Honestly Disappointed....

[Icky]

why does this thread exist? hahaha

[Lisias]

16 hours ago, Devblaze said:

Hello everyone,

<…>

What are your thoughts on Kerbal Space Program 2 so far?

I can't say I'm disappointed because since the pandemics I'm resigned to cope to a lot of changes on Real Life™, most of them for the worst. And I'm convinced that this is not going to happen only to me, I don't expect my life to be better (or too much worse) than anyone else's.

So I kinda knew that KSP2 would have a somewhat bleak launching - people had too much high expectations for it (and I think I can include even the developers on this wagon). And I think this is OK- lots of things on my life didn't gone as I wanted, but some of them gone as I needed, so I'm counting my blesses. Sometimes it's not evident, but I'm deeply grateful to a lot of things that I didn't wanted to happen, but it happened anyway and they ended up being what I had needed to happen.

And I think KSP2 is going to be something like that - not what we want, but hopefully enough to fulfil what we need: consensus is not something that makes everybody happy, but something which makes nobody angry.

KSP1 started as a very humble game. It grown a lot in the process - not without a lot of pain. I expect KSP2 will do the same - it will, eventually, be a hell of a game in the same sense KSP1 became a hell of game nowadays - there's still an incredibly marvellous game buried on all that collection of bugs, and that's the reason I'm still digging on it.

“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work.
It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

Michelangelo

Coding is the same for me. It will eventually succeed, as long we keep digging.

 

12 hours ago, K^2 said:

Yes, but realistically, I think we're going to see a new generation of KSP Youtubers and streamers.

And hopefully modders too. The scene needs new blood, with more time to spend on a hobby and less desire on making this a "profession". KSP1 had a vibrant, colourful and intense modding scene in the early days - shifting to KSP2 without bringing all of that back will be way less attractive than otherwise.

Is KSP2 going to be an elitist scene like X-Plane or DSC, with add'ons made by companies and not rarely costing more than the game itself?

Or it's going to be fun and anarchic as KSP1 was in the beginning?

What's going to lure add'on developers to KSP2? Fun? Amusement? Self accomplishment? Or money? (money changes everything).

Are we going to need  to pay money in order to publish something around here?

This is concerning me more than anything else - the game itself, I KNOW will be fine as long the developers have time and resources enough - smaller teams with less resources managed to provide us with KSP1, I'm pretty sure these guys are more than skilled enough to do the same to KSP2. (mistakes will be made, the same way some already had been - but, hey, we are still alive and kicking, right?)

 

12 hours ago, Ekerci said:

There is nothing i like the game about in this stage. I'm not a graph guy but i wanted to see what's new, I only saw that interface is updated.

I like graphics, but I like playing more. I'm very, very impressed with games like Tiny Combat Arena and Juno: New Origins - they are incredibly fun to play even on a crappy machine like mine. And, yeah, I spent more money on software than on hardware - it's one of the reasons I didn't upgraded my rig yet!!

 

6 hours ago, Chilkoot said:

There's really no doubting Intercept's vision and enthusiasm and just plain belief in KSP 2.  However, they have been so focused on minutia like geologically "sound" planets, they may have poorly prioritized overall development, and now here we are at a late, arguably expensive, lukewarm release.

This came to my attention too. I'm guessing that these dudes took advantage of the initial momentum to get funding for things they knew will not be funded later once the money started to flow and the pointed egg heads smelled the incoming money.

It's a sad state of the industry the one we have for decades already: the "fake it until you make it" mantra is still on the vogue. Theres a lot of things you need to get fast, or you will not get them at all.

 

6 hours ago, Agustin said:

I think that the most and arguably the only problem I fear is the performance issue.

A fear the same.

I really enjoy (most of) the videos, and I liked most of the things I saw on KSP2 until this moment - but as much as I think I will enjoy the game itself (eventually), I enjoy eating and paid bills more. I'm on a budget, and the machine used by SWDennis on his KSP2 test drive would cost around a whole year of the minimal wage on my country - and all of that to get 20 fps?

