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77+ I mean, there's 177 points left to go to negative and 33 more to positive, and at least three more positive than negative posters within the last few hours, so here's to the winning side. Bottoms up.

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Fanboyism is the only possible reason why this is even a matter of debate... Nobody complains about being able to see how much ammo you have left in a shooter game, which is honestly one of the best comparisons I can imagine for this kind of situation (you know exactly how many bullets/how much fuel it'll take to achieve your objective ideally, but a large number of things can go wrong). Nobody complains about being able to see how many blocks you have left to place or materials you have left to use in Minecraft and its ilk. Nobody complains about precise status gauges in any other game where you have to carry out complex operations to a high degree of precision. Denying players delta-V information doesn't make anything more "fun" unless you enjoy calculating the same answers over and over again or crashing over and over again. Failure that shows you in a meaningful way what went wrong and what to do better next time is fine. Being forced to sit through failure after failure because you don't have handy access to the information that would make it easy to overcome this and actually get to do the things I want ingame - that is not meaningful failure and it is not interesting failure. Wanting to force this kind of mindless tedium on other players is just another way of saying "I enjoy making cool games tedious, frustrating, and inaccessible to people who would like to play the game but don't have the time, patience, or energy to put up with the hoops I'd like them to be forced to jump through." It's a punishment for not being a fanboy

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Yes... that's the point, actually...... You juxtapose some satirical headline into the thread alongside the actual ridiculous thing (the OP's video) to show by similarity that the actual thing is as ridiculous as the satire..............

87 Sylvia

I'll belt out some worldbuilding threads that I'm not particularly attached to: 1. Inhabited planet/large moon that becomes captured into the liquid-water zone of a brown dwarf passing through the solar system, by extraordinary fortune. It's far enough away from its new sun that much of its surface freezes, save for a band roughly across the tropics and equator. Large-scale extinction/environmental disruption occurs additionally due to redness of the new light source. 2. A rogue planetary body with large concentrations of uranium salts readily accessible in the crust. Without visible-UV spectrum light from a sun to power photosynthesis, life arises in the sea in the form of chemosynthetic and thermosynthetic organisms and eventually finds its way to uranium (or maybe it starts here). Lifeforms eventually evolve to sequester uranium into a shielded chamber and apparatus constructed via gradual deposits, a sort of "coral reef" reactor. Heat generated in this way fosters a variety of thermosynthetic organisms who dig into the outer walls of the nuclear reef, taking advantage of the thermal gradient between the reef and the flowing water around it. I assume this is a super-Earth. 3. Life arises from self-organizing dust structures in plasma in space orbiting a rogue planet, forming an ecosystem-belt (maybe sphere?) that encircles the world below. I assume a rogue planet here because it seems like a place where dust might be more efficiently collected together, hence possibly a denser and more vibrant ecosystem of inorganic life than in interplanetary/interstellar space; and because I am not sure if a sun would disrupt the disparate lifeforms.

Well, yes. I'm also criticizing SQUAD's contribution as well. While the tools provided do allow for interesting constructions when put together, they are still built off of largely the same movement engine and model of gameplay balance as they were in 0.18. Yes, aerodynamics and re-entry heat have been added, but in lieu of an economic system that makes it matter to your hardware and Kerbals outside of "you don't have money for new missions", what do they constitute other than a slightly new flavor of flight control that was already implemented by modders years before the official release? And on that note I'm not saying that we should rely solely on modders for content - very much the opposite. I do like the functionality provided by the full release versus the demo, but that doesn't really have much to do with any changed functionality or gameplay. It is nice to have a wider range of parts to construct things which are aesthetically interesting and different, and which I could share with friends and other players. It's also nice to have rockets fly a bit more realistically than before, with aerodynamics and so on. But the difference between 0.18 and the full game, in terms of my actual gameplay enjoyment, is mostly the fact that I have to pay for one and not the other. I like being able to land on Laythe versus having only the Mun to target, but the gameplay between the two is not really significantly enough changed that I'd want to pay $40 for it. Having access to larger SLS parts doesn't do anything except make certain missions somewhat easier. Having access to more science parts just means I have more things to click to make my science go up. Having access to aircraft parts is nice for about 30 minutes before I get bored by the bland terrain. More realistic aerodynamics mostly means I have to bend my flight trajectories a little more carefully, in lieu of anything else to do in the air. And so on. As I've said, these things are all nice if you intensely appreciate carving out your own challenges, but I still don't think that that makes them very large improvements in quality. That is why I say that most of the interesting content in KSP (that is, the things that you as a player interact with in the course of gameplay) comes from player contributions.

