PDCWolf

[snip] I don't know how to disagree any harder with the idea that I'm criticizing a yet non existent final product, or calling the developers inept or incapable or whatever words a lot of people insist on putting in my mouth. Here's my list of concerns. You'll easily understand that I do not mind so much the deadlines themselves being missed, but rather the lack of general communication, including the lack of provided reasons for the delays, along with the rest of the concerns. [snip] I'll probably have to repeat myself even more as people quote me to respond to a single nitpick instead of the whole argument: I do not believe the devs are inept or incompetent, I do not believe there's a conspiracy, I firmly believe they've left a lot of unclear stuff hanging around. It's not weird that people believing and hoping are ok with waiting in silence and people who like to see stuff with their eyes are not. I like tangible, shareable and analizable evidence [snip] plus once you add that list of concerns I have, it should at least be understandable for me to be... concerned, and wanting answers. Lastly, since somehow I also need to spell this out: I'm not demanding answers, they can chose to completely ignore me, other posters that agree, and controversies raised on their socials, discord and the subreddit. They have complete freedom to do that. I'll just rest easy knowing there's evidence of complaints existing somewhere. This however does not make me a megalomaniac, misanthropic, problem customer, emotionally unstable, attention hungry, a troll, or whatever else has been implied along this thread.

Yeah, I saw this live and loved it, though that article only makes marginal mentions of the game, other articles make a better job of explaining to the common person: https://www.space.com/boeing-starliner-oft2-kerbal-jeb-zerog-indicator I had problems finding more articles about this to be honest, only found the one you linked and this one... Edit: As I find more information... neither T2 nor PD were involved in this, just a crew member doing a very lucky selection. [snip]

[snip] Criticism is not abuse, and criticizing the visible outcomes of the development/marketing processes is not criticizing the final product, specially since it's now been well established that there's at least justification for the concerns presented. Also working as a community manager is not something I would qualify as working "on software", if anything your job seems closer to my field than development, heck if we're playing the credentials game I'd gladly fly my modder banner as well, but contrary to what you imply, I do know the differences.

I've only repeated myself extensively because people would quote me, cite only one of the many complaints (because they most times quote a post in which I'm responding to somebody else) and then I have to add all the other complaints again to complete the idea that there's many complaints, not just the one about dev times, not just the one about delays, and so on. If I hadn't desired at all to engage in discussion I'd have just made that list as my first post and then disappear from the thread. This is a really good effort to clarify the different argumentative lines going on in the thread, appreciate it.

Once again, misunderstood. Me (we?) do not have demands, we're voicing our concerns and asking for answers as to put the concerns to rest, one way or the other. They don't need to answer to me, I'm not a megalomaniac that thinks himself the god of how PR should be done, nor do I think myself the voice of those with concerns, even if a couple other posters, and you at some point, have found common ground. There's a big, distinguishable line between voicing concerns, discussing them with people that share them or don't, and me or others treating them as demands and the only way to move forward. My feedback has been provided, and further from that I've only answered to comments that quote me to discuss either the concerns, methods to post them, other discussion, etc. Though some posters do prefer to just nitpick one or two of the weak ones to dismiss the whole thing, which is why I find myself in the need to repeat myself, and now summarize on a list just so that I stop being misquoted or nitpicked. No you haven't, you've given good, positive, hopeful messages of how the development might be going, and why they might do things one way or the other, or why you prefer to wait in silence. You must understand that the only final answers I care about here, outside of discussion obviously, is from official channels. Back when some mods from here (not sure if I can name them), Squad's PR and then some devs (and mod devs!) used to visit 4chan, they'd go there because even through the constant degenerate posting, insults, etc, they could still scrape good feedback (which shaped the game more than you could imagine). If you won't take what's possibly good feedback just because of the form, or because it is hidden under a pile of poop, then you shouldn't be the one taking feedback. Also since we're all flashing credentials to justify our points (or rather, just the "you don't know about software dev" card), I've only worked public facing positions in my life: Teacher, radio show host, and now director of a public organization, and that's mostly what's formed my idea of public communications and why the way they're engaging in it is subpar trash.

