Release Date Update from the KSP2 Team

[Catto]

1 hour ago, Angel-125 said:

Take your time guys! Better to have a complete and polished game that took longer than expected than to have one that's rushed and buggy. At least I know I'll have time to finish up the mods on my plate.

Yup. Can't wait for buffalo 2.

[PopinFRESH]

7 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Because it tries to imply that a game set for release in 5 months...

You keep saying this like it was announced with a specific release date, specifically like it was announced to launch in January 2020. The only thing I've seen from the original announcement was "Lithobraking Near You in 2020". Am I missing something where they announced a more specific date than this?

If I haven't missed the announcement of a specific January 2020 date, given it was announced in August 2019  for launch in 2020 that would be anywhere from 5 - 17 months for their originally expected launch window. I think you are ascribing a January 2020 date to imply some fictitious level of progress or state of the game in order to strawman "they knew they needed 3 years instead of 5 months to release" and that their initial expected release date couldn't have possibly been impacted by covid.

The reality is in August 2019 they gave themselves a release window of up to 17 months when the game was announced

In May 2020 after moving studios and being forced to adapt to remote work due to lockdowns they announced a new target of "Fall 2021", again a window of about 17 months.

In November 2020, just 6 months later, they announced the delay to a release window of 2022.

That sequence of events seems to me like they responded fairly quickly to the studio changes and the covid lockdowns and punted what they thought would be a reasonable amount of time. After 6 months of experiencing the impact of being in lockdown they reassessed their estimated timeline based on their throughput over the prior 6 months and decided to reforecast it to 2022.

To me this sounds like a responsible developer. I'd be far more skeptical if those circumstances were different, or if they waited until the very end of 2020 to push it back to 2021 and then waited until the very end of 2021 to push it back to 2022, and then waited until the very end of 2022 to push it back to 2023.

Edited May 18, 2022 by PopinFRESH

[Vl3d]

16 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Now, where do the other 2 years come from?

Multiplayer and creative work probably. Check the wish list.

But the truth is we just don't know what this game will be. Nothing really new and of significance has been revealed, compared to KSP1 + mods.

As some point we will either love it or hate it. I really don't expect good communication practices anymore. The delay was announced literally at the last possible moment before we found out from the corporate documents. That's not very nice. Anyway...

Edited May 18, 2022 by Vl3d

[MechBFP]

1 hour ago, Vl3d said:

The delay was announced literally at the last possible moment before we found out from the corporate documents. That's not very nice.

The time line for KSP2 was very likely in discussions up until the last possible moment from the business process side. They likely left the public announcement until the last possible minute from the PR side just to protect themselves for an executive deciding to flip-flop on their decision last minute.  (Because that never happens, hahahaha). 

[Superfluous J]

10 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

We need to stop perpetuating the myth that delay = better product

So long as we also drop the myth that deadline missed = you are an incompetent fool who should not be making anything little alone something as important as a video game

[PDCWolf]

29 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

So long as we also drop the myth that deadline missed = you are an incompetent fool who should not be making anything little alone something as important as a video game

I never said they were incompetent, my words were that a deadline missed means there's a problem, either in the process or its management, you don't miss deadlines just because "you wanna make it good", as making it good is part of the plan for which the deadline was set in the first place, and that deadline usually includes some level of tolerance for imponderables as well.

[Pthigrivi]

2 hours ago, MechBFP said:

The time line for KSP2 was very likely in discussions up until the last possible moment from the business process side. They likely left the public announcement until the last possible minute from the PR side just to protect themselves for an executive deciding to flip-flop on their decision last minute.  (Because that never happens, hahahaha). 

Take Two is also a publicly traded company in a relatively volatile marketplace. We're probably headed toward a (hopefully mild) recession in the next 6 months and capital is moving to safe harbors or big returns on easy gambles. Then there's that whole SEC thing which Im not particularly an expert on. Needless to say any public announcement by Intercept has to be cleared. 

[PopinFRESH]

3 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

I never said they were incompetent, my words were that a deadline missed means there's a problem, either in the process or its management...

That is also a myth, especially when forecasting out more than a year in the future on a large and/or complex project. There are a plethora of valid reasons for various portions of the forecasting to exceed the anticipated duration (including factoring in some buffer) which are neither a problem with the process or the project management. Several of these have already been discussed including expanding scope, unforeseen external events, etc.

