NO CAREER MODE or Money planned for game

[Picard2]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

I think all we know is that you'll have to do the resource run first yourself (the flying bit being what makes it KSP), that it'll work in principle for any vehicle, rovers, planes, even interstellar vessels. We don't know though whether the repeat vessels will be physically modeled and flying around or more abstract. Though I think the latter could be really cool it poses some problems and I kind of suspect the resource transfers will be more virtual. I do hope though that scheduling repeat supply runs considers transfer windows and dV costs, and that the deliveries come in lump-sums based on those timings. That shouldn't be wildly difficult. Everything would be known about the route on the back-end and the game itself could suggest repeat rates based on flight duration. 

Thanks! Yeah I agree seeing the automated ships actually flying around and stuff sounds amazing but probably not realistic (and maybe not a ton of value relative to expense after the excitement of the first few times of recognising your design inbound from Duna). Scheduling and stuff seems like it would need to be a must have - seeing your carefully designed exploration vehicles be unable to launch for nine months because you forgot to order in a new convoy probably wouldn't be a great time.

[RocketRockington]

4 hours ago, Kerbart said:

I try to be upbeat, but my imagination on what it will be has taken a bit of a dark turn since February 24. I hope it will be great but there seems to be a wide chasm between the picture that Nate and his merry men paint, and what we are getting. I really hope that's not the case with progression/explorer/belter mode.

Yeah I'm also extremely skeptical of anything the devs have said at this point.

I also think there are some serious design issues with a resource system - namely, what to do with KSC rockets.  If you have to collect resources to launch a rocket at KSC - that sounds just exceedingly dumb.  Am I meant to set up iron smelters and copper mines next to KSC?   Even if, for KSC, that's abstracted away, it seems weird for the space center to be waiting till I get enough aluminium to build my rocket.

Conversely though, if rockets I build at KSC are 'free', with no resource cost - there's nothing to stop me from building a titanic rocket (besides KSP2s borked up performance :P) using the biggest parts, for any job.  The tyranny of the rocket equation gets turned on it's head as now you should always do all work on the ground at KSC because stuff is free.

[Kerbart]

26 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

Yeah I'm also extremely skeptical of anything the devs have said at this point.

I also think there are some serious design issues with a resource system - namely, what to do with KSC rockets.  If you have to collect resources to launch a rocket at KSC - that sounds just exceedingly dumb.  Am I meant to set up iron smelters and copper mines next to KSC?   Even if, for KSC, that's abstracted away, it seems weird for the space center to be waiting till I get enough aluminium to build my rocket.

At this point everything is mere conjecture. It seems logical that Kerbin has an ample supply of basic materials used for standard rocket parts, and you don't have to actively mine them, they're just there (likely brought in by boat, train and/or truck). However some of the higher performance engines require unobtanium that has to be mined on the moon.

In itself it's not so weird that you have to wait for enough material to be collected to build rockets; Werner von Braun had to deal with that issue all the time with his early rockets. I just hope that it doesn't turn into a resource allocation game.

[Pthigrivi]

3 hours ago, RocketRockington said:

Even if, for KSC, that's abstracted away, it seems weird for the space center to be waiting till I get enough aluminium to build my rocket.

We'll have to wait to see what they have in mind of course but having a fuel/resource building at KSC that fills over time isn't that weird. Real space ports like Boca Chica have fuel farms. They have warehouses where materials and components arrive and are stored. It's just that dealing with specific vendor contracts is boring gameplay so its abstracted away. It solves the balance problem you point out in your last sentence while avoiding game-bricking failure states. It introduces new players to the concept of resource costs early without bogging down the first few hours with setting up resource collection on Kerbin. If the KSC resource stockpile has a cap then early on the sky isn't the limit, and if it can be upgraded with science later on it provides some interesting strategic decisions for the player vis-a-vis launching bigger and bigger things from Kerbin or investing more heavily in a live-off-the-land strategy.

Edited March 9, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[RocketRockington]

24 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

We'll have to wait to see what they have in mind of course but having a fuel/resource building at KSC that fills over time isn't that weird. Real space ports like Boca Chica have fuel farms. They have warehouses where materials and components arrive and are stored. It's just that dealing with specific vendor contracts is boring gameplay so its abstracted away. It solves the balance problem you point out in your last sentence while avoiding game-bricking failure states. It introduces new players to the concept of resource costs early without bogging down the first few hours with setting up resource collection on Kerbin. If the KSC resource stockpile has a cap then early on the sky isn't the limit, and if it can be upgraded with science later on it provides some interesting strategic decisions for the player vis-a-vis launching bigger and bigger things from Kerbin or investing more heavily in a live-off-the-land strategy.

