KSP2 Hype Train Thread

[darthgently]

Just now, Just a random person said:

Oh, I feel stupid now

No reason to feel stupid, I wasn't into KSP at that time and only know the trivia from some post I read here or elsewhere

[PopinFRESH]

16 hours ago, darthgently said:

So far, I'm mostly sticking to my pitch-drop-eoFY2022 theory.  So early access in late February could easily accommodate a science non-sandbox-enhanced release by end of FY 2022 in late March. I'm hoping the interval is that short. 

That would be Fiscal Year 2023. Fiscal Year 2022 was from April 1st 2021 - March 31st 2022.

I'm also with MachBFP that I'd put more weight / faith into that being the case if all of the prior communication wasn't contextually implying that the full, feature complete, game would be released at launch; e.g. in early 2023 as of the previously most recent delay. I'd also have put more credence in that notion if they had shown any evidence of that being the case in the EA video, along with providing some actual context to what we should be expecting in terms of cadence for those feature milestones.

Quote

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“KSP 2 will stay in Early Access until we feel that the game and its full feature set are at our desired level of quality. Check out our roadmap above for our planned feature releases and make sure to follow our social channels for further information on timing of updates.”

While the spirt of this is nice, in my opinion it rings hallow when coming a few months after a delay announcement that had the implication that the game was mostly feature complete and needed a bit more time to "push towards the finish line". 

And as others have said, I'm not "upset" that it will now be an early access release. I'm significantly disappointed at the poor communication and the very limited scale of what has been said to be coming at the release of EA considering their prior communications. This announcement does not inspire any confidence that we will see a feature complete version of the game anytime in 2023.

[Turtlegirl1209]

4 hours ago, PopinFRESH said:

While the spirt of this is nice, in my opinion it rings hallow when coming a few months after a delay announcement that had the implication that the game was mostly feature complete and needed a bit more time to "push towards the finish line". 

I'm excited for ksp 2's release, but I agree that they should have told us earlier about their intent to make early access versions available. For a really long time we were under the impression that on launch day we would have a complete game. Based on what was said in their video, they've been planning early access for a long while (I think it's a perfectly reasonable explination of why 2020 was the original release date). But, having one's expectations set for a complete game, and having ones expectaions set for an early access version are completley diffrent and I think the team's small faliure in managing these expectations is what's generating dissapointment.

4 hours ago, PopinFRESH said:

This announcement does not inspire any confidence that we will see a feature complete version of the game anytime in 2023.

Yeah, the EA announcment had me thinking.

When the first trailer came out, my reaction was something along the lines of:

"Oh boy! KSP 2 will be out by the time I finish middle school!"

After the most recent delay, the fact the "it'll be coming to consoles later", and now with the release being EA meaning 1.0 and a console release likely wont be until 2024, possibly mid-year even, now my thinking is more along the lines of:

"oh boy, ksp 2 only might be out by the time I graduate high school..."

[t_v]

I just realized, we are 4 months away from release today! Hype!

[regex]

Reading these posts just confirms to me that developers should never, ever mention any dates or promise any features whatsoever.

[SSTO Crasher]

Here’s another thing. If you all are really so upset about early access, you shouldn’t not play it, you should put good time into it, find out what’s wrong with it, and communicate it. Don’t just sit around whining all day about ea even though you have barely played it. The point of ea is to let the devs know what to improve and what to work on.  So lets tell them, in a United voice “devs, we want colonies, interstellar, and multiplayer, they should be the top priority”

[Pthigrivi]

All that really matters to me is how good the product is at the end of the day--solid performance, improved interface, and good gameplay. Im already loving some of the changes they've made to the VAB, HUD, and map view. Hopefully this will follow on with performance improvements. There are always going to be bugs but at least this process makes them easier to iron out system by system. The main thing, and the reason Im honestly happier to see a staged EA process over a whole-hog release, is it allows us to take on and give feedback on each system individually.  If when science comes out the pacing feels too fast or too slow or we're hoping for more streamlining of experiments or whatever the case may be there will be a few months to just talk about that, and so on with colonies, interstellar, and resource gathering. Im not a person who takes "promises" or marketing personally or even seriously. I just don't personally care about the politics or the optics. I care that at the end of the day KSP2 is the best game it can be and this is a really smart way to make that happen. If the devs are committed to that, and they certainly seem so, then thats good enough for me.