[snip] Since you so insist, here's a full list that I can think of by myself, without looking at other posters: No communication for months, followed by a delay announcement with 0 explanation other than basic PR wording. Last real hands on gameplay dates from 2019, game's been in the oven for almost 3 extra full years since they were able to show gameplay, but were never able to show complete gameplay again. Only progress traceable to video evidence is new interstellar parts in 3 years of cumulative delays. Insistence on trying to pass asset mounts as gameplay (led to outrage that ended on them including "not real gameplay" notice). Just because it should be its own point: 4 unexplained delays. Failure to address broken promises: Breaking Ground unusable, Multiplayer for KSP1. They could do this outside whatever PR strategy they employ for KSP2 Repeated failure to address multiple points in this list which exist before the delay and thus have been addressable since much longer than their previous updates. Zero effort on community growth. Failure to answer other questions, unrelated to development, in their social media (heck, there's even some good ones in their last twitter post for example, reddit too). I'm sure other posters have their own concerns not included in this list.

I think I said this in another thread: How can I expect my concerns to be addressed if I don't voice them? Waiting is a good thing, waiting in silence isn't. Glad corporations have honest people like you defending them from the consumer. What would they do.

It's not evidence of progress either, the only way to disprove absence is with evidence of the contrary.

Wrong take. In fact, I believe this was discussed about 10 pages ago. KSP2 might have no customers yet, but there's a literal forum filled with decade-old franchise customers ready to spend. Plus, it'd be really dumb if they enable preorders tomorrow, and I could go and put money in the thing just to prove you wrong. Another vomitive take is calling criticizers naysayers, we want the product, we believe in the product coming out eventually, of course we're going to purchase it if it fulfills our checkmarks. This is why no PR person ever comes out talking about haters or naysayers, they know better than you. Further on, purchasing the game doesn't prove anybody right or wrong as, again, we're here because we want the product and want it to reach release to play the thing. I don't think there's a single person in the thread or the forums that came to excrements on KSP2 or it's developers/development to then not purchase the game, unless something terrible happens. Worst case scenario, 3 delays have made people forget about the game, but that's a different tale. KNOW is absolutely the wrong word. For me to know the development is going, I need proof, otherwise I'd be believing the development keeps going. I like to believe it keeps being developed. Of course nothing bad would happen to us if KSP2 gets cancelled, and people sacked, etc, but that's not the point, once again, we want to purchase the game, that's why we're here!. Asking are we there yet between adults would incite a mature response about distance to the target or if we plan to stop along the way for gas/bathroom, we're talking among adults here, as much as you might want to resort to rhetorical name calling. Plus, it's not been 5 minutes, it's been months since the last video, and now it's the previous response to the "are we there" plus some extra months, so good thing we keep asking. Prospective customers should be treated as customers, business 101. This is specially true when prospective customers are knocking at your door cash in hand. Good thing at least one person in the thread understands.

20 years ago games had a level of polish that's been on constant decline, I was getting free shareware off magazines so good that would warrant a trip back to the store the next day to purchase the full game, would know since not only was I alive, I've also got a decent collection of both shareware CDs from mags, and actual game CDs from the time. Every new release requires at least a day 0 patch, let alone multiple hotfixes, or 7 years of delivering missing "features" for NMS. You assume I'm worked up because you only see me post here. That's fine, but remember that everybody here is human, with their own life outside what they post in the forum. I'm trying to have a decent discussion and only responding to the people that specifically quote me, or feel like they dodged me, except for my first post, but obviously I wouldn't be here if I waited to be quoted on any given topic before posting, now would I. KSP2 is only one of many releases I'm following, and this forum is again one of multiple places I participate online. I'm sure this is true for a lot of people. Being a NMS player, you're going the wrong avenue here. That game started as a scam and took them almost 6 years to implement poodle-depth systems to call their game feature complete. Thankfully KSP development has bothered to go a little deeper than that on every individual system. Further on, the internet went absolutely wild on them, and they got investigated for false advertising, barely clearing the investigation (which focused on its steam page alone). If anything, No Man's Sky is a perfect example of how not to work a pre-launch media campaign. I do know the importance of consumers, we're the ones that are gonna give them the profits, some of us even qualify as franchise consumers, being here for a decade now. I'm sure they're addressing all of these delays and feedback internally, would be great if they said something useful externally though as, as I said before, the only thing going on right now is they've not enabled preorders, which is still an avenue of questioning in itself, but gives them a good couple points at least. We can't argue or discuss anything if people list issues and concerns and people just jump on them as they're some part of negativistic sect and call "gobbledigook" on them proceeding to look away and ignoring. I've had more fruitful discussions with flat earthers at this point.