That's a very reasonable design, except... time warp.  It makes sense if time is a real commodity in the game, but in KSP it typically isn't since missions can be of such widely divergent game clock times.  One of the reasons that 'playing against the clock' in KSP1 career was really boring is because you'd end up grinding really boring contracts in Kerbin SOI over and over vs more difficult/interesting ones on other planets.

So yeah - if you add some sort of time constraint, that design would track.  But if you can 100,000x time warp and fill all your resource buffers, it falls down as a gameplay loop.   Maybe something interesting to do with resource caps?  That still has the issue that you'd never build anything but the biggest sizes your caps allowed for.  

Its all speculation of course, but this is at least more interesting speculation than my typical one with KSP2

Edited March 9, 2023 by RocketRockington

[Superfluous J]

I'm not big on the game having a failure state, so punishing the player for time warping for 8 years just 'cuz is distasteful to me. Also, most "do something every x days" mechanisms are easily worked around by putting a capsule on the pad and recovering it, turning your simple time warp into a penalty-free grind fest. Which is also pretty distasteful to me.

I do think time should be a resource in the game, but I don't know how it should be done. Hopefully the professional game designers thought of something.

[Cailean_556]

On 3/9/2023 at 12:37 AM, caipi said:

So, I'm gonna play a space rocket game that starts with having to explore and mine the home world before I can start exploring the Müns and other planets?! That might be fun for the first playthrough, maybe the second as well. But I think it'll get in the way of restarting the game pretty quick! I don't know how many career modes I've started in KSP 1, but I know that the digits on my hands and fingers weren't enough to count them anymore. Mods made this game so enjoyable and so diverse. I already hated the first few slow steps in KSP1, having done them so many times.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the first unmanned flights and even researching and testing planes the first few times - once or maybe twice. But this isn't what kept pulling me back to this game over and over and over (etc.) again.

As for your last statement: It depends on how it'll be implemented. We'll see. Unfortunately, right now I'm not very optimistic because many of the things I'm seeing so far feel like the devs haven't played too much KSP1 as there are too many disimprovements and missing crucial basic feature - even for an EA. It feels like they have a vision of what the game should be - with only a single story mission and single playthrough in mind. It doesn't feel like they are experienced die-hard fans who really enjoyed all aspects and the rich diversity of the game and what it can be. But now I start to digress. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Though for now, I'm still on the verge of refunding my EA. Let's see what the next or next two updates bring and where things are heading.

Well, if you're following a logical progression path then yes you will explore and mine the "homeworld" before you can explore the other planets/stars. If I was to hazard a guess, I would probably have a strong argument that Kerbin is the most unexplored planet in the Kerbolar system in KSP1. So if KSP2 bucks that trend and we spend a little more time putting up satellites to map Kerbin and understand that planet before we go to the Mun and beyond, and repeat the approach, I think we'd all be better for it. And, like you, I have also started and restarted quite a number of Career modes - except I do so without mods. If you don't want to follow the full "career mode" path - that's literally what the Sandbox mode is for. Or if you want the campaign minus the "hard stuff" at the start, you'll (hopefully) be able to slider-and-checkbox your way around those starting "first few slow steps".

I would also assume that, like KSP1, when starting a new "career mode" (Exploration mode?) campaign in KSP2 you would be able to select what you do and don't have access to via sliders and check boxes - as that "softened the blow" of starting a new campaign in KSP1 and having to build the same 3 mystery goo canister carrying Mk1 pod with a Flea SRB and maybe some winglets and a parachute EVERY, DAMN, TIME you started a new campaign... Unless you're a glutton for punishment. Like I am with KSP. I very rarely tweaked my starting resources to give myself a leg up - the rate at which I gained resources, on the other hand - those I tweaked. Especially Funds.

Even if it is a single story, how does that affect replayability? How do games like KOTOR and Mass Effect  - which all have a common ending - get replayed time and time again? It's the *players'* mindset and approach that sets each playthrough apart. Plus, when you restart, I guarantee you, you build your "first few" rockets differently than from your very first playthrough - because you've learned new skills, which changes the outcome - by becoming arguably more efficient and/or streamlined.

As for a single playthrough approach, considering they're going to be adding more than a few star systems I believe we'll have hundreds of hours (even with time compression) if we play a career mode from start to finish. If there's even a quantifiable "finish/end" to KSP2.

While I will admit my impressions of KSP2 are...less than I had hoped...I'm not considering a refund, nor would I as I no longer meet the requirements for one having played KSP2 for more than 2 hours and having owned it for more than 2 weeks. I'm not as concerned about FPS, this isn't a shooter or twitch-based game after all, but I am concerned about putting heavy payloads (thus requiring heavy, large rockets with complex fuel usage, multiple engines and stages) in space and being able to reliably circularise an orbit and/or dock, and reliably navigate between celestial objects. I am, however, also quite interested to see what the first patch brings/fixes. While I'm not expecting it to address all of the issues straight off the bat, I would like to see it address the majority of issues that we have in KSP2 that aren't in KSP1.

