steveman0

Maybe this is the last stable patch and they'll dump everything else into an unstable patch on a separate steam beta branch for those willing to risk it.

I'd also point out that barring the discovery process revealing some substantial evidence of fraud, you would be at most entitled to compensation reflecting your loss, i.e. the cost of purchase. Even as a class action, after lawyers fees you shouldn't expect more than a small fraction of what you paid for the game. Even if they lumped un a sizable penalty, I'd be shocked if it made up for the cost of raising the suit in the first place for you to see more than the $50 you might have paid to buy the game. In short, the only value in a suit would be to set a precedent for future publishers.

Do you have research or studies to cite for this or is this just speculation?

I don't get why people think HarvesteR would do better. The last I played KSP was probably around the time that he was on his way out. The game was a gem for many reasons but it also struggled in many areas, both in gameplay and technical reasons. In many of these areas, KSP2 has already done better. While his experience may given him some advantages in recognizing pitfalls that would need to be addressed, given what we saw out of KSP1, I don't have confidence that he has the technical skills to solve these problems any better than what we saw out of the KSP2 team. KSP is not an ordinary game with ordinary problems, it's going to be a challenge even for someone with very specialized experience.

I never thought too deeply before about how the solution is actually achieved. The iterative nature makes perfect sense though. This brought to mind the other stability concerns I had observed in the game. Namely the spotaneous rapid disassembly bug. This doesn't require it to occur immediately after a scene load, though it often does. I assumed this was due to the lack of sensible dampening forces leading to rounding errors becoming blown out by some singularity. I assumed that this would be something applied outside to overlay the physics model, but it is sounding like there might be more reliance on the canned solution that makes it more opaque in understanding what is at fault. I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. Would the solver have something built-in to suppress spurious noise that could lead to this kind of result, or is that something that would be left to the developer to layer over the physics model to address? Anytime I've built a model for some project from scratch, I would plan some kind of corrective force to ensure a stable state for predictability. Could some of the problems observed be explainable by the absense of something similar here? This seems necessary to ensure stability even if it might not be 100% accurate to life given the constraints imposed by the boundary conditions.

Certainly modern C# has come a long way, but I know Unity for the longest time was stuck on much older versions of C# that wouldn't see these benefits especially where Mono is concerned. I'm not familiar with the version of Unity they are running and what the latest version of C# it supports, but I could certainly see the limitations here making C++ notably more performant in addition to being more familiar as you noted.

I disagree. I think you put too much weight on how much community sentiment matters. The vast majority of sales will be to people who never step foot in this forum nor the discord. When they have a good product, marketing and word of mouth will overpower any remaining whispers about the rough start and delays. The bulk of the sales was always likely dependent on this as it wouldn't be ported to console until after it hit 1.0.

K^2's various posts have touched on this already so this is probably redundant, but it comes down to we're in a high interest rate economy and T2 is burning money very fast right now. They don't have enough cash cows lined up to fuel new development. The return on investment for KSP2 is longer term. They're better off putting it on hold to slow their cash burn rate until something like GTA6 comes out putting them in a position where they are so flush with cash they'll need to find ways to invest it with a good RoI. At that point, it would make much more sense to invest more heavily in finishing KSP2 in light of what they know now in terms of the scope of remaining work. This is much more sensible financially than to continue racking up debt on it now when the return on investment is further out than originally hoped.

The more I think about it, the more I see it as the silence being the safest way to put the project into hibernation. There is too much money on the table for them not to finish development and release as @K^2 has summarized nicely. The financial situation combined with the apparent troubles in IG suggest they might take the combined opportunity to save money for the time being and return to the project with a refreshed team/studio at some undetermined point in the future. It wouldn't do them any good to announce a cancellation if they aren't really planning to cancel it, and it doesn't do them any good to tell people that their EA game is going to be getting minimal support for the time being. Better to just go silent and disappear for a bit.

This is assuming the base was fundamentally strong enough to rely on to build up a sequel directly on top of it. I don't think you'd find many who would agree with this. There were several technical limitations that required rework from the ground up. It's this kind of work that takes time.

But also potentially enable them to expand to a much wider market due to the growing popularity of this genre. I see this aspect as one of the ways they were aiming to enable KSP2 to branch out to a wider consumer base to profit off the IP. There is potentially an overlap in the types of players who would play these two genres, although it isn't clear to me how many of the existing market is already accounted for in the KSP community in this regard.

Check out FortressCraft: Evolved. It predates Factorio, but is ahead of it in several technical regards. Still scratches the factory genre itch and the base game is quite a bit cheaper, especially if you get it on sale. There's easily hundreds of hours of entertainment before committing the extra cost for expansion if it wins you over. Full disclosure, I have contributed to this game's development.

Re: performance - this improved greatly with the patch and there were no notable regressions that I'm aware of. Polished. Re: wobble - for practical purposes for gameplay, wobble was fixed. While there might be a more optimal under the hood improvement, from a gameplay perspective it is as good as fixed. This was welcomed with a lot of praise for the patch. Polished. How many of these were legitimately new and not reposts of bugs that happened to be found again by new players due to the uptick in purchases after the patch? Honestly not aware of anything squarely on the FS update itself that was notably broken. Besides the science issue noted earlier, heating needing some tweaks is the only other thing I recall getting much attention and they're not gamebreaking. Obviously there's more work to be done, but the point is the specific aspects that were worked on for the patch were very well done. It isn't fair to call the patch bad because there are other aspects of the game that weren't touched in it. The patch was extremely polished. The point is the level of quality of their most recent work has been objectively good despite the earlier failures. They stepped up and that should be respected.

