Kerbart

Most Early Access games I've encountered were fully functional and sold at a steep discount. Features were missing, and added along the journey. Functionality was added based on feedback ("it'd be nice if we have a compass or map"), not because it's on the "to do" list (auto struts, reentry heating). Or the project was abandoned and you end up with a half-finished game at a half price, but that's why you got the steep discount. KSP2 sells at nearly full retail and the only thing that was talked about was "we can add the features right now but we'd rather have feedback first before locking them in." What we get is a half-functioning game. People have been dying to play the game for years and now they have to wait for the full launch (which by the look of it will be at least another two or three years) to have the performance issues taken care of. So, they're upset.

Extrapolating where we are now that is going to require hosting on a quantum computer with 16 TB of RAM and an optic fiber network.

Don't forget Astroneer. Aside from a "space theme" it has very little in common with KSP but it does have comparable "scale of operations." I can see how one can build a resource pipeline in KSP with a similar concept.

Excited about how everything will look great without mods!

My father's TRS-80 had descenders in lowercase (a full one crt line). So the term "retro font" itself doesn't make one think of those kind of particular shortcomings. But yes, this is a particular bad pick.

What upsets me is not the EA state. KSP1 went through something similar and came out fine-ish. Yes, there are issues with KSP1 andf those are largely due to (the lack of ) an architecture that wasn't designed for what the game eventually did. KSP2 (likely*) won't suffer from that. What's disappointing is that EA was announced "because we want feedback before adding all features" which, I'm sure is true, while omitting the glaring "it's EA because we're nowhere near where we want to be for launch." That omission covers a pretty big part of the negative reactions (lack of xyz, lackluster performance despite chad hardware reqs, etc). The issue is: can we take their word for it? Now all that might be covered in due time. I certainly hope so, I love the game. But there's the rub: "we're selling the game for nearly full retail in a half baked state. But trust us, we're going to make it super over the next few years." I want that. I'm sure the intention is there. But the intention was also there to publish the game in 2020. That was unrealistic. But now a lot of people wonder: how realistic is it to expect the roadmap features and decent performance? – on that note, I think that fixing performance will now be more important than features like shader collision and reentry heating. It probably makes sense to fix those first, but few people are willing to drop a grand or more on a new computer for a game with an uncertain future. Make it work on a wider range, and more people can buy it. "But Kerbart, EA is not for everyone!" Yeah, right. It'll need to generate sales to survive, that was the point (and not feedback, as nice as it sounds). Selling to the 97th percentile of hardware only is not going to accomplish that. The next few weeks will be critical. Do we get rapid follow-ups and fixes, like KSP1? Things will be good. Do we get weeks, if not months, of radio silence from the update department? I'll fear the future. For now have no reason to buy a heavy duty GPU (=new PC, my potato can't handle the current generation), although it'll be fun to run Cuda and Dask on it. And I'm not willing to drop 4 digits on that given my doubts on how it will turn out. Hopefully the game will appear on GFN; I'll be happy to buy it at that point (two weeks from now?). Or, even if performance is atrocious, when I hear news that it will slug along on potatoes. * Likely: we have to believe the devs on their word that the architecture supports it. Credibility has suffered greatly though...

I think that by now management of any publisher is well aware of review bombing. They'll look at the numbers that really matter - sales revenue.

Why did they change the voice? The one they posted about "missing the ground" was just fine, but now I'm being told they replaced it with some donald duck voice? Does anyone have a link to a tutorial with the new voice?

Thank you for quoting me but you missed this part: A price of $50 suggests a fully working game. A roadmap that starts with "Science" instead of "adding missing features" suggests that. There's no big bar at the bottom that runs all across saying "fixing and adding things we missed at introduction." Like I said, they can claim "we never said that" and yes, they didn't. That doesn't mean the expectation was raised, and one has to be extremely naive to think it wasn't. We wouldn't have this discussion if the EA price was $30. But it isn't, and here we are.

