KSP2 is Art

[Vl3d]

After ~30 hours of play time - spent mostly exploring Kerbin with airplanes and landing on Mun, Minmus, Eve and Duna.. I can sincerely say: I GET IT. I have seen the beauty of the game and I am in awe. This is more than gameplay, it is an artistic experience without equal. You have to play it with patience and curiosity to get the most of it. You have to enjoy the solitude, the details, the visuals, the sounds, the music.. the rewards of the work you put into building your craft. The developers have captured the essence of discovery through space exploration. In my opinion this is more than a game.. it's the unforgettable experience of facing the cold beauty of the universe and seeing it through human (kerbal) eyes. Anyone who doubts this game ... go land on the celestial bodies for the first time and you will understand. This game should not be played in haste. It has to be felt.

Later edit: The experience is beyond just the music and the visual.. but these are a few screenshots that I think show the potential of the game. (55 hours in)

Spoiler

Edited March 3, 2023 by Vl3d

[regex]

tbh I "got it" right after lifting off in a plane and turning north. I'm sure I'll get bored of it eventually but flying over Kerbin is incredible. The best thing is you can see some of that detail from orbit, it's gorgeous.

E: Driving around is awesome too, until you hit that wheel bug where it kicks you up into the air at high speed, lol.

Edited February 27, 2023 by regex

[mattihase]

This is exactly the vibe I really wanna be having right now. I wish I could go to look at all the pretty sights without everything falling apart before I get there. In that sense it really makes you work for them.

[Vl3d]

I think that it's important now, at the start of EA, to play around the bugs and around the limitations instead of confronting them. My advice for anyone feeling a little frustrated: keep it simple for now, build probes or simple craft.. and go explore. There's much more to this game than trying to prove to yourself how smart or good at sticking parts together you are. The game is out there.. waiting for you to land.

[TLTay]

What, OP? Seriously? I cannot imagine someone who actually plays other modern games saying KSP2 looks even half-decent. It's so underwhelming the devs announced a they will be working on a terrain overhaul on the first day! The response from the community was THAT BAD.

I thought they were joking us with potato-mode graphics and holding the scatter density back in the teaser pics leading up release, but then they went and dropped the turd just like that.

[Vl3d]

4 minutes ago, TLTay said:

What, OP? Seriously? I cannot imagine someone who actually plays other modern games saying KSP2 looks even half-decent. It's so underwhelming the devs announced a they will be working on a terrain overhaul on the first day! The response from the community was THAT BAD.

I thought they were joking us with potato-mode graphics and holding the scatter density back in the teaser pics leading up release, but then they went and dropped the turd just like that.

Graphics can be improved, but good taste and art style is rare.

[Majorjim!]

15 hours ago, Vl3d said:

Graphics can be improved, but good taste and art style is rare.

Do you not find the game lighting horrible..? Everything is far too shiny and the sun washes out all colours and looks so artificial. The fact that this is a CPU heavy game and looks pretty meh and doesn’t run properly on anything other than other than monster hardware isn’t funny. 

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

 

[Movado]

16 hours ago, TLTay said:

What, OP? Seriously? I cannot imagine someone who actually plays other modern games saying KSP2 looks even half-decent. It's so underwhelming the devs announced a they will be working on a terrain overhaul on the first day! The response from the community was THAT BAD.

I thought they were joking us with potato-mode graphics and holding the scatter density back in the teaser pics leading up release, but then they went and dropped the turd just like that.

Precisely. It is staggering to me in this day and age with the graphics shown in Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous and other space games that KSP2's graphics are somehow considered amazing and/or beautiful.

Let's take the following example...

Look at the island on the horizon. It's seemingly composed of no more than 7 straight lines. It's looks as if some kid cut a jagged piece of smudgy green paper and slapped it on the background. The trees only look good from a distance, and the KSC as a whole is not much more complex than KSP1 with the Kerbal Cities mod pack. This lack of resolution appears again and again throughout the other planets and moons.