I'm gonna group these two comments in a single answer: I feel you can't say "ok you're doing great" to these type of news without consciously deciding to overlook the bad stuff, this is why I call it "blind praise", you're literally closing your eyes and typing something positive. Not only do those kind of comments bring absolutely nothing of value to a discussion (this is a forum, we're here to discuss stuff), but at this point you've gotta overlook so much stuff to just say something like that that we can't just agree it is "interpreting facts in a different way". We can discuss how much we know about what could be going on, we can discuss their track record as publishers, developers, etc. We can discuss a lot of stuff around this, because the more this crap happens, the more of it piles up to discuss, and the tighter you need to make your field of view to overlook it. However, we're in the official forums, this is the specific place to overlook the bad and just blindly praise, to the point where saying "concerns are not growing" when you keep your eyes in here is outright disingenuous. Every single piece of KSP2 news brings more and more negative comments on the subreddit, steam discussions, and other places, and yes, 2 or 3 people in the congregation of blind praisers. As for "People can be happy that the devs are making progress", they need to show that progress first before we can talk about progress, otherwise we go back to blind praise. Since you like lists: Meeting accusations of lying with silence only rises culpability. This is true since one reaches its 5th birthday, and for anything from breaking a plate to a police interrogation. Being out of touch with your fans is a thing, specially on a formed and very specific franchise such as KSP. Multiplayer for example has been massively asked for, then promised, and now demanded since it's been promised. Back in the day they tried to hide behind "people not wanting resources" using fake stats (google hits for "ksp resources" proved wrong by people posting "ksp kethane" metrics, among other stuff), obviously they had to backpedal and now we have ISRU in game. You know full well the complete extent of what you release to the public. If the outrage is about A and you release information about B, you're damn well gonna get a deserved mention of A all over the place, to the point of whatever new you brought to the table about B being completely drowned out. Last point is just you thinking everyone is ignorant of how gamedev works, something a lot of people like to do, even in this thread alone. People were right to call out early footage not being a pre-alpha, and some of it not even being real gameplay, and thus once again we had another huge backpedal on footage subjects (no more "pre-alpha" gameplay, just mounted scenes to render assets) and a nice warning of "not real gameplay" on some footage with included motion. That list sounds like the publisher needs to get new PR people onboard, somebody that knows what they're doing.

[snip] ~3 years from release date 1, ~2 years from release date 2, ~1 year from release date 3. This was made in very bad faith, and I'm really sad it's caught on as an argument. Starfield, Elden Ring, etc, come from companies that have decades in the business pumping out game after game on multiple franchises. Sure, a lot of them might be not good games, and one of those companies certainly has built up a reputation (or already had it if you didn't fall for the skyrim fad). KSP2 comes from one of the worse publishers out there in terms of how they treat their products and community, and KSP2 itself is being developed by a studio formed by poaching, boat jumpers, and what remains of the original people that rushed KSP1 to release just to "prove people wrong" that the game wasn't green. This is like the first comment I quoted but worse, you decided to completely ignore the counter argument, the concerns, and the evidence. The fact that they've already broken promises (other than the release date, you can completely ignore that) is real, that's why the people who've really been paying attention to what's going on have actual concerns and not just blind praise and eternal patience. You might feel like ignoring all of what's happened, other people do not. Further on, their PR/CM keep completely failing to address these concerns, which only makes said concerns grow.

I think we'd both agree that deadlines are missed for a reason and not just sport or tradition. That's as much as I have implied. No. We've not been told anything about features not mentioned since 2019. Other than that, we've been told a lot of things that fall into the same hole as Breaking Ground robotics fixes and multiplayer for KSP1. People have already been brought to buy stuff under promises that were not fulfilled. Now sure, we're in the official forum, if anything this is the one place were people would gladly overlook that. Further on, there's another lot of things we've been told, but if it was just for saying stuff, I've got a crate of snake oil that needs a buyer. There's already reasons to not trust mouth-only reports, to not trust delays, and to not trust any release date. Whether you want to look the other way is up to you, but at least don't try to sound as if complaints and doubts are unfounded.

I never said they were incompetent, my words were that a deadline missed means there's a problem, either in the process or its management, you don't miss deadlines just because "you wanna make it good", as making it good is part of the plan for which the deadline was set in the first place, and that deadline usually includes some level of tolerance for imponderables as well.

