PDCWolf

"Early Access" is not a free pass to publish whatever. Early Access is for games that are still in the oven, yes, but when they already propose a solid foundation to build upon, which KSP2 fails at due to using broken unity systems and KSP1 leftovers. Bugs on EA are expected of the features that are added as a result of laid plans or community input. Foundational bugs like KSP2 has point to the game being raw, and being forced into EA. See point 1. KSP2 fails to comply with basic EA features you describe: Private bugtracking means the community has no input besides what Nate happens to read, or a big enough ruckus, also EA games are not supposed to be unplayable for most people. I'm talking both bugs and performance here. A release is when the game is at its capture and retention peak, and only targeting 3% of the Steam userbase is laughable. This points to 2. EA is supposed to be for fast paced updates and experimentation. Private bugtracking, Private QA (what did I pay for?), and long updates are also in violation of the spirit of EA. EA IS the point where criticism should be, as it matters most and has the higher chance of steering the game in the right direction. Now that we're clear on EA. Let's address performance: Performance is unjustified. This game has higher requirements than recent AAA releases whilst having nothing to show for it. Graphics are subpar, pairing a cartoony style with aggressive pop-in and laughable render distance. Most particle effects are not properly instantiated and eat away at hardware, terrain is the literal same buggy imported mess from KSP1 and hacked further to produce the current terrain, killing performance for little gain on looks. Saying that Parallax looks the same as KSP2 is disingenuous at best, much worse if you get the full combo of Parallax + Scatterer + EVE, and so on, surpassing KSP2 graphics whilst still having like triple the frames. They effed up, all we can do as a community is provide our input in it. Some people write up on the forums, others leave negative reviews, others have refunded the game. Others like me have done all 3.

No. Since 1999, videogames have become the most popular medium, bigger than movies and music, combined. Highest selling games from '99 barely broke 10 million sales. Minecraft to date has sold 238 million copies. That's a 183% increase in sales. Inflation is not only offset by how big the medium has gotten, it's beaten. Further on, you need to remember that digital distribution has cheapened production costs (whilst we stopped getting cheaper digital editions) Remember when games where cheaper on steam than disc? I remember. Edit for sources. Revenue growth in $B from resetEra. All I want is clarity, pretty much the same that's needed with all their comms. "Multiplayer is [at this point], [this is still left to do], so we expect it'll be here somewhere around [date]". I'm sure their design document is full of ideas for creation, design, implementation, or already in testing, and posting lose images and statements doesn't help someone pinpoint at which point they are. Collision works? Great. Does it work on a realistic use case or you haven't gotten that already? You're showing me a synchronized use case, but you talked about being able to do both sync'd and desync'd, have you done that yet or is that still not a thing? Clarity, transparency, compromise.

You need to contrast those statements against theirs. We've been told (and now "shown") that multiplayer is a thing, and is working. However, you need to take into consideration that the robustness required of the system is not the same on the example showed, versus possible real uses. For my experience, it is vital that I'm able to use multiplayer to build massive craft in a collaborative manner with other players, for example. The images shown do nothing to ensure that multiplayer (and collisions) "work" in those environments. Now, you could say I'm getting ahead of myself asking for Multiplayer to be close to finished when the game clearly isn't. To justify this I'll tell you I'm only answering to their official statements on multiplayer, where they mention it's already designed, implemented, and now shown "working". Why the difference between their "working" and my "working working"? Because their statements suggest the latter, whilst these new pictures suggest the former. Are these just the first tests? Then that should be clearly spelled out, lest we end up with another "NOT REAL GAMEPLAY" type discussion again.

UI: This is needed badly. The UI has a nice palette, but the design and UX sucks, along with being overly bloated, and oversized. Glad you've already taken notice of this. Pricing: Yikes. You're already charging $50 with plans to increase price, and the suspicion of DLC. You're overstepping the line. Knowing this data now (since I've already refunded), you just lost me as a 1.0 client. I'll wait for a steep sale since I have to wait years anyways. Camera: In KSP1 you could click the mousewheel to pan, and alt-scroll to change FOV. Can we get easy controls like those instead of occupying the entire numpad? Since we're here, the VAB camera needs some UX work too. Multiplayer: I'll eat my words that it is not a thing. However, it is still worrying to see the most basic low-part vehicles, right on the ground, without anything special like docking, plus a still image doesn't tell a tenth of the story when it comes to multiplayer. I wanna see multiplayer working with vehicles like the ones you show on the Duna challenge, which is a much more realistic scenario than goofing around on the KSC STUFF YOU DIDN'T ADDRESS: Performance: You need to come out with this already. What are your targets, how much more can you (or plan to) squeeze out? And no, I'm not talking about disabling stuff and calling it "optimization". Visuals: Is what we currently have really the target level of detail / artistic view for the game? Multiport-Docking: Irredeemably, 100%, broken. Pls Fix.