[Terrestris]

Sadly, I can see people's love start to turn into hate ... 

[Redneck]

I told ya it wasnt going to be released in 2022 didnt i? @Nate Simpsonhow about some news on multiplayer. Can you talk any about this? A screenshot a couple of words on it?  Please give us a little reassurance that take two wont do what squad did and promise multiplayer then not deliver. Multiplayer will be a part of base game correct?

Edited May 19, 2022 by Redneck

[RayneCloud]

17 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

I never said they were incompetent, my words were that a deadline missed means there's a problem, either in the process or its management, you don't miss deadlines just because "you wanna make it good", as making it good is part of the plan for which the deadline was set in the first place, and that deadline usually includes some level of tolerance for imponderables as well.

I have no idea what to say to this, other than, this reads like someone whose never worked on a single software or game project before. 

[darthgently]

On 5/18/2022 at 10:44 AM, PDCWolf said:

We need to stop perpetuating the myth that delay = better product

We need to stop perpetuating the myth that we know what is happening and that it is not what we've been told and that the reports we've gotten are some kind of conspiracy to fool us into something or other. 

We've been told things are moving along throughout pandemics, corporate tectonics, dev team square dancing, and have been told about additional features not originally planned for;  all of these things are going to equate to some delay.  Any number of people who actually work on projects like this have stated that this is all fairly "normal" as unpleasant as it may be.  There is zero reason to perpetuate the "worst case scenario".  

Creating things takes time.  The more work involved the more time involved.  Delay does sometimes equal better.  But the bottom line is that we either trust the reports we've gotten, or we invent a counter narrative out of imaginary fabric with zero basis in anything that somehow dovetails with a worst case scenario (or close to it).  I'm finding the counter narrative a bit dramatic and not well founded for my tastes.  I can just tune it out but thought I'd at least get that into the thread before going about other things again

[Frank_G]

Thank you for the update! Take all the time you need, to make KSP2 the gem it deserves to be!  

[Bej Kerman]

On 5/16/2022 at 11:36 PM, joratto said:

On 5/16/2022 at 6:10 PM, Acid_Burn9 said:

Better to delay the game than cyberpunk it. Good call.

Cyberpunk was ultimately delayed for longer than KSP2 and it still cyberpunked it. More time does not necessarily yield proportionally better results. Especially not if increasingly-serious deadlines lead to bad working conditions, or if the eventual product fails to live up to an impossibly over-hyped standard.

For the game's own sake, I would prefer if the game wasn't delayed any longer.

KSP isn't being developed by the Cyberpunk devs though. You can't say they're in similar situations.

[BowlerHatGuy3]

2 hours ago, RayneCloud said:

I have no idea what to say to this, other than, this reads like someone whose never worked on a single software or game project before. 

Have you?

[TheOrbitalMechanic]

1 hour ago, BowlerHatGuy2 said:

Have you?

Her signature would certainly suggest as much.

[RayneCloud]

2 hours ago, BowlerHatGuy2 said:

Have you?

Yes. 4. Kebral Space Program. Legends of Aethereus. Heliborne. Grumpy Witch. I am also in talks to become a Senior Community and Media Relations manager for the US arm of a AAA studio tomorrow morning. Also, all four of the projects I worked on were Unity Engine projects. I've also done QA/Testing and been a QA Lead, again, for Kerbal Space PRogram, for which I was one of the people who started the Experimental Testing Team and Media Teams for the game whose forums you are on asking me this as you seem to have not read my signature.

[Redneck]

4 hours ago, darthgently said:

We need to stop perpetuating the myth that we know what is happening and that it is not what we've been told and that the reports we've gotten are some kind of conspiracy to fool us into something or other. 

We've been told things are moving along throughout pandemics, corporate tectonics, dev team square dancing, and have been told about additional features not originally planned for;  all of these things are going to equate to some delay.  Any number of people who actually work on projects like this have stated that this is all fairly "normal" as unpleasant as it may be.  There is zero reason to perpetuate the "worst case scenario".  