You're right, of course, and I have edited the relevant section. Still, the game has been out for four years. The range of content implemented in the game remains about the same now as it was in version 0.18. SQUAD has a consistent team of 10+ developers? And something like 16 "legacy" team members that they've gone through. They've implemented a few limiters that don't interact with each other - money limits spacecraft construction, science limits parts availability, Kerbal skill limits what stabilization capabilities are locked or unlocked. And they have given the game some degree of graphical overhaul, which is neat - but it's very limited. Planets are still almost exactly as bland as they were before up close. Bugtesting is great, but every release still comes with some gamebreaking bug or weird inconsistency in the way parts are implemented that awaits another release or three in order to iron out. It's been four years... and they seem to have progressed very little from their initial models. Version 0.19 in March 2013 was the last major update to parts, with the addition of rover wheels. The last major update to Career mode was in 0.24, in July 2014, with the implementation of Funds, Contracts, and Reputation. Since those two dates the game's mechanics have remained largely unchanged in their respective areas, aside from various tweaks and new parts. Three years for parts and two for Career. They can't claim bugtesting as the reason why things are being drawn out for this long and say that stock KSP remains more bug-free than modded KSP when the game continues to break down every time they introduce some small degree of new functionality. I don't really see mods messing up my game much more than the game messes itself up.

I mean, I'm not saying I want to forego rocket construction (although having more stock vehicles that actually do something would be nice). Procedurally generated vehicles, if anything, would be my jam - procedurally generated NPC actors that you can interact with/work with. But the point I was getting at is that people are billing KSP as this enormously complex game so full of content that it is entirely due to Squad that they are pouring hundreds of hours of time into the game. What I am saying is that SQUAD has significantly less to do with this than is being assumed. What SQUAD does is provide you with is maybe 100 rocket parts and a small assortment of planets with extremely bland surfaces, such that you can barely tell any landing site from any other, and none of them are particularly interesting to look at. They set the orbital trajectories of the planets, and the heights of their atmospheres, if any. And they provide a movement engine for your rockets to go places in. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing in itself. But it's not a very large amount of content, it's definitely not a management sim game, and I definitely would sympathize with people not wanting to pay $40 for it. The vast majority of the content that makes the game interesting is the ships and vehicles players build by themselves. And if you want to do anything particularly interesting with them aside from "go places" or "dock", you have to download mods created by other players. And yes, I agree that a large part of "the point" of games like these is for players to build their own spacecraft/vehicles/whatever! I love that aspect! But SQUAD provides absolutely nothing to do with your creations aside from going places or docking. And while learning how to do this is difficult/complicated, that isn't due to SQUAD's careful game design, it's due to physics! That's what I wanted to get at, in essence. So again, I'd definitely sympathize with someone not wanting to pay a 2x jacked up price for a very small update to a game that is largely featureless if you consider SQUAD's contribution, and thus the portion of the gameplay that you are paying money for. People are talking about the game as though the hundreds of hours of enjoyment they got out of it were entirely due to SQUAD, but I don't think that this is true. It's like saying that you would be okay with paying someone else $500 for a ball peen hammer because of all the things that you can build with it using your own time and your own effort. ---- ---- So with that said, yes, I would personally like there to be some kind of management aspect. The most defining aspect of management/strategy sim games, IMO, is that you have a lot of units (spacecraft modules, people, etc) that can interact with each other to produce novel situations that you must deal with. KSP right now has none of that. Your Kerbals don't serve any purpose other than to be cute impediments to your spacecraft's stabilization system. Your mining bases don't serve any purpose other than to refuel your ships to keep going somewhere else. What I'd like is at least something akin to the Kolonization mod, where you have to manage resources across multiple long-term bases. But in the long run I'd like to actually have to... manage a space program. Give Kerbals some degree of AI so they can do things without your direct command. Let Kerbals control and auto-manage spacecraft systems, and let them have basic personalities so they can be happy or satisfied or angry and they can help you out or revolt against their dire condition and mess things up. Make it so that you actually have to take care of the health of your crew, and plan strategies for exploring and inhabiting the solar system that involve more than one spacecraft at a time without requiring you to constantly, exhuastingly switch around between ships and fiddle intricately with the flight controls of every single unit for minutes or hours at a time. Don't force me to build gigantic space stations piece by piece all by myself! There is nothing interesting to me about launching a payload to Kerbin orbit or rebuilding a booster for the fifteen thousandth time. Let me focus on building and launching the actual modules that do interesting things. Make science actually interesting. There's nothing fun to me about clicking on some boxes to make a money counter called "science" tick up. Implement some actual science in the game if you're going to have it at all - collecting and recording observational data, and using it to make decisions that actually matter to your space program. Let my scientists refine their analyses and models of planetary/asteroid surfaces based on spectrometric data and sample collection missions. Let me share my results easily with other players so we can cross-reference and compare techniques. To make this interesting, I think to some extent the planets and asteroids will need to be seed-generated so that no two players can use the exact same results, but they will use the same techniques. Make management actually interesting, too. Counting money isn't strategy in itself. There needs to be deadlines (or at least people to keep from dying), there needs to be catches, there needs to be NPC characters or factions who can actually get angry with you if you mess things up, and impose or threaten restrictions on you in a way that's meaningful to the other aspects of gameplay and the requirements of your hardware and your Kerbals. And in the long run, let your Kerbals and space habitats develop their own dynamic community/economy and squabble amongst themselves. You don't need to simulate down to nose hairs - you can have Kerbals with a handful of stats and personality traits, and that's sufficient to allow for a wide range of interesting interactions. Likewise with habitats and economic interaction. Flying rockets is nice, but I don't just want to fly rockets to places where there's nothing else to do. This isn't to say that the way KSP is right now is necessarily bad or unfun. But once you've exhausted the challenge supplied by Kepler and Newton, there is not much else to it unless you want to do self-imposed challenges. I've squeezed out about all the fun I can from that. I don't think people ought to have to pay $40 for that experience when the game has already sold so well.