You missed a key bit: We're forced to "stack" things because that's how the game was designed, whilst also submitted to Unity's crappy joint system. Rockets in real life are only a stack of parts designed specifically for specs and weights and to work only with eachother. In KSP you stack generalist parts that themselves abstract a ton of stuff and nowhere do they present structural strength stats other than an arbitrary node size and whatever Unity's doing behind the scenes between them. Wobble in KSP has zero to do with the wobble of anything in real life, and much less the entire design process of a real life rocket. Much like them talking about multiplayer lmao.

Here: Life support confirmed not a thing. From what it looks like right now, we all know as much about multiplayer as the devs let on: "it'll be this or that but we can't talk". The fact they don't even have a proper blueprint they can share yet, compared to (for example) how much they talk about colonies and science, is pretty much all you need to know. Multiplayer at the moment is probably not more than a talking point in meetings with shareholders or T2. We're talking rockets. We're only making rockets as a stack of parts because that's literally how the game lets us do it. Punishing the player with unrealistic mechanics because of a building method they have no agency over is not correct. Neither does wobble correctly abstract real-life structural issues with rockets. Also, the stack of books and alphabets blocks are not supposed to compose a single structure, or joined by a joint system. What I said is the release didn't even have a hint of being QA'd, so anyone would have a problem believing their statement was real. Ah yes, we both take it into consideration in our day to day interstellar trips. Considering there'll be no FTL, their interstellar scale is exceedingly small, meaning realistic stellar motion is irrelevant, intangible. Of course, they could probably make stars move laughingly fast, as that's the only possibility to justify bothering with stellar motion: Everything being extremely small, and extremely close. Procedural radiators and solar panels are a good start, procedural wings was quite a leap in the right direction. All I ask is they give the same treatment to tanks, to solve both wobble and most shape limitations. Yes, and from what they've talked about, I speculate they're just being roundabout about copying KSP1's career, minus funds. However, you are the first person I see that isn't expecting career to evolve in KSP2. I'm only going off about what Nate answered here. When asked about colonies, he mentioned a new VAB-like building with an interface to build stuff off of, that answer leaves off a lot of important bits, which is where my questioning comes in.

Trade Routes: Apart from in-situ construction, one of the other answers removes all uses for this feature and colonies. Since there's no life support, there's no need for colonies other than a small local launchpad. I'm guessing (from yet another answer) that you'll need to ship X material to Y colony to be able to fabricate Z part. Absolutely, mind-numbingly boring. It's an unappealing logistics layer that completely misses all points of real space colonization, and almost all challenges of it as well (heavily dependent on how shipping logistics end up being handled). Do I need to just plop some parts down and establish a magic route, or will I be challenged to design my own logistics ships on further implementations? Multiplayer: Schrodinger's feature. One answer says it is not synchronized, another says it can be both, and a lot of speculation which is not really far from what I've been reading on these forums for years. Also, they can't talk about it. Yeah, you can't talk about things that don't exist. Wobbly Rockets: Hot garbage take. Wobble is not realistic, not fun, and is only a feature of Unity's incredibly crap default joint system made for prototypes and indies. Playing the game as dev / QA: Nobody would believe that. The results of that are visible. Moving solar systems: Dumb. Even on chemical-rocket scale interstellar travel (centuries to millennia from one star to another), systems would move so little, even the ones furthest away from the center, that modelling such a thing as a half-way is a waste of resources. Either do it right or don't, the middle ground doesn't work either way. Procedural parts: If you really want to leave wobbliness to rocket stacks, then you know you yourself are forcing players into wobbly rockets by limiting their part choices. Make everything procedural so we can avoid wobble. Science/Career: "There will be a system that rewards you for doing missions", "Gather science points, redeem them for parts". So, the only real change is tuning the planetary modifier for KSC? The rest is just a KSP1 ripoff? god. Colony building: So, I have this space rocket game, but buildings are built magically off an interface and not shipping + docking? BRUH. IVAs: The fact you're not culling high res meshes from outside to not waste performance is pretty yikes. Also, those models are unoptimized, as much excuses as you want to throw at people. Robotics/Propellers/Rotors/Hinges Post 1.0: I thought one of the goals of KSP2 was to start off with a better foundation and a more complete game. This answer only tells me that KSP1 will be a much better product for about a decade. Thanks to the community for wasting like half the questions on irrelevant stuff.

