SPOILER-FREE: Data-mining yields good news

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

22 hours ago, VlonaldKerman said:

this information gives me huge optimism for the game moving forward

You have certainly made me feel better - and without reading too deeply into this, it sounds exceptionally plausible. 

Thanks for the post! 

 

(and FWIW - I certainly feel like the Dev team deserves better than they are getting.  Let's hope, if this is correct, that the updates come fast and furious and the reputation damage can be turned around into a good story (and perhaps 'Corporate Cautionary Tale' with a happy ending!) 

 

[Moons]

3 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

You have certainly made me feel better - and without reading too deeply into this, it sounds exceptionally plausible. 

Thanks for the post! 

 

(and FWIW - I certainly feel like the Dev team deserves better than they are getting.  Let's hope, if this is correct, that the updates come fast and furious and the reputation damage can be turned around into a good story (and perhaps 'Corporate Cautionary Tale' with a happy ending!) 

 

You do realize that is probably at the same level of accuracy as reading the tea leaves?

So someone found random words and code therefore XY - someone else said the code of A has been rewritten and was able to conclude that within days after release therefore XY ...

Edited March 2, 2023 by Moons

[omega2003]

I don't know what future can guess those who decompile the game, but for the moment I don't find the "improved user experience" promised for the early access. There are improvements but besides, there are so many bugs everywhere that I have the impression of a "degraded user experience".

The future may be happy but for the moment the official discourse and the delivered product are really far away.

[K^2]

9 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

You claim it was a fresh restart - but clearly they took a lot of code and assets from the failed projects, based on the 2019 promo material and the post star theory releases. The VAB looks identical.  The lighting looks identical.  The UI looks identical till they did an internal redo.

You say it was a fresh restart but the entire design team came over, so the project should not be credited with having to do a new concept and pre-production phase, much of that work should either have been already done - or if it was done badly, they pulled over an failed design team

So this is kind of the main crux, I think. I've been on projects that get re-started because pre-production dragged on and even started production that got scrapped due to scheduling. You'd have all the same leadership with the access to all the existing assets, but with a completely new scope and schedule, and it's shocking how little ends up re-usable. Yeah, you grab some assets, but these are pre-alpha assets. They still need all the same polish to make them useful in full production that you would otherwise. And a lot of stuff has to be just scrapped. I don't think the work generated by the team while they were Star Theory saved them a lot of time.

And the other aspect I want to be clear about - I don't think Star Theory failed. I mean, I don't think they failed as developers. Obviously, I'm filling in a lot of blanks, obviously, it's all subject to interpretation, and yes, this is likely the one that's most charitable to the developers, and you're welcome to think my judgement on this is clouded. But for the sake of presenting my argument in as complete of a timeline as possible, here's what I see.

 

Squad was acquired by Take Two in the spring of 2017. Presumably, very soon after that, Take Two, via Private Division, contracts Star Theory games to make KSP2. Given an aggressive development schedule, since we know the initial plan was a late 2019 to early 2020 release, the original vision for KSP2 was a much narrower scope than the current plans for the KSP2. Best guess, a second star system, a colony management system, a visual update, and a new UI. Along with some fixes and improvements you get from updating the Unity version, this should be a big enough change to make it KSP2, but it's just past the threshold of being a couple of DLCs.

In the process of making ST's version of KSP2, an idea is pitched to make something bigger. Multiplayer, more star systems, overhauls of many key systems. PD is not convinced, at least not fully, until in 2019 a trailer is shown, and it's a much greater hit than anyone anticipated. PD sees an opportunity to make KSP2 a much bigger commercial success than just an update to a niche game enjoyed by a dedicated fanbase, and starts negotiations with Star Theory about expanding the scope. The initial signaling must have happened early enough for Nate to talk about the possibility of these features in some post-E3 interviews, although, still very vaguely.

Late in 2019, negotiations between Star Theory and Private Division break down. We don't know the details and whether the disagreement has been about the timeline or the costs. A lot of fingers have been pointed at the Star Theory's former financial leadership who are not involved with Intercept. Either way, Private Division scraps the contract with Star Theory, spins up Intercept, and a lot of creative and engineering talent jump ship. Intercept starts working on a new vision for KSP2 with significantly broader scope and on a longer timeline.

 

This is roughly what I suggested as the likely timeline for the formation of Intercept back in the spring of 2020, when we were starting to get first news of "additional delays" and some early snippets of the development progress from the Intercept. Since then, everything else has been aligning with this hypothesis very well. We have seen the delays eventually pushed out to what looks like a reasonable time to work on the game, we did see people being hired into the missing positions for a larger game scope, including specialists in multiplayer and physics, who were missing from Star Theory's original composition. And in general, while the creative leadership mostly migrated over, it comes off as them being dissatisfied with scope permitted under the Star Theory and starting completely new production under Intercept under a much more liberal scope and budget for the game. This is still a mid-studio's effort on a mid-sized game, but it's an experienced team working on a large project on an appropriate schedule.