Creating things takes time.  The more work involved the more time involved.  Delay does sometimes equal better.  But the bottom line is that we either trust the reports we've gotten, or we invent a counter narrative out of imaginary fabric with zero basis in anything that somehow dovetails with a worst case scenario (or close to it).  I'm finding the counter narrative a bit dramatic and not well founded for my tastes.  I can just tune it out but thought I'd at least get that into the thread before going about other things again

Sorry but i can not do that! The absence of information regarding multiplayer in ksp2  is non existent other than “multiplayer is planned “ but then again they said same thing with ksp1 and it didnt happen AFTER i had already bought it

[darthgently]

5 minutes ago, Redneck said:

Sorry but i can not do that!

I just fall back on the fact that it is a game.  Works for me

[starcaptain]

I too am in support of the "as long as it takes" timeline.

[GrapeInvaders]

37 minutes ago, starcaptain said:

I too am in support of the "as long as it takes" timeline.

Thankfully we can all physics warp from time to time by sleeping.

[PDCWolf]

9 hours ago, RayneCloud said:

I have no idea what to say to this, other than, this reads like someone whose never worked on a single software or game project before. 

I think we'd both agree that deadlines are missed for a reason and not just sport or tradition. That's as much as I have implied. 

9 hours ago, darthgently said:

We need to stop perpetuating the myth that we know what is happening and that it is not what we've been told and that the reports we've gotten are some kind of conspiracy to fool us into something or other. 

We've been told things are moving along throughout pandemics, corporate tectonics, dev team square dancing, and have been told about additional features not originally planned for;  all of these things are going to equate to some delay.  Any number of people who actually work on projects like this have stated that this is all fairly "normal" as unpleasant as it may be.  There is zero reason to perpetuate the "worst case scenario".  

Creating things takes time.  The more work involved the more time involved.  Delay does sometimes equal better.  But the bottom line is that we either trust the reports we've gotten, or we invent a counter narrative out of imaginary fabric with zero basis in anything that somehow dovetails with a worst case scenario (or close to it).  I'm finding the counter narrative a bit dramatic and not well founded for my tastes.  I can just tune it out but thought I'd at least get that into the thread before going about other things again

No. We've not been told anything about features not mentioned since 2019. Other than that, we've been told a lot of things that fall into the same hole as Breaking Ground robotics fixes and multiplayer for KSP1. People have already been brought to buy stuff under promises that were not fulfilled. Now sure, we're in the official forum, if anything this is the one place were people would gladly overlook that. Further on, there's another lot of things we've been told, but if it was just for saying stuff, I've got a crate of snake oil that needs a buyer.

There's already reasons to not trust mouth-only reports, to not trust delays, and to not trust any release date. Whether you want to look the other way is up to you, but at least don't try to sound as if complaints and doubts are unfounded.

[Superfluous J]

The best part is, when (if?) the game does come out, some people will hate it because something they wanted isn't in it or doesn't work, and some people will love it because it's exactly what they wanted or at least close enough to make them happy.

So in a way we'll all be right!

[Lisias]

11 hours ago, RayneCloud said:

I have no idea what to say to this, other than, this reads like someone whose never worked on a single software or game project before. 

I hate to say that, but I have too. On the pretty old days of the Siemens Mobile, I had worked on what I think may be one of the first A.R. games for mobiles, a thingy called Cuddly Combat. It was the first 3D game for the Siemens SX-1 for sure.

And we had a budget, and we had a deadline, and the Siemens Mobile's CTO (I think, don't remember exactly his position - Germans have different hierarchical structure) more than once explained to us (sometimes, on the most German way possible.  ) that the constant delays we were having were costing them money and that besides the project was essentially P&D, some results were expected anyway.

We ended up delivering it, but yeah, we was being pressured for results.

If you never felt the pressure of a deadline or a budget, be absolutely sure that you was shielded by your boss. You own him a beer.  

 

Edited May 20, 2022 by Lisias
better phrasing

[Vl3d]

10 hours ago, RayneCloud said:

I am also in talks to become a Senior Community and Media Relations manager for the US arm of a AAA studio tomorrow morning.

Respect to you sir. Please allow me to ask for your opinion:

How do you think

1) the lack of transparency regarding key architectural features of the game (like multiplayer)

2) the lack of investment towards community growth

3) going month(s) without news about the game and the lack of gameplay videos

reflects on Private Division's Communication and Marketing department?

Also, if the game launches in early 2023, when can we expect the much anticipated reveal of the game feature set? Because most of us have no idea what type of game KSP2 will be and I personally believe it will and should be persistent world massively multiplayer.

Edited May 20, 2022 by Vl3d