Kerbart

"Jeb, what goes trough your mind at launch?" "Hopefully not the T-800 fuel tank"

And not only that...THEY LOOK TERRIFIED!

"It's been the biggest technical challenge during development" sounds to me like a feature they're not yet 100% comfortable with, which is the whole point of a gradual EA rollout with features that do work. That $9 game was spectacularly less featured than what we're getting now. Based on the sneak peeks, dev diaries and all the rest we know, if we're using that $9 as a baseline, $50 is going to be a very modest price point given how much further developed we expect the game to be. I'm not saying it is, but calling out 0.18 as the shining example of "wHy Is It So MuCh MoRe ExPeNsIvE" isn't really a sensible comparison. That was somebody's hobby project (and it showed), not the result of a team of professionals trying to give you the best experience possible. Ah, but that assumes everyone is like you: reasonable and understanding that the staging branch is unstable and a work in progress. There will be lots of angry outbursts (by email, forum, and bad-advertising public spaces like Facebook) of people complaining their save of 250 hours of playing, that they never backed up despite playing an experimental version, just refused to open after the latest update, etc. It might make a very select group of people happy but create lots of headaches and distractions for the devs, and there's next to nothing in it for Intercept. So, very unlikely to happen.

Yeah but how do I now get rid of cheek fat?

That might come down on who calls what "release." The "requirements" are really recommendations, it's not like they're drawing a hard line in the sand where the game won't run (well, there probably is something like "1 MB graphics card, 4 MB of memory, etc" but that's likely the same hardware that KSP1 can run on) By the time the "official" (1.0) launch is there they will have a much better idea what the average player considers "runs smooth" and what hardware is recommended to get that. Right now they might just list what the absolute minimum is but if you're fanatical enough to buy new hardware for the game than you don't want that—so what's the point of publishing those specs early? You're going to need more than that, buing what is the minimum hardware requirements will lead to disappointed customers. So they'll need recommended requirements as well. Which will not be for a $10,000 rig (anything runs smooth on that), but rather "what is the least you need to run the game smoothly" or people won't buy the game "because I can't afford the hardware." (it works both ways). Well, what is smoothly? Under what circumstances? That's probably another answer EA will bring — by the time the 1.0 launch comes around, Intercept—and us—will have a much better idea on what is needed for that. I for one am not going to spend money on hardware without having the faintest idea what the actual game will look like, and what realistic minimum hardware requirements (from both a performance and a cost perspective) are. Certainly not going to spend money purely based on some lofty specs on the box.

Yes, versus "recommended (minimum) hardware" as what Intercept will list. What do you mean, "default color?" Doesn't it always show in red?

I have absolute no insight in what’s going on at Intercept but I think the go/no go poll was held three months ago when the release date was announced. Undoubtedly with a list of things that need to be fixed before release, and some slack into the process to polish and shore things up that are revealed by internal testing. I’m not sure what we’ll see. The sneak peeks give us a genral idea of the styling and some of the features, and it all looks great. I am expecting a relative bug free product. Not everything can be tested but I remember a 1.x update where my Kerbals would spontaneously explode when setting foot on the ground. And we remember the toppling flags of 1.12. Those are the kind of things that would really disappoint me. As for the state of the graphics, I’m not going to pixel peep, but based on what I’ve seen there will be hrongs of people utterly disappointed as they are going to expect nothing less than 4k photo realism at 120 fps and I doubt that will happen. I’m pretty sure the ability to modify the forum structure and keep that hidden with the flick of a switch existed before the turn of this century. The forum is very mature and one can imagine much better managed than the Discord server.

That assumes a lot. For instance, that these screen grabs are all fresh, and that there is some kind of obligation for these pictures to be representative to... to... something. And there isn't. Here's what my assumptions are Once the publication date (if I call it "launch" some people will yell at me) was set, a marketing plan for that event was created Part of that plan is the social media campaign we see now Likely a request "send us screenshots with what you're working on" was sent out in the past few months (multiple times, I bet). Marketing makes an initial selection of what is going to be published ("what looks good" from a visual appeal perspective) Selected content is reviewed and vetted, to ensure no material unfit for publication is selected Marketing makes a final selection with what gets published each day, ensuring we don't get airplanes five days in a row, no videos for a week, and so on Content is uploaded to social media All of this is done way upfront. I doubt anyone at Intercept is insane enough to let Marketing decide on the spot what image they'll upload today. I know I wouldn't. Too much riding on it. It's not that they're stupid (many here will like to think that), it's just that their job is marketing, not detailed knowledge of in-house development. Don't show those volumetric clouds yet, we haven't decided on including that for now or not pending performance issues, those kind of things. Nate knows, they don't. Primary criteria for selection will be: (1) Does it look cool and (2) Is it fit for publication. The rest is just a bonus. I don't think "lack of hi-res textures" is going to be a disqualifier (things can still look great for a publicity shot), but reveals too much of the final game is. The sneak peeks are teasers, notice that we consistently don't see anything that will tell us how the game will look on Feb 24 — that's not a coincidence but a deliberate choice.