I understand it was a beta (or even alpha) release of an early access game compiled in debug mode and all that jazz but… Gee… 20 fps on a machine that is way beyound the purchasing power of about 90% of the population of my country? This is not exactly the best way to get some money from the product right now: you can give the game for free, it will be of no use if people could not run it.

 

5 hours ago, p331083 said:

That might make some sense if this was 6 months from announcement to release but in case youve forgotten its been 3 1/2 years since KSP2 was announced.

I would deduce 18 months from it. Pandemics screwed everything, and on my line of duty, I closely overviewed the effects on a whole country. I have nightmares until nowadays due that (falling) numbers, wars didn't screwed things like that - and I know what I'm talking about.

 

5 hours ago, p331083 said:

I really dont understand why so many here are making every excuse in the world for a product that has every red flag possible.

Hope.  

 

5 hours ago, Kerbart said:

Granted, we have a good feeling what it will be, and if YT is an indication 75% of the players will ask Steam for a refund as they can't get the game to run on their PC,

IMHO, this is the real threat to this game. Everything else is just life being life and people doing what people do.

 

3 hours ago, Klapaucius said:

I did not hear any disappointment in Scott Manley, and I heard a lot of positive from Matt Lowne.

Manley doesn't talk anything that could detract the game since the developers complained to him in the past that he was making them look bad. Manley stopped to do things too bold since them (or, at least, it was what I perceived) to minimize crashes on his videos. So I pretty doubt he would criticise it openly on a video.

Lowne, well, this guy is a grown "kid' - on the most positive sense of it. It's one of the main reasons I had enjoyed this videos in the past - he is enthusiastic, contagiously enthusiastic. I doubt he even noticed any problem on KSP2 while playing, he was enjoying himself.  

Check ShadowZone and SWDenis. These ones are being pretty critical on the matter (also, on the most positive sense).

 

2 hours ago, GigFiz said:

3.5 years from announcement to release is a long time; 3.5 years from work starting to release really isn't, at all.

"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time."  

 

[Kevin Kyle]

Been waiting to play this since it was announced.......now I come to find out that I wont be playing at all. Dont even know if I ever will be able to the way things are going. My expectations are going down in a big ball of flames as I auger in at mach speed. Your thread title really does say it all.

[K^2]

6 hours ago, Jarin said:

See, you're completely correct, in a rational world. But corporate cost-cutting does not exist in a rational world. It exists in a world where someone who knows jack-all about actual development makes decisions based on the idea that some or all of the QA department can be outsourced to people who will pay them to do it.

I've worked on games under umbrellas of such greed-driven megacorps as Square Enix, WB Games, and Perfect World. Since I've managed engineering teams, I have both worked closely with QA and have seen some behind the scene figures that aren't public. In addition, I've talked to people who worked in QA under EA and ABK about their work evnironment. I don't recall anything specific about QA culture under Take Two, but I think at this point it's safe to extrapolate.

Under all of these corps, there is always a lot of pressure to keep the costs down, and I have seen cases of contracts with QA outsource studios that are just racketeering, causing them to work for a lot less than they ought to, but not a single one thought they can do without QA or that they can do less QA by opening up the game to more people. If they did, even for a second, every single game would be shipping with "Free to play until release," the moment the game hits beta. Because that would get the most "free QA".

The reason they don't do this is that you can't ship a game like this. Community feedback can be very valuable for some types of games, but it never replaces the QA. It can't. And without QA the game will tank. There is not a question. The refunds alone can cost the company so much money as to make an otherwise successful game a financial failure, and no corp is going to risk that. They are greedy, yes. And sometimes blind-sided because of that profit-first mode of operation, but they aren't stupid. People who run these corps are professional strategists and backstabbers. If one of them could show off the competition by getting "free QA" out of the public and blame previous losses on leadership that invested in QA, they'd do it in a second. They don't, because they know that anyone who tries to do away with QA will end up showing losses at the end of the year and that's tens of millions of lost bonuses for some of these people.