This just circles back to my initial statements: If they needed 3 extra years, why set a 2020 release on 2019? If all of that is still under development, what were they going to release back then? if all of that is new, why hasn't the scope moved from the 2019 PAX statements? Only transparency solves these questions. And again, right now the only saving grace is that they haven't enabled preorders in the past 3 years, which still opens up the question of them doing that because they knew they needed 3 years instead of 5 months to release.

I'd advise you to be realistic: Seeing models on terrain is literally nothing other than models on a terrain, the same goes for models of reactors and other components. The only hands on gameplay we've seen is the couple seconds of footage inside the vab and then launching and staging, and nothing more. Anything further is either heavily implied "gameplay", or straight up asset renders, or some pretty flow diagrams and written up stuff, but that's not even the game part of gameplay. Part of your comment is answered with what I wrote above. I'm trying to be grounded here and not assume stuff that hasn't been explicitly shown. If you see a building on a planet, you're going to relate it to colonies, sure, but you didn't see anything at work other than the model of a building sitting on a terrain, the only thing you can take for granted about the "colony system" is models on the ground the rest is mostly talk and not-game media from devblogs. For the rest of your comment, the only pressure directly put on Valve outside memes was 2 fans outside their building holding a sign, which relates back to what I already said: They don't give a crap about what you or me or anyone else "demands", the community and "toxic gamers" have no power to force a studio to rush a game, and that myth should be put down next to the one about delays making good games. These "toxic gamers" made it so difficult to release stuff that Valve has released 3 or 4 games since (including one from their flagship IP), lots of hardware, their own linux based operating system, and so on. Why you'd choose to pick valve and ignore the rest of the examples is probably because it looked like the easiest nitpick, but no, they've kept releasing games (except those on development hell lol), and ignoring fan "demands".

There's 0 proof that the scope has expanded. Their current promises still respect all of the original PAX statements. Also that people that would gladly spend 200 dollars on 4 independent DLCs they can get as mods of the first game for free exists only in this forum, in these threads, which have limited participation. Do not kid yourself to think KSP2 is big outside anywhere but the forum. Already the $60 tag will definitely alienate anyone who's not a fan of the first game, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot charging that. You fail to understand that we, as community, have 0 power over them. This same dumb thinking plagued Cyberpunk's criticism: "It would be better if you hadn't rushed them to release it". That's bullcrap, if there was anyone rushing them to release it was shareholders, whom they promised release dividends to, other than that they don't give 2 cents about a group of 100 people in a thread begging for a release date inside their lifespan. On the other hand, we know full well what happens when you don't rush them, and that is you never ever get a product, kinda like Valve's shenanigans, kinda like DNF, Yandere Sim (lmao), Dead Island 2, Star Citizen, and again, a very long list to keep naming. Which makes me come back to: The only thing that ever changed in trailers from PAX 2019 to Episode 5 in 2022 is new looking interstellar parts, which to their detriment is a change that happens to coincide with them incorporating the dev from the interstellar mod. State your position as it is: faith, almost religious level too.

We need to stop perpetuating the myth that delay = better product. We don't know the current state of the product, or the reason behind the delay. Spore, Crackdown, Duke Nukem, FFXV, FFVII Remake, Cyberpunk, latest Watch_Dogs, Halo Infinite, Hydroneer 2.0, Diablo 3, and a longer yet list, that's still growing too. The quote so often thrown around was made at a time where you couldn't just live-patch your game after release, so not only doesn't apply because it's just outdated (and didn't apply much back then either), it also doesn't apply because the industry works in a fundamentally different way. Delay = The promised product at best. On the average case, it means they needed extra time to release whatever broken, mandatory 0 day patch product they already planned to release.

Because it tries to imply that a game set for release in 5 months from announced can be delayed 3 years only over studio reshuffles. The first delay, as I said, I'd understand, Covid pushed the game back a year whilst they sorted the Covid+PI mess. The rest remains unexplained, he said it himself that way too: Which is 100% their fault for not being transparent. I'll not believe any "passion project" copout with T2 behind it.