Why would they do that? What's the point of a big reveal if there's nothing to reveal? The point of sneak peeks is to keep the audience hyped up and curious about what's coming, not to ruin the Early Access launch. Well, everyone likes to speculate and wonder, but yeah, some are reading waaaay too much into the published pictures.

I'd rather have "Amazing and requires better hardware" than "Mediocre but runs on my potato." I can fix the former but not the latter.

With the discussions on autosave and the ability to rewind at will in mind, how does "rewind to before I done goofed up" distinguish itself from "rewind to before this future mission that I certainly want to happen?" Not meant to criticize or "shoot holes," just food for thought.

So only after interstellar, or is this "Dres" the mythical new planet to be added to the Kerbal system?

Or given how every sinlge pixel gets analyzed, they refrain from using actual EA footage because then they might as well release it right now. I suspect the game is in a state fit for publication (they can't afford delaying publication now), .but they'll be polishing it as much as they can. Is that "finished" or not? There's always something that needs work, in that sense it'll never be finished and they'll draw a line somewhere around Feb 20, freezing the builds for publication. But if they had to, they could do that right now, I bet, with the game being in a playable state. And surely we'll see plenty of mini updates and fixes in the weeks after that for the stuff that didn;t make it into launch. Also, by using beta captures, they'll ensure that what goes live on Feb 24 will look so much better and finished in order to delight the fan base.

Are you sure about that? I thought that's how the original Kraken was defeated - by introducing multiple FR's, retaining precision in calculations that would invariably be lost (introducing deep space Krakens) the further a ship travels. I might be wrong here. Or we're talking about two different things., but to my knowledge everything ins KSP1 is already jumping back and forth between various FR's all the time.

You seem to think that the spectrum of computers is only fully blown gaming rigs and 12 year old hand-me-downs, and since the marketing staff isn't using the latter, they must be using the former? Most office work is done on i5's or i7's with 8 GB. Good enough for email, modest Excel and Powerpoint work. Marketing is mostly that kind of work. Setting up and evaluating campaigns, developing plans, emailing with vendors. Not sure where you get the idea that marketing involves glitzy workstations for making full featured movies. They might have one machines like that but I doubt it — not when there's an entire department of graphic artists who can be asked to create creative work. If my project management team decided to blow tens of thousands of dollars on unneeded hardware I'd be firing them. Perhaps your experience is based on shows like Mad Men and not real life?

In KSP1 the Vector was introduced late into the games' lifecycle, and it's a typical Career engine. Yes, it's severely overpowered and a testament to the engineering of it's real-world equivalent. It also delivers relative little thrust (compared to, for instance, the Mainsail), so you will always need a handful of them, and it is outrageously expensive. THAT limits its use in Career, and using it in reusable craft mitigates that. For all we know, money is not going to be a game mechanic in KSP2, so we'll probably find out, if there's a Vector equivalent in the game, how it's use is going to be limited to prevent it from being the only engine worth using.

That sounds very rational and well-thought out. However, KSP2 is a game, not a simulation, and realism for the sake of realism is known to not be the automatic game enhancing mechanism it's often thought to be. Unless the game has a randomized procedural generated universe—it's confirmed it doesn't—players will know in advance what systems are colonizable and which ones aren't. Colonies seem to be a huge driving factor in exploration, from what we know (admittedly, not a lot) so far. Incentives to go to such a system, without FTL effectively a one-way trip, would be lacking. If you think Dres is unpopular, wait until there are going to be systems that are 1000× harder to reach with equal destination appeal. And Intercept certainly will not have appetite for pouring precious resources into a system that 95% of players is not going to visit, regardless of how thrilled The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy is about them. As not every star in the Skybox is an actual destination, one can only conclude that the Kerbal Institute for Science and Technology has surveyed the skies and hand picked only those systems that are suitable for colonization into its catalog. I always fantasize on how the game would be if each system, and every planet, would be procedurally generated and randomized with each game. It would be an amazing incentive for exploratory research — you'd have to start with sounding rockets to find out how big Kerbin's atmosphere is — and provide a mechanism of purpose to scientific research far superior to the Career Clutch in KSP1. Counter would be that the research would become just as grindy, as a mandatory exercise before venturing out, and 95% of the planets would be bland an uninteresting, and the remaining 5% too wild to land on. So it's probably better to have a hand made universe, with destinations pre-filtered for suitable gameplay.