To quote Matt Lowne, "I've been to the Mun ... and to Duna as well... it doesn't look as good as modded KSP1"

and this from someone with a vested interest in KSP2.

People are entitled to their own opinions as to the beauty of one thing over another, but much like a proud parent who sticks their child's infantile paintings to the refrigerator and gushes as to how talented they are, I suspect that most of the people praising the graphics of KSP2 have the same lack of perspective.

If you want to see the type of graphics KSP2 should have delivered, have a look at this video...

... and yes, I expect a game studio funded by Take Two to be able to deliver those kind of graphics while maintaining a fun whimsy Kerbalness to the game.

 

[RayneCloud]

It's all subjective. So, in short, "That's like, your opinion man"  I think the new planets are amazing and I have put nearly 600 hours in to elite, and many many 100's of hours in to SC. 

9 minutes ago, Movado said:

Precisely. It is staggering to me in this day and age with the graphics shown in Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous and other space games that KSP2's graphics are somehow considered amazing and/or beautiful.

Let's take the following example...

Look at the island on the horizon. It's seemingly composed of no more than 7 straight lines. It's looks as if some kid cut a jagged piece of smudgy green paper and slapped it on the background. The trees only look good from a distance, and the KSC as a whole is not much more complex than KSP1 with the Kerbal Cities mod pack. This lack of resolution appears again and again throughout the other planets and moons.

To quote Matt Lowne, "I've been to the Mun ... and to Duna as well... it doesn't look as good as modded KSP1"

and this from someone with a vested interest in KSP2.

People are entitled to their own opinions as to the beauty of one thing over another, but much like a proud parent who sticks their child's infantile paintings to the refrigerator and gushes as to how talented they are, I suspect that most of the people praising the graphics of KSP2 have the same lack of perspective.

If you want to see the type of graphics KSP2 should have delivered, have a look at this video...

... and yes, I expect a game studio funded by Take Two to be able to deliver those kind of graphics while maintaining a fun whimsy Kerbalness to the game.

 

 

[Vl3d]

31 minutes ago, Movado said:

Precisely. It is staggering to me in this day and age with the graphics shown in Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous and other space games that KSP2's graphics are somehow considered amazing and/or beautiful.

Let's take the following example...

Look at the island on the horizon. It's seemingly composed of no more than 7 straight lines. It's looks as if some kid cut a jagged piece of smudgy green paper and slapped it on the background. The trees only look good from a distance, and the KSC as a whole is not much more complex than KSP1 with the Kerbal Cities mod pack. This lack of resolution appears again and again throughout the other planets and moons.

To quote Matt Lowne, "I've been to the Mun ... and to Duna as well... it doesn't look as good as modded KSP1"

and this from someone with a vested interest in KSP2.

People are entitled to their own opinions as to the beauty of one thing over another, but much like a proud parent who sticks their child's infantile paintings to the refrigerator and gushes as to how talented they are, I suspect that most of the people praising the graphics of KSP2 have the same lack of perspective.

If you want to see the type of graphics KSP2 should have delivered, have a look at this video...

... and yes, I expect a game studio funded by Take Two to be able to deliver those kind of graphics while maintaining a fun whimsy Kerbalness to the game.

 

I'm not talking about the graphics, but something more subtle and important. The visuals will improve a lot in time, as there's more performance budget. I'm talking about the vision of the developers for the game and the feeling you get when you explore the star system. What matters more to me than the current state of the game is that the devs put an emphasis on the feeling of exploration and discovery through science and engineering. That and expressing creativity through design are the main reasons I play this game. And I'm glad to see that KSP2 is still a game about rewarding exploration. I've surveyed Kerbin and landed on Mun, Minmus, Eve, Duna and Dres up to this point and I feel inspired and uplifted by the music and the experience.

That being said, I do appreciate how good the planets of Everspace 2 look and the realistic quality of the terrain in Starfield (especially the mountains). I hope we'll get something like that in KSP one day.

