute a meticulously planned and designed grand tour thinks the spaceflight player is just being stubborn and missing the 'good part' of the game. Neither play is wrong, of course, but its two very different design spaces. In a simple polish up of KSP1 to make KSP2, the problem wouldn't exist, its the same equidistant approach. But colonies and interstellar change this gameplay design equation heavily. You are now putting far more emphasis into the things that aren't the ship flight. Do you continue to promote ship flight as much of a manual hands on process at all time as before, at the risk of preventing more players from engaging with the entirely new systems? Or do you take the same systematized approach that colonies and orbital assembly promotes, moving more weight off hands on flight and towards design and tooling? I feel like Nate never showed a clear understanding of this design problem, or any potential solutions for it. And my simplest evidence for it would be his approval of Wobbly Rockets. Wobbly Rockets are 110% a space flight challenge and problem. There's no real engineering or mission design solution to them, nothing colonies or advanced parts or anything else would have done to help it out, just straight player piloting, literally. At the same time, we were being told of automated cargo routes for moving materials between sites once you've made the flight. One is an extremely hands on, experience every wild moment yourself design approach, the other is an extremely systematized, play it safe to maximize efficiency style approach. These don't mesh well, and the fact that Nate continued to actively defend it when people were disappointed shows that he was both aware of it, and seemingly completely ignorant to its wider design implications. That's a 100% creative designer decision point right there, how and why you expect the player to engage most with the gameworld, with a known problem space stretching back into the original game and its community discussions, and Nate somehow just didn't seem to give it any thought at all. The docking autopilot argument is just a downstream thread of not knowing what systems are pillars and which systems are branches to the game.

At this point, all I want from a future sequel is a finished game. There's no realistic scenario in which I consider giving them a cent otherwise now. I've backed a lot of early access, and I will continue to do so in the future, but this franchise has now burnt that trust and it ain't coming back.