Does anyone else find it hard to actually finish a game of KSP

[Wjolcz]

^^ Wrong thread, Veeltch?

Oh damn! Yep! Wrong thread! Curse you touch screens!

I was actually surprised when I saw I replied to this thread and was wondering why?

Edited April 16, 2015 by Veeltch

[LABHOUSE]

Make procedural rockets that are reusable, have a base on every planet and use the module rockets to travel.

[Commander Jebidiah]

Dont worry ive been playing since .20 and i can only play sandbox. Career is dull and boring, i get bored of it before i get to high kerbin orbit.

IMHO career mode was the biggest mistake ever made, ksp as a sandbox game could of been so much more complete and have so many more included features it Squad hadn't wasted there time on the useless piece of spent SRB that career is. It is so damn repetitive.

[mikegarrison]

Dont worry ive been playing since .20 and i can only play sandbox. Career is dull and boring, i get bored of it before i get to high kerbin orbit.

IMHO career mode was the biggest mistake ever made, ksp as a sandbox game could of been so much more complete and have so many more included features it Squad hadn't wasted there time on the useless piece of spent SRB that career is. It is so damn repetitive.

Well, I find sandbox pretty boring, so I guess it is good we can each choose the one we like better.

[mikegarrison]

I do find that KSP gets boring if there is nothing new to play around with, but the mod community goes a long way to solving that. Lately I've been playing with the Near Future stuff, and making nuclear-powered electric rockets using liquid hydrogen etc. has been a fun new twist.

[Bill Phil]

Dont worry ive been playing since .20 and i can only play sandbox. Career is dull and boring, i get bored of it before i get to high kerbin orbit.

IMHO career mode was the biggest mistake ever made, ksp as a sandbox game could of been so much more complete and have so many more included features it Squad hadn't wasted there time on the useless piece of spent SRB that career is. It is so damn repetitive.

Career mode is the star of the game. It's said on their site that they planned for a tycoon-style game.

Not to say that career can't use improvements...

Btw, I have nothing against Sandbox. It's great, but it isn't the main game mode.

[mikegarrison]

Career mode is the star of the game. It's said on their site that they planned for a tycoon-style game.

It's not uncommon, though, that tycoon games are more popular in their sandbox modes than they are as tycoon games. Did anybody ever really get jazzed up about Roller Coaster Tycoon because they cared about the economics of running an amusement park? No, it was always about building crazy roller coasters. And I used to play Railroad Tycoon II more for the fun of building and running a railroad than to make whatever career goals I was supposed to be worried about.

Still, the career mode of KSP could be enhanced significantly. There should be some end goals beyond "fill out the tech tree without going broke". Maybe that can be tied in to the contract system better. Or maybe, when you start a new career, you get a rousing speech from President John F. Kerman telling you that your goal is to land and return a Kerman from the Mun by the end of the year, and to orbit a Kerman around Jool before 10 years.

Or maybe the game needs more of what most tycoon games have, which are limited scenarios. You get a partially filled in tech tree, a starting amount of money, and six months time to land and return from Minmus. To beat that scenario you need to target a few more specific tech increases, make enough money to fund a Minmus mission, and then fly it.

Stuff like that.

[Robotengineer]

Finishing a game of KSP would be like Sisyphus finishing his task.

[Van Disaster]

Career mode is the star of the game. It's said on their site that they planned for a tycoon-style game.

Not to say that career can't use improvements...

Btw, I have nothing against Sandbox. It's great, but it isn't the main game mode.

Nope, I agree with that other guy. Career mode may have been meant to be the star of the game, but what it actually is is a uninspired grind instead of a magnificient and occasionally silly gradual opening up of space. I don't enjoy doing things just because they're there, I have to have fun too, and it might be a challenge but I certainly don't get any fun out of it. Science mode was so bad after all the expectations that when it did actually show up I just stopped playing.

Meanwhile in sandbox if you're capable of making your own goals you can get on with magnificent and really quite silly space logistics programs. What the entire game lacks is a reason to be anywhere for longer than 30s, which isn't just a sandbox issue.

I find it very had to finish a game because there isn't an end, you can always improve something and the timescales of this game's setting can make that very slow.