Edited October 24, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, regex said:

Reading these posts just confirms to me that developers should never, ever mention any dates or promise any features whatsoever.

Releasing info is scary, an concept art for Elder scroll 4 Oblivion has an armored man riding with an drawn sword. Community reaction: Mounted combat confirmed , turned out it had horses but not mounted combat. 
 

[darthgently]

7 hours ago, PopinFRESH said:

That would be Fiscal Year 2023. Fiscal Year 2022 was from April 1st 2021 - March 31st 2022

Ok.  Corps can define their own fiscal year so was not certain

[whatsEJstandfor]

15 hours ago, TheOrbitalMechanic said:

Yup. Everybody's excited to be finally getting something, but this is a delay announcement disguised as a release.

I think this is exactly it. My guess is that Intercept really wasn't satisfied yet with the state of the late-game features or with multiplayer, but T2 is kind of forcing their hand because their last few earnings reports had shown that KSP2 would release by early 2023. T2 needs to start getting some ROI on this project, and they probably gave Intercept an ultimatum: release the game in a good enough state to start making money by April 2023.

I think, if Intercept had their way, they would have preferred to delay another several months to a year and release a finished product. Intercept is saying this is a way to get feedback on the core gameplay prior to polishing the late-game, but I see it as more of a compromise arising from studio politics. I mean, I'm certain they will greatly value the feedback and will make adjustments based on it. I just don't buy that that's the reason it's coming to EA.

To clarify, while I was disappointed at first, I don't really care that much anymore. I've wanted to play this game in whatever unfinished state it's been in for the last 3 years, so this is really just me getting my wish 

Edited October 24, 2022 by whatsEJstandfor

[RealKerbal3x]

On 10/11/2022 at 2:17 AM, Minmus Taster said:

Dude if this mad lad is right either by his crazy theory or sheer luck then I think we owe them a moment of thought when we finally get the date confirmed:

I don't think anyone has yet mentioned that this estimate was only two days from being correct.

@whatsEJstandfor I believe this was you, in which case, fantastic job!

[whatsEJstandfor]

1 minute ago, RealKerbal3x said:

I don't think anyone has yet mentioned that this estimate was only two days from being correct.

@whatsEJstandfor I believe this was you, in which case, fantastic job!

lmao with the amount of predictions I've made, one of them was bound to be close. I'm surprised it was the one that was purely meant to be a joke, but I'll take it!

[RealKerbal3x]

1 minute ago, whatsEJstandfor said:

lmao with the amount of predictions I've made, one of them was bound to be close. I'm surprised it was the one that was purely meant to be a joke, but I'll take it!

Given how close you were, I wouldn't be surprised if the hex colour of that folder was actually ffdd24, but lighting conditions in the video caused the slight error.

[Pthigrivi]

20 minutes ago, whatsEJstandfor said:

I think, if Intercept had their way, they would have preferred to delay another several months to a year and release a finished product. Intercept is saying this is a way to get feedback on the core gameplay prior to polishing the late-game, but I see it as more of a compromise arising from studio politics. I mean, I'm certain they will greatly value the feedback and will make adjustments based on it. I just don't buy that that's the reason it's coming to EA.

Im not so sure this is true. Im sure there is pressure from the studio on timing and revenue but KSP2 is a really immensely complicated and novel game. I think we all feel pretty confident that the core structure is solid--building lego rockets and flying them--but even on that front they've made a huge number of underlying structural improvements (multiple subassemblies, procedural parts, soi and maneuver node improvements, etc.) KSP1's science and career structure was playable, but certainly left room for major rethinking, so that whole system is going to be nearly from scratch. Same with colonies, Interstellar, and resources. Each one of these is as complicated as whole games in other genres. Even if they had the time and resources to boil off the lions share of major bugs you're dealing with a huge number of design assumptions in each category that may be wildly off compared to how players actually play, and dumping the entire project on them at once is very likely to result in months or years of disentangling balance and structural issues anyway before everything was really dialed in. This just gives a much more thorough and manageable process to meld the game into something thats really fun and robust, and a bit more transparency that that's what players should expect. 

