Kerbart

Well, from a practical point of view there's nothing left to fight over, so why not?

What's impressive is using the KSP1 code base yet introducing bugs around problems that had long been fixed (or didn't exist) in KSP1.

it's done a lot easier with video games but that doesn't mean it's not happening elsewhere. Kickstarter is filled with projects (especially board games) that never fulfilled their promises (I've been on one or two myself) with exactly—or worse—similar false advertising: prototypes with photoshopped/faked performance, products that don't work ("yes we promised it would work on android but we only got it to work on ios. kbye") and trust me, there were plenty of people seriously ticked off about this one: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/money/cars/2021/10/21/elio-motors-took-millions-customer-deposits-never-delivered-car/5930672001/

If the only attraction of KSP was spaceflight it would have a hard time competing with other spaceflight sims. Yet it's far more popular. The differentiator is the Kerbals. No one else has silly little characters that make you smile, alleviate failures and provide a story. The idea of making a (prequel) game about Kerbals, with a fresh story and the same relatable characters does not seem so far-fetched to me. Yes, you'll miss out on some of the existing audience but perhaps capture other, bigger audiences. It's not necessarily what we want in the short term. But a lively Kerbal franchise seems more likely to churn out a space flight sequel than the dead horse we're standing around kicking it right now. No, I don't mean that at all. However, Felipe seems t have solved the Wobbly Components problem much better than Intercept did. And he also seems to be a lot more creative when it comes to what a new game should be. Show me anything Nate came up with in KSP2 that makes you say "wow that's a genuine leap forward and not just a mere evolutionary step." The point is that once you get a franchise—or universe—of Kerbal games going it's easier to expand on. And once you solve certain problems, like wobbly rockets or finite resource usage, on a small scale, you can use that logic to scale up to your "back to space" release. Meanwhile the studio is still making money selling software and isn't closed due to not producing a replica of the game they try to replace after five years of coding. Yes, exactly!

Opinions vary on what the best part of KSP is though. Is it spaceflight? I'm not convinced Juno is worse. Yet we like KSP a lot more. Because of the Kerbals? That's what Felipe's prequel was hinged on. I remember one game, albeit it not a sandbox game, where the sequel took out what made part 1 so well acclaimed: stunning graphics, even the good story line. The second game had none of that. Yet it was even a bigger success, considered ground breaking for a whole new genre of games. Such a prequel—assuming it would meet sales expectations—would lay the foundations for a true franchise of KSP games, while functioning as a live-testing lab for high performance physics and graphics from the ground up (what we see in Kitbash) and serve as a stepping stone towards "back to space" with KSP3. All of this is speculation and wishful thinking but the one thing that made an impression on me in the Matt Lowne interview was that Felipe is much more a game designer than most of us think (and less a dude who stumbled across hacking together a great game). And I trust his instincts more than those of Nate who's using corporate speak like "new player on-boarding" and hasn't shown a single shred of imagination in how the new game should differ from KSP1

You probably missed the sarcasm in that post. Compared to no communication and hardly any updates before "the news" came out, did anything really change? No communication and no updates on the horizon. In other words, business as usual.

I agree that all the communication we received from "The dev team" (can't say Intercept anymore) since the WARN notice does indeed point strongly to "business as usual."

Actually... there was (is?) a very vocal MP fraction of players. Back in the post 1.0 days, every updates would predictably result in "still no multiplayer" posts. They also were all very vocal about that "timewarp was a non-issue and the easiest of things to solve," although opinions on how timewarp should be treated seemed to differ. At the time, multiplayer seemed to be one of the biggest "why we need KSP2" selling points. Don't get me wrong, I don't care for it. But is is/was a major factor on the "what we need in KSP2" list.

Well, the communication is very loud and clear "business as usual."

I don't know anything about game programming. I've seen claims that for the kind of physics simulation KSP is, Unreal or another engine wouldn't necessarily do better. But more importantly, it seems like micro-optimization to me. If another engine is 400% faster it just means that you'll run into the same issue at 2000 parts instead of 500. The real solution is to not brute-force it in the first place. We all agree that as far as we can see, no attempt was made for improvements in that direction.

That is the most incredulous part. It has become increasingly clear, as you state, that there were some serious performance issues with the game scaling up as everything is being recalculated all the time, followed by shortcuts (ie. heating) to deal with that. Forgivable for KSP1 which started with rockets made of a dozen parts and only going to the moon. But if you're building it from the ground up knowing that people are going to have dozens and dozens of ships, many consisting of a hundred or even a thousand parts, how can you not take that into consideration?

This is where I played Nate's game: choose your words wisely. I didn't say promises made because you're absolutely right, if you dissect the communication from Intercept there's very little to fault in that aspect. But oh, there were videos ("pre alpha footage"), and suggestions ("we intend to...") and all kind of "under development" pieces that, while it was never said it was in the game, it was certainly suggested and I have worked long enough in marketing to know that such a thing is far, far, far away from accidental. We have so much fun playing the game. Yeah, laughing at how things don't work, blow up unexpected, or laughing at the bet Dev A lost this time with Dev B on how long this session would last before a CTD. We didn't mean to suggest the game itself is fun to play and we're sorry if that's how you interpreted it, that was never our intention. Sure. You can say certain things that "accidentally" get interpreted as something else, and when it comes back to bite you, you can safely say we never promised that. All true. But you also can't prevent the community from being ticked off when those deliberate misinterpretations start to haunt you.

Don't forget expectations. The KSP1 audience started with literally nothing. Every feature added was an unexpected win. The KSP2 crowd already had a mature KSP1, which was the baseline. They were shown videos of colonies, other star systems, multiplayer. so that was the expectation. If you then release something with far less features than "1," charging a full price and riddled with bugs, you have a revolt on your hands that can only be squashed by rapidly releassing patches to fix the bugs and a steady stream of feature updates. We know how that went. The pro-team set themselves up for failure in that respect.

Review bombing was sourced by a couple of factors, among them: Expectations raised by Intercept Games Expectations raised by the relative high quality of KSP1 EA launch at full price IG's initial apparent attitude of "we don't care what you think and we're not in a rush to fix it. Besides, there's nothing to fix, the game is great!!" First update took forever and fixed very little. And then the pace went down even further. Customers have very little recourse when they feel wronged. Especially when their grievances on social media (the forum, discord) are seemingly ignored. They're angry. Yes, it's not productive but what else can they do?

Non-compete clauses, not NDA's.