[Starwhip]

I just fiddle with stuff that floats into my head every once in a while, and I've never really "finished" a game. Just gotten bored and wandered off into Sandbox mode. Or Minecraft. Or Space Engineers, Skyrim, some online weird thing that I find.

[Thomas988]

I just fiddle with stuff that floats into my head every once in a while, and I've never really "finished" a game. Just gotten bored and wandered off into Sandbox mode. Or Minecraft. Or Space Engineers, Skyrim, some online weird thing that I find.

Same here too, Starwhip. I liked doing super serious sandbox and career saves back in the day, but I got out of that in about a year. Now I've been playing other games, like Space Engine or Seed of Andromeda, while sticking around here on the KSP forums.

[Wallygator]

I also agree with the other guy... Career mode is not balanced or much fun as it really is more of a grindfest. It is clearly a very deterministic play mode - you are forced to play as the tech tree demands. And the player is only allowed to breakout of it when playing sandbox.

Regardless "the end" really is where you make it. The end for me is usually when I crash (to desktop not ground) ;-)

EDIT: That said - I;m still playing KSP after 2 years. No longer recommending it to folks as I can't yet with an honest heart curse my friends with the heartbreak of a save gone bad due to memory leaks.

Edited April 17, 2015 by Wallygator

[r_rolo1]

Well, if career is supposed to actually be the star of the game, they really need to prop up their game. As it is at this point, we have fetch quests spam and a heavy bias against doing more than one flight at a time due to lack of proper schedule managing tools. And better not start on how can we have a space agency tycoon game where don't know how much dV a designed ship has ...

P.S. Also, we have a lack of a kerbonaut training school. Most tycoon games have benefits for cumulative experience, while in KSP career a kerbonaut can't learn from the other one in his side the magic arts of refilling tires that he learnt from going to Duna

Edited April 17, 2015 by r_rolo1

[Flayer]

Every patch, I just start a new career game and consider what I want to do. For 1.0, I am going to build an asteroid colony made out of at least 3 different asteroid put together with claws. Aside from that, I will build infrastructure to support said colony in space. This includes satellites to establish connections (with remotetech) and life support stuff. Obviously I will have to gather the required science to unlock all available technology. Once I've built my asteroid colony, I will put the game aside for a while. If I do return before a new patch comes out, I will figure out a new goal in that same save. Otherwise, I will start anew.

[Karriz]

I always play career for maybe a couple of weeks when a new version comes out, but then I just start waiting for the new version. Now that 1.0 is finally implementing a lot of the missing stuff, I hope I can start a long-time career save that'll work with future versions.

[timsfitz]

I've been on a KSP hiatus for a few months, but I've finished the tech tree numerous times. I've been waiting for resources and stuff so that there will be more to do.

[theend3r]

I also find the game less entertaining than before but that is understandble since I've played it for 100's of hours. Moreover in my opinion things were far more challenging before with more wobbly joints and smaller parts, so you had to design more intricate ships for things like Eve lander lifters or large Eeloo rover base tugs.

[el_coyoto]

Just a question to the OP: Whats an SSD install?

It means installing KSP on Solid State Drive disk, which are WAY faster than mechanical hard disks (the ones that produce a scratching noise when they work ).

It greatly speeds up KSP loading, especially with lots of mods.

On topic :

I tend to play career to unlock the tech tree (more or less consciously, it's more "once I have all the science, I can do whatever I want") and notice a lapse in my gameplay time once it's unlocked.

To rekindle the interest, I try set myself new goals, things I haven't done before or I add mods to my install.

Watching Scott Manley or what happens in this forum also helps find new things to do and places to go.

Edited April 17, 2015 by el_coyoto

[The Yellow Dart]

I have a hard time finishing games but it's because I am just a ridiculously slow, methodical player. Much slow than the rate updates come out at. I am like this in most sandbox games. For example, it took me about 8 years to finally finish ES: Oblivion. I think I did just about every possible side quest before advancing the Main Quest even a little. In KSP, on top of being to concerned with making crafts that look decent and real-world-feasible, I always feel like I am going to miss a launch window or encounter so I can never time warp foreword too far.