Edited February 28, 2023 by Vl3d

[TLTay]

31 minutes ago, Movado said:

Precisely. It is staggering to me in this day and age with the graphics shown in Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous and other space games that KSP2's graphics are somehow considered amazing and/or beautiful.

My theory is that it's people for whom gaming isn't much of a thing, but somehow got pulled in by KSP. As in, they don't play other games, or at least modern ones. It's easy to impress someone with nothing else in mind to compare it to.

15 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

I'm not talking about the graphics, but something more subtle and important. 

Must be the sound. Because it's not the graphics. Also, not many others are seeing it. For example, if I sit in a BMW, I don't grasp the added "value." Marketing and expectation setting could perhaps be a factor?

[Majorjim!]

20 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

I'm not talking about the graphics, but something more subtle and important. The visuals will improve a lot in time, as there's more performance budget. I'm talking about the vision of the developers for the game and the feeling you get when you explore the star system. What matters more to me than the current state of the game is that the devs put an emphasis on the feeling of exploration and discovery through science and engineering. That and expressing creativity through design are the main reasons I play this game. And I'm glad to see that KSP2 is still a game about rewarding exploration. I've surveyed Kerbin and landed on Mun, Minmus, Eve, Duna and Dres up to this point and I feel inspired and uplifted by the music and the experience.

That being said, I do appreciate how good the planets of Everspace 2 look and the realistic quality of the terrain in Starfield (especially the mountains). I hope we'll get something like that in KSP one day.

So, you’re describing KSP1 then.. 

[Vl3d]

10 minutes ago, Majorjim! said:

So, you’re describing KSP1 then.. 

Unfortunately no, because KSP1 does not give 2 cents about making the planets interesting to explore. KSP2 does.

[purpleivan]

Could some of those signing the praises of KSP2's artwork, post some images of what they're seeing (they can be hidden for those who don't want spoilers) as I'm curious (and I'm sure others are too) to see what's being described. Currently the game is very buggy (I don't think that's a contentious statement), so it's time consuming and more than a little frusutrating to get to far flung locations in the game, so some screenshots would be interesting to see.

There used to be a screenshots thread in the Fanart section of the KSP1 forum, which I think might be a good idea to have resurected for KSP2.

[Bej Kerman]

22 hours ago, TLTay said:

What, OP? Seriously? I cannot imagine someone who actually plays other modern games saying KSP2 looks even half-decent. It's so underwhelming the devs announced a they will be working on a terrain overhaul on the first day! The response from the community was THAT BAD.

And the game that brought the forums together, again, didn't get a dV indicator for over half a decade with the devs having the extremely daft idea that the newbies they were aiming at would hand calculate their dV. KSP 2 is better than KSP 1 was, from 0.7.3 to 1.0 and debatably even newer versions, and as Matt Lowne says (or was it ShadowZone?), this is the worst it'll be. If you don't like playing EA games and exploring the game as it evolves, or otherwise don't feel like submitting bug reports and studying what breaks the game and how, then don't waste your energy getting involved when you can put your money aside for other things and wait for the game to reach a more presentable state. I don't have much doubts, with the idea development restarted sometime around the announcement due to a vast increase in scope, the transparentness of the devs and CMs so far and likely time constraints from T2, that KSP 2 still contains placeholders and unfinished systems for many things. Fuel crossfeed I feel is an obvious example, as well as command modules that don't yet have transparent windows. Given how the game looked three years ago when we first got that video of a rocket wobbling and disintegrating over the KSC above a rather empty looking Kerbin, I'd say development has been going at a fast enough pace and that KSP 2 has a decent chance of turning around into something better received, as long as T2 sticks to it for the next year. That's not even considering what the developers have also been working on alongside the core game we got on the 24th, like OABs, interstellar travel, colonies, et cetera. Just wait, and if KSP 2 does flop, then smeg happens. I don't think that's going to happen; I don't think KSP 2 is in nearly as bad of a state as it's made out to be, and that its current state is nearly as underwhelming as it looks. We've seen what three years has done, let's wait and see what one more year does to the game before making any serious judgements about how good of a job the developers did on KSP 2.