Let's assume you're right. You'd be saying that Covid turned the last 5 months needed to prepare the game for release into a full year, that's more than reasonable if it actually went down that way. Now, where do the other 2 years come from? 5 months to release means the game was very close to ready, they'd be probably on the beta stage on that timeframe. Further on, let's assume these 3 years have been super good for the development of the game, and they've made strides... They've literally shown nothing to account for that. This is either a very dumb choice (they need the goodwill obtained from showing progress) or there's really little to no progress made. These sets of assumptions, yours and mine, only open up more avenues to question them, instead of doing the opposite. This is why communication is important, and transparency even more so. A vague video with less than 3 minutes of pre-alpha "gameplay" and literal blender renders every 5 months is nothing, disrespectful even when you look back at the stuff from PAX2019 and see the only new thing they have to show is parts. It is made specially disrespectful if it still ends up in a delay, as you clearly weren't communicating the important stuff, and then the delay is announced with a copypasted "we want to make it good" discourse we've all heard before from many developers, and some from products that still ended in disaster. If anything, I'll give them credit for not enabling preorders diminished by them not doing so on the basis of knowing the release date was unrealistic.

For that to be true, they'd have to backpedal on what's been the main business policy of the videogames industry: Sending early review/PR copies to big media outlets and youtubers. KSP has been doing this since the "public test branch" outrage. This leaves the average consumer only 2 options: Read and spoil yourself, or be forced to a blind purchase. Now, it is pretty much a given that gaming is the only market where the informed consumer is beaten and looked down on, but listen to this: People that want to make a blind purchase should be the ones forcing themselves to, and not forcing everyone else to do as them. Deadlines are there for a reason: They clamp on the scope and feature creep, and stop a product from entering development hell. Deadlines are a needed part of a project, otherwise nothing would get done in a timely manner, under the excuse of just "making it better" in whatever minuscule way. Whilst you might be a "glass half full" person and agile evangelist, evidence and precedent would be against you in this particular case, specially more modern evidence. A good job is planned, and executed. A good deadline includes leeway for imponderables inside that ideal good job. This is their 3rd (4th?) deadline change, pointing to a problem somewhere in the process, or in the management of said process. Not only that, you're assuming with no proof that the deadlines were ever unrealistic: It is important to remember that the game was going to launch almost 3 years ago, with a date being published in 2019, before Covid. How a pre-Covid date got screwed over by Covid and pushed back 2 years, then another, and now 3 months, for a product that was ready to release 4 to 5 months from announced back in 2019 is probably something that's going to be analyzed over and over again by their internal teams to never make this same mess again, specially having the fresh example of CDPR losing like 60% of it's shares value over a similar incident.

This means nothing, and every day there's more and more examples that time in the oven does not translate to a better result, or even the originally promised result. Delays don't signify the developer "wanting to do a better job", they signify the developer doing a bad job, where they haven't been able to meet goals inside deadlines. This is probably one of the worst myths plaguing the consumer side in the modern videogame market. Being right should feel good, but in these cases it just hurts. If the only thing you ever managed to show in your trailers, spanning from PAX 2019 all the way to the very last "Episode 5" is new parts (and that comes only after you hired the interstellar mod dev), then progress was really not there. Further on, a 3 month delay does not fit development tasks, so either: They're delaying to finish post production, which would also mean they've chosen to not show anything useful on their media. OR There's yet another delay coming further on, but they're going the cyberpunk route of announcing "PR manageable" small delays, instead of incurring the obvious penalty of announcing the real delay needed. Now, that's not much of a prediction, either they release or they delay, obviously. But just to pick a side, I'm placing myself under number 2.

Not a screenshot. Rocks are unevenly distributed, there's artistic ambient lighting (in-engine would be global, not specific to the Kerbals). It might be a game-asset based scene with brush-applied rocks (which would explain the weird rockless patches), but I can bet it's not in game. Edit: The cinematic trailer from 2019 does not include in-game footage. Maybe in-engine, but not in-game.

Hard to hear about KSP2 when all your storefronts have "STARFIELD" in big letters plastered on art from the game, which has been the case for most recent big game launches. This on top of KSP2 probably going for a 60 USD tag would be really suboptimal, even if people did find out about the game in this alleged "space game craze" that starfield may create, most would probably still be out of budget for a second 60 USD drop, even more if Starfield comes with some sort of deluxe edition or season pass or whatever. They need to make it it's own thing, using T2 money to make the storefront theirs, and not go hoping for the falloff of whatever Bethesda does.

They do not compete on genre, but they will be competing for attention, budget, drive space, advertising, and storefront space, and believe me starfield will win all of those.