There are many thinks Intercept didn't do optimally with the EA launch. But the tutorials are something they, as far as I can tell, nailed. Onboarding is a huge issue. It may not seem that way because practically everyone on this forum knows how to get ihto orbit, but not everyone who tries the game does. And while resources may seem ubiquitous, chasing them down is an extra step not every player makes. So to put emphasis on it inside the game addresses one of the big issues the game has. Explaining things "in an adult way" raises the barrier to entry. Explaining things as if you're a child, especially when you are a child, lowers it. It's like Joel Spolsky's famous example of Oxo utensils. By making it better accessible to a special group, you make it accessible to everyone; Oxo sells more kitchen utensils to healthy customers than to those with arthritis. Yes, Scott Manley is great. He's also talking to an audience that has a big interest in space and who are not intimidated by numbers. Scott Manley is geat for people like you and me. But... we already play KSP. The tutorial is intended for those who are not. Of all the things to doubt Intercept on, I wouldn't doubt them on this. It's not "us," we already play the game and don't need tutorials. One of the things the game is trying to do is bring STEM subjects to people who don't consider themselves nerds. Get middle-schoolers interested in math and physics (because they want to) by playing the game. So tutorials need to be easy to understand, even if you're not that well versed in physics, and fun (potentially to be used in a classroom). I love Scott Manley. Without him I would probably have quit the 0.18 demo and never bought the game. But if I had the lofty goal of drumming up interest in science, physics, and space for groups of underrepresented schoolers (girls and minorities), then my thoughts would be "He's a great choice, but a male, white, middle aged dude is not the role model we're looking for." That's something they had to take into account. Scott Manley would have been the easy thing to do. "But we do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard"

It was implied that EA would basically be a finished product, with features missing, but that they wanted to gather before adding those in. And that's fine. The EA discount of $10 suggests that as well. There's a lot you can say without saying it, and that's convenient because then later you can turn around and say "we never said that," but everything that was signaled was basically a working game with game elements missing. And I highly doubt it wasn't the intention to signal that. What we're getting is a half-finished product that is rushed out the door. If the EA price tag was $30, that'd be fine, but it isn't. So tells us: "What we're releasing is an early release, with, quite frankly, a few things still under development. However, KSP is pretty complex and we think we can make a better product by gathering feedback on all aspects of the game. It'll be a lot like the early days of KSP1—you'll find that some elements that you're used to are still missing, or not working the way you expect them to work, and that's why we want feedback. We hope you will join us on this exciting journey!" So yeah, that's what I'm waiting for.

The original release date was 2020. It's now 2023. Publishing timelines will lead to either rushed products or missed deadlines. In KSP1 a continuous stream of updates was published, and quite frankly, I enjoyed every major update. I have no issues with the early access release. I just wish Intercept was a little bit more upfront about what's being delivered. As for yearly releases (KSP 2023, 2024, etc) that one needs to pay for? It's a double-edged sword. If you're struggling to pay for it, then it's the worst. But if it's a minor expense for you, then it means continuous improvement and development. T2 will not abandon a game if it's a continuous source of income, and that's quite literally the price you pay for it.

KSP Devs: “Challenge accepted”

It's not the code, it's the data the compiler adds to the executable for debugging purposes. That can add up to a lot of bloat and code that runs slower (but, if it crashes, your debugger can step in). The code itself can usually be flagged as "conditional compile" and simply be excluded by setting a flag or compiler variable. It's not being removed, just not compiled.

But the narrative, and the retail price, suggested that we'd get a game without the roadmap features (because feedback was needed). Looking at what we've seen so far, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't need feedback from the community as it's painfully obvious that a Work In Progress was shipped. Things clearly missing, horrible performance... Anyone hoping to see Science within three months will be disappointed, as it seems to be an all-hands exercise just to get the game in a proper (both game elements and performance) state first. It's showing a lot of promise, definitely, but those that were complaining about the price tag do have a point, at the moment. Yeas, it's Early access but at nearly full price. For the state it's in, $30 would have been more reasonable. I know, you're going to spend 10-30× of that on hardware, but it still leaves a sour taste.

I grew up with slow computers. Flightsims running at 15 FPS if you pushed your sliders too hard — and around 12 FPS landing becomes an issue. So it's nice to get somewhere close to monitor refresh rates — in my book, 20 FPS is actually fine (I'm blessed in a way). Now, I get that you'd want 25 FPS or 30 FPS - the refresh rate of an old school monitor. There's a reason movie theaters, TV's and CRT's had refresh rates like that, because our eyeballs don't refresh any faster. So, explain to me like I'm 5, because I can't figure this out: why is it so important to have refresh rates of 60 FPS to 120 FPS? I'm not saying there's something wrong with those who want it—it's expensive to get there, so I'm sure there's a good reason. I just want to know what I'm missing out on if I don't run at 120 FPS.

I'm not one of those people who saw "concerns" everywhere, but I'm not 100% delighted right now either. For the story line of "we're doing EA because we want feedback before implementing features" (and implicitly: "not because we're rushing it out of the door"), I don't get a good feelin. No re-entry effects or even heating, things floating in water don't look good, etc. You can't give feedback on things that aren't there in the first place. Obviously the product is being rushed out of the door, pretending it isn't is costing a lot of goodwill. Having sad that, it's not the heaping mount of digested food that was predicted either. A lot of the new features look great, and it appears there's a lot of improvement on the UX side. Not just how it looks, but how it works. Looking to forward to try it put (if either my hardware supports it, or if it's supported on GFN).