[regex]

21 minutes ago, purpleivan said:

Could some of those signing the praises of KSP2's artwork, post some images of what they're seeing

Here are a couple of my early screenshots:

Spoiler

 

[TLTay]

3 minutes ago, regex said:

Here are a couple of my early screenshots:

  Hide contents

 

I bet if you land there the surface is flat, the erosion is fake, the textures are bad, and the scatter is scarce.

Edited February 28, 2023 by TLTay

[Bej Kerman]

2 minutes ago, TLTay said:

I bet if you land there the surface is flat, the erosion is fake, the textures are bad, and the scatter is scarce.

Well it isn't. What were you hoping to achieve by just blindly guessing it's as bad as you hope it to be?

[regex]

6 minutes ago, TLTay said:

I bet if you land there the surface is flat, the erosion is fake, the textures are bad, and the scatter is scarce.

Yeah that's exactly what happens

Edited February 28, 2023 by regex

[Bej Kerman]

6 hours ago, Movado said:

If you want to see the type of graphics KSP2 should have delivered, have a look at this video...

While we're sharing videos...

 

Edited February 28, 2023 by Bej Kerman
Sent message without video. Shift+enter sends??

[Izny]

5 hours ago, TLTay said:

My theory is that it's people for whom gaming isn't much of a thing, but somehow got pulled in by KSP. As in, they don't play other games, or at least modern ones. It's easy to impress someone with nothing else in mind to compare it to.

Must be the sound. Because it's not the graphics. Also, not many others are seeing it. For example, if I sit in a BMW, I don't grasp the added "value." Marketing and expectation setting could perhaps be a factor?

your theory is wrong. i love the graphics of ksp 2. it's a thing of beauty. have been playing games since the MSX, and play the modern stuff on my RTX rig, and VR.

 

KSP is a game about rocket science, with a tongue in cheek approach. it does not try to be some repurposed bovine waste, "CGI" overproduced post-processing eyecandy quicktime event like most games nowdays. The graphics are exactly what they should be, without the added repurposed bovine waste shinies that make simpletons go "ooooooooooooh". This is not a game that requires 240fps. or 120 fps. or even 60 fps. no, it doesn't even need a full 30 fps. it is kerbal space program...  it doesn't need that filler sci-fi bullcrap you see in other games where the emptyness of space feels like a mall on black friday (an overcrowded anthill). 

 

This be rocket science, not a picture book. 

[Vl3d]

1 hour ago, purpleivan said:

Could some of those signing the praises of KSP2's artwork, post some images of what they're seeing (they can be hidden for those who don't want spoilers) as I'm curious (and I'm sure others are too) to see what's being described. Currently the game is very buggy (I don't think that's a contentious statement), so it's time consuming and more than a little frusutrating to get to far flung locations in the game, so some screenshots would be interesting to see.

There used to be a screenshots thread in the Fanart section of the KSP1 forum, which I think might be a good idea to have resurected for KSP2.

!!! PLANET SPOILERS BELOW !!!

Spoiler

The beauty of this game is in the experiences it offers you while exploring. It's beyond just the visuals.. it's intellectual and sensorial. It's art.
Yeah, it needs a lot of polish and improvements.. but it has a soul.

Edited March 1, 2023 by Vl3d

[Izny]

54 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

  Reveal hidden contents

The beauty of this game is in the experiences it offers you while exploring. It's beyond just the visuals.. it's intellectual and sensorial. It's art.
Yeah, it needs a lot of polish and improvements.. but it has a soul.

i second this motion

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, Izny said:

55 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

The beauty of this game is in the experiences it offers you while exploring. It's beyond just the visuals.. it's intellectual and sensorial. It's art.
Yeah, it needs a lot of polish and improvements.. but it has a soul.

i second this motion

I, third