Edited March 11, 2023 by Cailean_556

[goehler]

I too really hope that the Adventure mode will be a new take on Career mode, and not just Science mode. I've only ever enjoyed Career mode.

Science mode and Sandbox just feels like cheating. No real challenge, which gets boring really quickly.

[Wheehaw Kerman]

On 2/25/2023 at 6:54 PM, RaBDawG said:

Soooooo WTH lol?  There will be no monetary constraints on what you can build, just science progression.   I literally only play Career mode in KSP

How tf do they leave that out?!?

https://steamcommunity.com/app/954850/discussions/0/3772364949848937904/

Yup.  We knew.  And likewise, but I am very optimistic that Adventure Mode will be a major improvement over Career Mode - as much of an improvement over it as KSP2 EA is over the early versions of KSP.  

They ditched Career Mode because frankly, it wasn’t that great.  Annoying procedural contracts, the tourist contracts were easily and massively exploitable, and it just kinda peters out without endgame.

[Hanuman]

3 hours ago, Wheehaw Kerman said:

Yup.  We knew.  And likewise, but I am very optimistic that Adventure Mode will be a major improvement over Career Mode - as much of an improvement over it as KSP2 EA is over the early versions of KSP.  

They ditched Career Mode because frankly, it wasn’t that great.  Annoying procedural contracts, the tourist contracts were easily and massively exploitable, and it just kinda peters out without endgame.

I disagree vehemently.   I prefer the procedural contracts, myself.  Yes, tourist contracts are massively exploitable.  But not because of error.  But because this isn't exactly a hard game in that fashion.  In the way that you're looking for, it's only as hard as you make it on yourself which is kind of the entire point.  The procedural contracts would come up with situations that no handwritten contracts ever will,  with lots of them being kinda dumb and we can get annoyed at wading through the bad ones.  That doesn't make the idea bad.  I'd prefer the random than having my replay variability stripped out by using 100% handcrafted missions.  Imagine how boring THAT would be the 80th time through the exact same thing in the exact same order.

I hope that they do a version of the classic career mode, with funds and science, and I don't feel like that's too much to ask for.   These were to me, the boring parts distilled down into two numbers of relative ease to conceptualize.  I never used resource mods,  I never wanted to micromanage and deal with any of that stuff.   If KSP1 required resources and life support, I probably would've had 20 hours in it, instead of a thousand.  So distilling that stuff all down into two numbers leaving me free to spend hours and hours on the stuff I liked, was a large part of the appeal for me.    I'm not saying they shouldn't do whatever they're doing, only that I can hope that there's a way to play that I personally enjoy, rather than "just play in sandbox" as an answer.   I suppose time will tell.

[K33N]

There is a very vocal, fanatically anti-career mode minority that I fear the devs ended up catering to without considering that almost all the power users are playing career mode.

Its gonna be a big struggle for most of us without career mode spitting out objectives and constraints. The procedural nature of the missions is what makes it good.

Edited April 18, 2023 by K33N

[Pthigrivi]

21 hours ago, Hanuman said:

 I'd prefer the random than having my replay variability stripped out by using 100% handcrafted missions.  Imagine how boring THAT would be the 80th time through the exact same thing in the exact same order.

A couple of things about this. Everyone has their own way of enjoying games and I don't begrudge anyone having fun. I personally found most of the generative contracts pretty repetitive and unrewarding, but yeah if you sift through enough of them you can tack on some pretty workable side-quests. I don't think they need remove all of the generative contracts, but what the do need to do is fix the exploration/ world first contracts for visiting new places and doing new things. I never quite understood why those remained this weird invisible mess in KSP1. I completely agree they shouldn't be linear--there's no reason why you should have to visit Duna before Eve or the Mun before Minmus. Players should mostly be able to go where they like and always find ways to discover new things. 

As far as resources and LS goes KSP1 did have ISRU but it was kind of one dimensional and the way things were mapped and prospected was pretty clunky. Im psyched to see that system developed in a way that makes building colonies and living off the land on other planets feel more active and rewarding. The most important thing is having the supply route system really tightly designed to alleviate the manual maintenance of it. Its not like a city builder or factorio where you need constant maintenance. Everything Nate has said has indicated that colonies are really set-and-forget and non-punitive, so to me a really simple 'snacks' based LS is the most obvious and important mechanic for keeping kerbals happy and productive. I have no interest in worrying that running out of water or oxygen will mean you come back to a colony full of dead kerbals. But I also don't think greenhouses should just be there for looks. 