I was under the impression that reviews and ESA event reports can start today but gameplay vids not until Thursday, so this is a pleasant surprise. I doubt Matt is trolling everyone for more views on Monday; no one will watch the rest of the week if that's KSP1.

But a GTX 1070 Ti doesn’t seem that expensive, so it’s not so bad after all?

Everything gets released on Discord first, and that was just a pictures. By the time it was posted on the forum they wisened up and added some context, but by then it was already shark frenzy.

Likely not because initially only the specs were dropped without any clarification. On top, why oh why post "minimum" specs that are intended as "this is the minimum you need when you have all sliders on max." No one, no one is going to read that into specs, even if (and they didn't) you clarify them. Within a week we'll know if the outrage is uncalled for, but if it is, it's totally on Intercept for borking this monumentally.

I hope not. KSP1 was things upon things upon things. KSP2 was built from the ground up with an end-product in mind. The optimizations that are left should be in the 5-10% range, unless we've been lied to regarding where the product is in development (the story being it's feature complete, we just want to await feedback before adding that). I'm willing to give Intercept a lot of benefits of doubt, but when they're saying that there's room to improve to an extend where it's lowering system requirements, I feel that the product is not as finished as they told us it is; the game running better in the future on lesser hardware might be a positive aspect of Intercept misleading us but that's about it. On the other hand — and again this seems self-inflicted damage by just dropping stuff without initial clarification — the specs seem to written towards "this is what you need with every detail maxed doing crazy shenanigans" and the difference between "minimum" and "recommended" is the resolution.

There is definitely blame on how Intercept managed this. Instead of dropping sneak peeks without any comments, saying what they are ("we grabbed this cool sequence during interface testing") it's easy and very appealing to disect the very sparse morsels we've got thrown at us. I've worked for years together with people doing just that. There's just things they don't know, can't know, until someone tells them. We've seen landscapes with scatter, and landscapes without. Who's to say what it is in the final game? We haven't seen that. The ignorance along schoolkids and students — no doubt a very large segment of the playerbase — isn't their fault and Intercept (or the gaming industry in general) definitely did a bad job managing that. It worked well as long as the hype went up. Until it didn't. I wonder how many saw the publication target back in 2019, naively imagined the game would be released then, or shortly after, and bought a top-of-the-line machine back then "to be ready when it drops." And then the game got delayed and delayed, and now their supermachine is no longer up to spec. I'm sure that's where a lot of the saltiness comes from. When you're older you have less illusions about publication dates (I'll believe it when I see it), but again, it's a game, for a good chunk of the audience it's likely their first rodeo.

NDA's are very effective. The reason we constantly have to look for excuses is because everyone is getting their underwear in a bunch over software they haven't seen in action. Those that are seen as "defenders" (I'm sure you'll see me as one of them) will be equally disappointed if the game disappoints. But to get an aneurysm over jumping to conclusions when there's nothing to be enraged over (yet?), is just plain silly. Yes there have been screenshots. 'What are you working on Joe?' 'Landing gear animations' 'Cool, can I get a shot?' 'Sure, here's a 5s screengrab' and before you know it, Joe's animation (and Joe is not) on the landscape team) gets ripped apart because it's not showing clouds or trees. I'm just amazed on how many people are obsessed with burning the game down before they have seen it. Don't be surprised when you don't get to see anything about the new features until they're released; this is why.

I'm surprised by the reactions. With hindsight, I shouldn't be, since the theme of the hype, for a large segment, has been unrealistic expectations. Screenshots that looked absolutely fine to me were burned with comments like "haven't seen it this bad since Doom, worse than KSP1, not of this day and age" Then there were comments like "there's no specs, what should I buy to run this game" — and when Intercept delivered and said "buy this" there were complaints that, while demanding a game representative of this day and age, Intercept had the sheer audacity to suggest you run it on hardware of this day and age. And this is not an ivory-tower comment from someone who comfortable exceeds recommended specs. Yes, it's sad that by the looks of it, the game won't even run on my PC but that wasn't entirely unexpected. But specs are usually flexible. We still don't know what the game really looks and feels like. Or how it runs on different hardware. So instead of complaining "even my gaming rig that I bought for $800 5 years ago at Best Buy won't run this, this is insane!" why not just wait and see? We can expect streamer content as early and Monday, and the latest by Friday? Why not reserve the outrage for then, when the game truly is worse than KSP (0.18, I assume), worse than Doom, perhaps even worse than FS4? Or perhaps, when at that point things don't seem to be that bad at all, and emotions have died down, start thinking, if the game seems worth upgrading your hardware, to what extend?