Edited October 24, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[pss88]

2 hours ago, SSTO Crasher said:

you shouldn’t not play it, you should put good time into it, find out what’s wrong with it, and communicate it. Don’t just sit around whining all day about ea even though you have barely played it. The point of ea is to let the devs know what to improve and what to work on.

Will they pay me to do it?

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

26 minutes ago, pss88 said:

Will they pay me to do it?

No - they're offering a discount to all of us who do participate in EA.

My value proposition, however, isn't about the money.  I've wanted access - including asking for EA last December - since I started hoping the 'coming soon' stuff was accurate.  So to me, the real value is getting to play a revamped KSP... and as a long-time player... I'm perfectly OK with a less-than-feature-complete version... as I have relative certainty that my enjoyment of the game will only grow as it gets expanded.

[regex]

1 hour ago, pss88 said:

Will they pay me to do it?

The whole "unpaid QA" argument is pretty baseless because early access is an opt-in for-access scheme. You can choose not to buy early and patiently wait for the finished product. You can even buy early and not report anything; no one's forcing you to fill out a QA report. You can also circumvent their auto-reporting process if you want, prevent the app from reaching out and just deny them any information from you at all.

But honestly you should be thankful for the people who do enjoy (or just don't mind) making the game better and helping test it on the myriad hardware and software configurations that exist out there. They're very much a crucial part of making the game as good as it can be.

Edited October 24, 2022 by regex

[TheSaint]

4 hours ago, regex said:

Reading these posts just confirms to me that developers should never, ever mention any dates or promise any features whatsoever.

They probably would have been better off not announcing the sequel at all until release day. At least from a mental health perspective.

[Kerbart]

6 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Im not so sure this is true. I'm sure there is pressure from the studio on timing and revenue but KSP2 is a really immensely complicated and novel game.[...] KSP1's science and career structure was playable, but certainly left room for major rethinking, so that whole system is going to be nearly from scratch. Same with colonies, Interstellar, and resources. Each one of these is as complicated as whole games in other genres. [...]

100%. Without the knowledge of this being the case (we have 2023 for that), I suspect this is exactly what makes development hard. Those complaining that it takes so long are looking at the sandbox game, figure the optimizations to run more parts and things looking pretty are already there, so what's taking so long.

To conceptualize that, consider the classic Harvest [x] kg of resources on the surface of [y] and bring it to Kerbin. We all know that after mining the resources all you need to do is put a ship on the launchpad with the right amount and walla. So, when designing the data structures that represent ships and their cargo, you need some way of tagging the load so this trick won't work. Fix that, and two weeks later someone discovers an unintended consequence of the fix put in place. (Once you completed the first 90% of the work you discover that the rest is the other 90% of the work...)

This is not GTA5 or Fallout 4. It's the 2nd release of a complex game that had serious issues on both the technical design and the gameplay, and both of them needed to be redone from scratch to a large extend. Why people think this is a routine process with perfectly dependable timelines remains a mystery to me.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

13 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

Why people think this is a routine process with perfectly dependable timelines remains a mystery to me

I hear you.  Most of the FPS titles that go blockbuster are literally reskins of the previous game, maybe (MAYBE) with some new mechanics thrown in. 

Very, very rarely do you hear of ANY follow up that gets a new engine, much less a total revamp and update. 

Edited October 24, 2022 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[Pthigrivi]

10 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Very, very rarely do you hear of ANY follow up that gets a new engine, much less a total revamp and update. 

Not to mention "Oh by the by we also need to design a physics-based low-key city builder with resource chains and automated supply runs to make colonies and resources work."

[Rutabaga22]

18 hours ago, Serenity said:

the window you are suggesting

They haven't given a window and I doubt they will suggest a window until a week or 2 before they release the update.

[Kerbart]

5 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Not to mention "Oh by the by we also need to design a physics-based low-key city builder with resource chains and automated supply runs to make colonies and resources work."

How hard can it be?

[Rutabaga22]

Too many people saying good things! Might run out  of likes soon.

[Superluminal Gremlin]

46 minutes ago, Rutabaga22 said:

Might run out  of likes soon

NOT AGAIN

 

Ok i have an observation and a question

1. In the roadmap, on the card which is almost completely obscured, there IS something drawn on it. Dont know what it is, but i hope its good

2. How many more stock parts do you reckon we will have on the very first early access release? The same? more? less?