The simple fact they released an extremely polished patch that was very well received. The only notable bug, if you can call it that, associated with the release I recall having any issue with was the timers on science resetting when crossing biome boundaries. This was fixed in a bug fix patch soon after.

While I get many opinions on the matters of communication as that was completely botched/misleading, looking objectively at what was provided ignoring any timelines purely on the quality of what was released was poor at first but quality ramped up greatly for FS! There has been certainly a lot of unfair feedback, some of it from people who openly admitted didn't own the game. Given time, I think the high quality work of FS! would show with continued patching and drown out all of the misleading criticism based on echo chamber feedback that isn't grounded in actual play experience. If they continue to develop it, of course.

I waited 5ish years since I saw the release trailer. I could easily wait 5 more. Part of me hopes they using the opportunity to rescind the EA and return to a private development process where they can work in peace free from the pressure of all of the community expecting far more than is healthy. If they went radio silent and just suddenly released a complete 1.0 to the full scope of the roadmap years from now, I would be ecstatic. I never needed the EA cycle. I would have been happy with them simply delaying it instead of entering EA in the first place. And from my view of the community, it would have been better for many if they had done it this way.

This is the crux of it. The past year has been apparently a lot of time fixing foundational issues. They've had an upward trajectory as of late, but we can't know how much more work there is to be done to get to 1.0. It could be they are nearly out of the woods and colonies will be a big turning point with many on the fence ready to commit to purchase... but it's also possible the remaining milestones could still be mired with a ton of work. There is a ton of potential untapped revenue, but if it will take 4+ years to realize it, I couldn't blame them for not taking the risk. It could just be the timing is coincidental that T2 needs to make cuts and they are restructuring to cut costs and hopefully streamline the remaining development work to 1.0 with the full expectation that despite the turmoil the restructuring will cause that they are still lined up for a big success by 1.0.

Been saying it for a while and will keep doing so. The economics are simple. There is too much untapped revenue with much already invested in it to stop now. Even if they had to contract out the remaining work for 1.0, it would likely be a net financial return for them to finish it compared to canceling.

It's a near certainty they didn't break even yet, but those estimates are just terrible. Both the sale counts and costs are way under reality.

There's a whole spectrum of possibilities that could be included under "affected". Clearly some have been laid off, we don't know the scope, and they might not either and policy might be let HR notify all affected before commenting.

While it is true they are likely in the red, the decision to terminate a project only should look at the cost to finish and potential future revenue. Estimates put KSP2 at only about 300k sales and $15m. KSP1 sold 4m copies. There's still plenty of potential revenue to earn if the cost of finishing it and the confidence of traction to gain those sales covers the costs. Killing the project guarantees virtually no additional revenue while completing the project to desired quality could mean $100m in potential revenue. There's room for profitibility yet unless they see no possibility to recover. This would be an odd assumption with some of the restored faith with FS! We don't know what it is lile internally though.

This is assuming they have the informatiom and permission to post it. A big news break like this might have communication on lockdown until they get everything in order.

Take Two is the publisher. They're role in day-to-day decisions is not going to be substantial with respect to gameplay implementation beyond approving the overall creative direction set forth for the game. This is already locked in with the roadmap. Any concerns from a gameplay perspective are then only really to be based on the roadmap and public statements. Any bad feelings about the publisher are moot unless/until we get official statements to say otherwise. So getting to the facts, are you honestly saying you think KSP2 with it colonies built in part with resource collection to supply orbital construction of future-tech interstellar craft by ferrying the required materials by automated supply lines established by player flown example flight plans to enable the growth of those colonies to support interstelar colonization is a watered-down version of KSP? To me this is a massive project scope with steep requirements that will take substantial dedication to complete. With such a massive scope deviating from the original in notable ways it should come as no surprise that some of the filler/fluff features of the original title would be reevaluated in the context of whether they fit the sequel or if they are not worth prioritizing among the long list of work that must be done to accomplish their goals. With such radical changes, it would be prudent to wait to hear how these will impact the gameplay rather than make assumptions. Again back to the topic at hand, is where communication is needed, but the lack thereof is not an excuse to make things up as the expected way they will be. It may well be that some decisions have not been made one way or another. And to be clear, this is not just directed at people disparaging the game or direction. There has been plenty of assumptions on the other side too that also originates from the lack of clear communication of the granular gameplay plans. It all goes to reinforce the need of the team to communicate plans with the community better if we're to effectively utilize the EA period to direct the game in the best direction. The problem is that the community is impatient, the pace of new content release is slow, and the engagement with the community over discussing planned features and collecting design feedback is basically non-existent. It's understandable that such large development goals would take time, but in entering early access there should have been plans in place to bridge the large gaps in major roadmap releases with community engagement or else they shouldn't have committed to early access. Their failure here is not an excuse to fill in the blanks with rapant speculation though. The unfortunately correct answer is patience, but that's a tall order for anything on the internet and moreso for something with a price tag on it.

I'm not trying to argue. Just legitimately confused. People seem to come up with fantastical stories of what the game is and is not rather than listening to the official word. It has been a huge factor in the community going all sorts of negative directions unnecessarily. Nothing good comes from doomsaying over assumptions.

How so? The roadmap has been published for a long time and the content on it fixed more or less since the beginning. The first was never announced as a planned feature as far as I'm aware, resources were always planned to fill this role. The other two have no word one way or another. I think you're just assuming these things while ignoring the plans they laid out. There is a ton of room for strategizing around colonies and how you'll pursue interstellar travel given the requirements for it in the cotext of finite resources and dependencies on colonies to accomplish this. If anything, we need more communication to stop people making up what they think the game is going to be than what it is. There has been doomsaying left and right despite many of things like this that fly in the face of many of the gameplay goals laid out as a part of the roadmap.