Your initial paragraph makes sense, until you add in the fact that PQS being limited was something we knew at least 10 years ago. Whilst hardware has improved significantly, terrain remains the biggest source of frame delay in KSP1 (if you don't push partcounts). This has been known for a long time, as the last update to PQS was on 0.20, in the form of "streamlining", and even then it was still easily noticeable that terrain and the PQS system in general was a problem. The appearance of mods like Kopernicus (and back then some non Kopernicus planet mods) made this even more painfully evident.

You do realize the graphics department hasn't moved much since the original videos from 2019, right? So it's been at least 3 years this system hasn't been ready, and their PQS Hacks (PQS+? lol) has been in place.

Whilst one can most certainly appreciate any work being done, I can't believe the stuff I'm reading. PQS being limited garbage was known before KSP1 got to 1.0, and then y'all went and wasted time on it only to obviously have to throw it away? plus this gives much more credibility that this EA was just a tech demo propped up on the toothpicks that are both Unity's default systems and KSP1 leftovers. Big yikes. Further on, you spend multiple paragraphs talking about optimization only to end up removing graphics effects as the only real "optimization" coming up in a tangible timeframe. Sad to know as well that the current visual style is actually accepted as good. It is vomitive, riddled with excessive bloom, dissonant brightness and overall sickening to the eyes. All of this, slated for the "next few updates", when we're struggling to get the first one out, with a very thin fix list and zero new features. Meanwhile KSP1 gets volumetric clouds at a negligible performance impact.

Big oof for him, big yikes for the future of KSP2, big LMAO for his petty corpo message. Having my man promise a performant and complete product only for 2 years later deliver a broken, unplayable and almost hopeless mess is pretty much a valid reason for getting the boot, as much as he wants to hide under "cutting costs". Yeah, costs are being cut because you didn't do your job right. As a technical director, the state of the game is almost your direct responsibility, as you guide, shape and direct the team you yourself built. This is why peppy, happy go lucky PR during a disaster never works, all you do is wear the clown makeup. Say it like it is and the players will support you, tell me everything is "okay" to my face when your game is unplayable and I'm refunding and sitting back to enjoy the show.

My man, things have been "okay" for the past 3 years as you "were tracking to deliver the full game that was promised", and now we're here with a sub 1 million sales release, completely broken, unplayable, almost hopeless (save for people here in the forums lol), not even beating the 11 years old previous installment, and now layoffs. Please rethink your PR strategy, it's clearly been catastrophic to your franchise, specially considering your position.

Nah, that's just the same 10 people club that are chronically in the forums thinking they know some magic context they refuse to mention whilst calling you names under the mod's eyes. Most people look at the steam store page, and then at the website, which is where the posts were deleted from. This forum is barely a wasteland of the same 100 people and has been that way for the past 5 or so years since the KSP1 modding scene fell off.

Hail. That's such a cop-out lmao. "It's still on the website", yeah sure it is buddy, just not on the front facing part of it anymore, only where the diehard fans are. I'm not saying they're evil, I'm saying they clearly realized they uhm... have "overstated" a lot in their dev blogs and it'll be better to take some of that stuff off a place that was 1 button away from the front page. A risk of the job. That's why you hire PR people to manage the communication with your fanbase. I fail to see any further context other than Paul describing his job, which he hasn't yet fulfilled based on what's publicly available. KSP2 is not performant, stable, neither did it arrive on time. The second quote has even tighter context, as it directly states their view for the launch product, which they've completely failed to meet. Saying "muh context" without providing what you understand as the context doesn't make a very clear argument, specially because I took the job of quoting the previous and following sentence and not just the highlighted bit.

Well, deleting them from the front page makes a lot of sense when you can read stuff like these from them (#4 specifically):

You guys do realize I linked web.archive URLs that link to kerbalspaceprogram.com and not forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com The dev diaries were deleted off the website, which I clarified was my mistake.

My bad, not threads, but website blogs: You can check here: https://web.archive.org/web/20211214032627/https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/dev-diaries/developer-insights-4-ksp2-engineering/ https://web.archive.org/web/20211021083259/https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/dev-diaries/introducing-intercept-games/ They deleted the dev diaries off the website completely IIRC.