I worked for over a decade in marketing. Make no illusions. Those were the same standard machines the rest of the office had. We had one special computer for "creative" work (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc). "But ooh, don't you have to handle large sets of market data?" Yeah, that's what chunking is for.

Probably heard it from the same people who will tell you that each launch requires a micropayment. There are some doomsayers who are obsessed with the idea that the entire Intercept team are money hoarding goblins whose intention is to make the game as unattractive as possible by trying to milk every last dime out of it before it's even sold. The people that spread these kind of rumors are probably going to be very disappointed if KSP2 turns out to be an enjoyable game, because it seems like they don't want it to be one.

No, the issue is that ultimate ownership of KSP lies with Take Two, who have shown some dubious approaches to perceived copyrighted content in the past. If KSP2 is reusing NF mod parts, and have paid Nertea for intellectual ownership of said parts, it could lead toKSP1 NF parts being yanked or while we are in fantasy land, the ability to mod KSP1 being shut down "given that it's a cesspool of copyright infringement." And while T2 has done some wild stuff, it seems extremely unlikely something like that will happen, and there are also a lot of assumptions built in there. We don't know if those parts are there, we only have some screenshots. We don't know if those parts are ported over and adapted, or simply used as an inspiration to rebuild them from scratch to match the KSP2 styling. We don't know if that point the NF mod copyrights still apply. And if they do (I'm not a lawyer but it seems not likely), we don't know how the licensing was worked out. But if a lot of very unlikely "ifs" are met, and Intercept feels alienating their community over mods that have been freely accessible for the past half decade is worth it, then yes, there is a remote chance it might become an issue. Getting struck by lightning twice seems a bigger risk though, if you want something to worry about.

True. I'm sure there are soome caveats, but yes... Leaving one SOI simply means entering another SOI, usually of the parent body. Consider setting up a return trajectory from the Mun to Kerbin. It's really not that hard to come up with one where eventually you'll be recaptured by the Mun. Extending that to Kerbin/Kerbol is just a matter of scale. You leave Kerbin SOI. Now you're orbiting the sun. Kerbin is orbiting the sun. At least part of your orbits is shared; there's a good chance that en encounter might happen. They had encounters with other planets, altering their course and velocity Orbits are cyclical, not linear. What's behind you now will eventually be in front of you. Just because something foes faster doesn't automatically mean you won't see it ever again.

I think you're overestimating the audience's ability to stay focused. If it were one week to go, I'd say, yes, there needs to be increased activity, and in the last day or two a bonanza of content. Remember Tiktok is doing well on videos of 30 seconds, Vimeo with 30 minute videos is not. Once that attention span fizzles out, it's gone, and it won't come back. If you're telling your coworker that the new KSPis coming out and they have to watch Scott Manley playing it on youtube, is the correct response to "sounds cool, send me a link": "I will, in three weeks" "Right away!" We're all excited that it's just a few weeks now, but overhyping and fizzling out is not the right strategy.

I agree. Making an informed decision based on postfixed screenshots made on a beta version three months ago is much better than based on twitch and youtube videos once the game comes out. Why rely on that for making a decision to buy the game?

I doubt those screenshots are coming from devs acting on their own. Who releases them, when, where, what? All marketing. And likely using a plan. Attention, at any level, is a precious commodity, that you don't want to waste. Release videos and images like confetti now, and they won't be getting attention in four weeks. Every image rleased is being devoured by the community. People are claiming hey're using non-standard video editing software with RYB color models based on some pixels that might or might not be anti-alias artifacts. Do you think that kind of attention will be given when there's a dozen images per hour being released? Not only is it not about quantity, it's very much about not overdoing it. I'd say the marketing (with a limited budget) is done very right, and seems to be a lot more focused than it ever was with Squad.

Don't forget, marketing is more than advertising. In some ways, advertising is like that guy from Seinfeld who's honking at women in traffic — no imagination to get attention any other way. Marketing involves a lot more: Know your customers Know what your customers want Engage with those customers Make sure those customers know what you have to offer Advertising is a very expensive, one—way buckshot approach to achieve that. In some cases it's the right way, in other cases it's not. But any dollar spent on paid advertising cannot be paid for something else, so it's only going to happen when it's expected to have an effect. KSP getting attention at electronic gaming shows? Marketing KSP being mentioned and getting articlaes in (online) game magazines? Marketing KSP social media activity, informing you of videos and sneak peeks? Marketing The production of screenshots and videos (dev diaries, product updates)? Marketing Sofar I've seen tons and tons of marketing They need the marketing and they are seriously marketing it. The videos are marketing and the number of views shows it's pretty successful. It's just not advertising.