Just because you got your money's worth doesn't mean it's absolutely necessary that other people accept a nearly doubly jacked-up price tag on a still-unfinished product (no matter what they crank the version number up to), especially when the primary reason that you get so much playtime out of the game is because you and your fellow players put massive amounts of work and time into creating and testing almost everything you can interact with aside from the buildings and rather featureless planets. Squad doesn't build the Eve ascent vehicles and Mun bases, they give you the tools. And while credit and payment is due to the developers who made that happen, it doesn't change the fact that it's still a somewhat basic game on the whole of it. I find that this is true of most indie "sandbox" games advertised for their openness to creativity: the catch being that YOU (and/or the modding community) have to create most of the actually functioning content yourself. Most of the value of the gameplay, as it currently stands, arises from a few challenges that are pretty simple when you get right down to them: You have an large distance to cross, which means you have to spend a certain amount of delta-V. Sometimes you need to be able to brake in an atmosphere. Sometimes you need to be able to land on a planet. You have a relatively small assortment of parts, and they are fragile in unintuitive ways. And you have to design a vehicle to overcome the rather basic challenges the game puts in front of you. (To land on Laythe and return to Kerbin you need a heatshield and ~4K delta-V, and you need to accurately perform 2 liftoffs and 2 transfer/injection burns.) "Career mode", in its current state, adds one additional imposition: You have to do these things to make money in order to keep doing these same things. Which is not really an imposition that adds much to gameplay, since it doesn't actually change anything that you have to do. It just means that you have to headache more over it. The long-delayed implementation of stock mining was one step toward a better overall game experience, and what I've seen of the recent UI overhauls is, too. But it's still not really a finished game, for what purports to be a "space program simulator" inspired by Simcity and Tycoon games. It, like Minecraft, is more of a game engine that allows people to build the game they want to play in it, so long as they are willing to contribute a large amount of effort. The challenges of semi-realistic space travel are new enough to most people that this doesn't get boring for a while (and in this regard I think that KSP is lucky to have been one of the first such games), but once you have learned to land anywhere and understand basic principles of spaceflight, the game quickly becomes boring if you don't have the drive to pour endless hours of time into construction. (On that note, building spacecraft remains entirely too finicky, fiddly, and inaccurate to retain my interest for very long. No, having a ruler doesn't make the game "boring" and "overcomplicated", it makes it easier for me to enjoy. Minecraft has a ruler: it handles everything in discrete blocks of 1 unit cubed side length, making it easy to tell how everything fits together. I don't see Minecraft fans, particularly Redstone engineers, complaining about having a precise building system! Or Robocraft fans, for that matter - or virtually any other sandbox game that allows you to construct your own vehicles from scratch.)