[TickleMyMary]

I've only ever played career mode and anything less than that would be madness to leave out of the game imo... I'll hold out for whatever 'Adventure mode' is but I don't like what I've heard so far.

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, TickleMyMary said:

I've only ever played career mode and anything less than that would be madness to leave out of the game imo... I'll hold out for whatever 'Adventure mode' is but I don't like what I've heard so far.

What about it makes you nervous?

[TickleMyMary]

20 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

What about it makes you nervous?

What part of my comment struck you as me being 'nervous' about something? 

It's just my opinion based on how I play the game... Don't get nervous over it.

[Superfluous J]

33 minutes ago, TickleMyMary said:

What part of my comment struck you as me being 'nervous' about something? 

I do not believe Pthigrivi meant any offense and just worded "What about it (what you've heard about Adventure Mode) don't you like?" slightly differently.

I too am curious though. What about it (what you've heard about Adventure Mode) don't you like?

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, TickleMyMary said:

What part of my comment struck you as me being 'nervous' about something? 

It's just my opinion based on how I play the game... Don't get nervous over it.

Yes, sorry, I know conversations like this are often combative but I didn’t mean it that way. Im genuinely curious. 

[TickleMyMary]

7 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

I too am curious though. What about it (what you've heard about Adventure Mode) don't you like?

 

6 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

I'm genuinely curious. 

Because I prefer (as much as is possible) for the game to be as realistic as possible in ways such as this and funds, science, research and the original KSP career mode style triggers my little monkey brain in exactly the right way... So much so, that one particular game mode (with many mods installed) has held my attention for 10 years now and will continue to do so for the foreseeable. 

 

10 hours ago, TickleMyMary said:

I'll hold out for whatever 'Adventure mode' is but I don't like what I've heard so far.

As stated, I am willing to wait to see what we get... The fact I haven't been enticed by the few details we do have does not equate to me writing the mode off before it lands.

 

6 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

I know conversations like this are often combative

Not necessarily... Yet, frequently.

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

Time has passed and I still don’t get how you can name a game Kerbal Space Program and not include fund management. Isn’t that a crucial part of competing space agencies? Or is the competition going to be only about resource gathering?

[Periple]

7 hours ago, GGG-GoodGuyGreg said:

Time has passed and I still don’t get how you can name a game Kerbal Space Program and not include fund management. Isn’t that a crucial part of competing space agencies? Or is the competition going to be only about resource gathering?

I like to imagine that kerbals live in a post-scarcity society where they can fully devote themselves to whatever makes them happy, like giant rockets going whoosh and occasionally kaboom! 

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

Judging from the latest announcement of Nate, the update before the Science update is going to include some new engines and probably other new content.

It’s unclear how many updates it will be before Science so we just get to be teased about it until it’s more clear. 

 

[Bake]

I didn't buy the game on release because I heard career mode wasnt in yet.  I saw it on steam yesterday and decided to buy.  I assumed career mode had been added or was close to being added.  Came here today and found out no career mode planned.

I have 390.9 hours in the original KSP.  390.85 are in career mode. I loaded up science mode once long enough to figure out I wasn't interested in it.   I don't think I'm interested in a KSP without money. 

And as for contracts, I love them.  The money aspect and contracts are the whole reason I tried to build as small and cheap as possible to complete the current objective.  Otherwise, I would have just built with my most advanced/largest equipment every mission.  I also enjoyed the early game crunch of trying to upgrade my base to max. I usually got bored with the game after I had everything at max and plenty of money.  

I'm on the fence about returning KSP2.  The goodwill alone from the original KSP means I should buy it even if I don't intend to play it.  However, I want to vote with my wallet.   No career mode will at least mean no extra money on future expansion from me.

[Pthigrivi]

Something something people can sooner imagine the end of the world before they can imagine the end of capitalism.

I mean. If there's no money, what is there even to live for?

Edited April 24, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[darthgently]

9 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Something something people can sooner imagine the end of the world before they can imagine the end of capitalism.

I mean. If there's no money, what is there even to live for?

Money is just an easily transferred representation of value.  One could as easily ask: if there is no food, clothing,  or shelter what is there to live for?  Most things transacted are not luxuries, but necessities.  And the luxuries are what keep it from being mere survival

[Pthigrivi]

Yeah skipping the moral vacancy of these sentiments. Nearly all of the best games Ive played had no money. This all seems like some weak, unimaginative thinking. Ksp has always been about discovery and the power of clever engineering. Y’all need to broaden your horizons. 

Edited April 24, 2023 by Pthigrivi