Faster updates keep people playing. This is specially true once you take into account the obvious lack of play-testing that went into the release: you're only making us wait more to still not address important stuff, and with a dubious track record for play-testing so you know this "polished" update will be broken as hell. Remember: You had to delete your own threads saying you were making us wait for a performant and polished release.

Colonies and pretty much any other system (stock or modded) that can give a concrete "endgame" goal for all the other systems in place.

My point came from the idea that SQUAD guys had a passion project, and as much passion as PD might have, T2 has the reins, which is the most probable reason we're seeing another stealth delay with EA after 3 delays already. T2 needs money, needs it now, and it doesn't matter how many super passionate people including squad employees are in PD, they're releasing now. And when the time comes, that they have to choose between fixing bugs and developing some new feature to attract sales again, they will follow what T2 tells them, which is probably the later.

The product's been 3 years in the oven longer than originally planned, and it's coming out with half the features missing, into the only market that allows messy launches and lackluster products. Early Access at this point is just a hidden fourth delay, with the politeness of at least letting the customers spend some money on a promise of a game before we all age and forget about it. It is definitely ROI related pressure. I thought that was because T2 bought the rights to a franchise with intent of exploiting them, not out of the goodness of their hearts to create an allegedly bugless, well built platform. If anything, the still broken DLC and the launcher surprise is proof of T2 more than likely wanting another live-service or DLC/microtransaction-able cash cow. I'm not against a company wanting to make money, but if you think T2 is gonna do a better job at bugfixing than SQUAD... yeah no, we have proof that this is definitely not the case. This is not me defending SQUAD either, KSP1 still has bugs carried from very old versions, due to their spaghetti code and complete disregard for anything but rushing a release, BUT, they had some internal passion that PD just can't, on account of being a hired studio and having to do what T2 tells them (like releasing a long overdue product that's still barely half done into EA just to get some quick cash)

Ayy, out of all possible moves, you add a launcher? Exactly what the game you left broken and abandoned was needing. Good thing you fixed the important stuff: Breaking Grounds robotic position bug on quickload -oh wait, you didn't fix that. Clamp-o-tron control point pointing the wrong direction sometimes -nope, not that either. 1.11 swim bug -Not that one either Procedural part refunds -Still a nope. Docking port rotation being unusable -Nay And so much more, but no, instead I get to waste my storage and resources on an extra step for launching a game, just so that you can also advertise to me and maybe harvest my data more as well. Completely agree. My review was already negative for other matters but I will definitely add this now.

Great way to prove you have no idea how a Starmap app works. Download stellarium, then download all star catalogues for it, watch as it becomes unusable and anything that is not a star is still just a png, if it doesn't outright crash at all. Even if you get it to run, all star catalogues amount to about 120 million stars... bit short of the 100 to 400 Billion in the galaxy. That's the problem with magic sky arguments: You can't base them in reality, you first have to constrain them. Do you want a HUD? realistically you'd have spaceship-centered orientation aids, not a sextant with stars. Do you want AR windows for a pretty view on your spaceship? realistically you'd have a non zoomable png with a constrained magnitude limit, useless for orientation but it'd maybe look pretty. If it's a geosphere with a png, you lose dynamic range, quality, etc. Just look at the OG skybox on KSP1, this also goes against what the OP asked for, and what you were trying to justify as well. We've moved the goalposts from justifying magic eyes with realism, to justify magic eyes at all. In fact, what originally mattered to me entering this conversation is misrepresenting reality to justify magic eyes. You want magic eyes? Great, that's your subjective taste, but reality can't possibly justify magic eyes. Considering the circles this discussion is going into, I'm out, at least we've left realism where it should be: not justifying magic starry skies.

Bruh 3 years of delay to release in to Early Access . [snip] Let's hope the EA cycle of this release goes much better than the previous, and devs don't actively work against the community. Honestly best wishes, not sure I'll join the EA if you still plan to charge full price for it.

No one mentioned anything about the point you're both getting defensive about. You tried to justify something with realism, when reality is incapable of justifying either of your approaches. Whether it helps or doesn't, or you like one way or another, was never part of my point, I only wanted to clear up that realism can't be a justification for that stuff, because reality doesn't allow it, neither does near/far future sci-fi. My smartphone isn't magic, neither will my smartphone waste decades rendering a super-post-processed true color condensation of weeks of data just to "orient me", not how it works, that's why maps is a simplification of flat images, or even better, just roads on a white background, for example.