We can try to find an alternative explanation, but nothing else aligns with what we're seeing. If we were really seeing results of six years of work of one mismanaged team on something that got delayed by years, we'd be seeing a completely different monster in place of this early access. This early access is a good alpha build. Anyone who works in games that understands Unity and a bit of what goes into an open world and simulation games, will tell you that there is nothing wrong with KSP2 in it's current state for an alpha build. This is a game in alpha. We should not be treating it as anything else. And I can't imagine a mismanaged team making something like this at an alpha stage.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

8 minutes ago, Moons said:

You do realize that is probably at the same level of accuracy as reading the tea leaves?

So someone found random words and code therefore XY - someone else said the code of A has been rewritten and was able to conclude that within days after release therefore XY ...

I'm a poker player.  Pretty used to dealing with incomplete information and supposition based on probabilities.  My reaction isn't based solely on the post of the OP, but from stuff I've gathered since watching this throughout the Dev cycle (back to '19).

Reading @K^2' s assessment - who is someone I'm familiar with and trust not to be 'Pollyanna' - isn't that far off the OP's summary of the Reddit posts.   Those things line up with expectations I've had - coupled with my past experiences with EA titles, several Beta tests and one Alpha - the title has the look and feel of something pushed out before the team was ready. Some parts 'feel' alpha, much of it feels Beta and some seem genuinely EA. That's an odd mix.

One that fits the narrative of the OP 

[Bej Kerman]

27 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

31 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

<s> Like the time they lied about the game running perfectly on mid-tier hardware? </s>

When they lied saying they needed extra time to make that the case

How can they lie about that when they said nothing of the sort, and all we heard is that the game was delayed, nothing else?

[drhay53]

This is from discussion earlier in the thread, but I'm personally expecting 1.5-2 years before we are getting close to a performant game that is approaching the roadmap vision. I'll in fact be pleasantly surprised if we have playable, fun colonies in 2023.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Just now, drhay53 said:

This is from discussion earlier in the thread, but I'm personally expecting 1.5-2 years before we are getting close to a performant game that is approaching the roadmap vision. I'll in fact be pleasantly surprised if we have playable, fun colonies in 2023.

Only if your definition of Performant = Multiplayer. 

Way back to when they announced EA I expected it to be a lot more polished than what we see now... But if we are honest - all the parts are there.  People are getting out to the other planets and their moons.  That alone says that the game isn't 'broken'.  Much of it works. 

There are a LOT of bugs.  It's pretty clear to me also that whatever 'Beta' they had (given the pictures saying Beta) wasn't well done or comprehensive. In fact I really doubt it could be called a beta for the game to be in this state. 

The terrible reputation cost of the decision to push it out in this state cannot be overlooked. 

But if the OP is correct - if K^2 isn't wrong - this can be recovered but only if it is exceptionally farther along in the next three months. 

Given the number of eyes on this now - it may be. 

One thing is, however, the Community Managers are doing garbage work - at least here. They are not talking to us like it's an EA, much less a Beta/Alpha hybrid - and the problem is that teams that run successful community Betas or EAs have been way more open and forthcoming than our team, here seems capable of. 

[Bej Kerman]

7 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

One thing is, however, the Community Managers are doing garbage work - at least here. They are not talking to us like it's an EA, much less a Beta/Alpha hybrid - and the problem is that teams that run successful community Betas or EAs have been way more open and forthcoming than our team, here seems capable of. 

They are doing some work, just on that stupid Discord server... 

[Drakenred65]

1 hour ago, RocketRockington said:

No they're all just people.  And people can screw up.  And when they screw up repeatedly, believing they will stop screwing up in the future is a nice thought but not the most likely outcome.

And they also will follow their incentives - including the incentive to lie to the community and paint the prettiest picture they can about how things are going.

So basically there pathological liars because that's there job.

[RocketRockington]

54 minutes ago, K^2 said:

This early access is a good alpha build. Anyone who works in games that understands Unity and a bit of what goes into an open world and simulation games, will tell you that there is nothing wrong with KSP2 in it's current state for an alpha build. This is a game in alpha. We should not be treating it as anything else. And I can't imagine a mismanaged team making something like this at an alpha stage.

It's not a good alpha build by normal standards of Alpha.

Normally an Alpha means "Feature complete but content incomplete" and it's the very first time you can expose the product to complete testing.

But KSP2 is not feature complete.  Not by the standards of what they claimed they were releasing.

It is ready for it's first round of complete testing.  Something the public should never have been exposed to - much less charged for.

Clearly you're highly invested in the product mentally and in your own narrative though.  That's a level of blind faith that is unassailable by reason.  People like Master39 who was on this forum refuting any naysayer for years had that level of blind faith that the project was going to be this wonderful thing when released - that the dev team was delaying so that everything could be done right. 

He hasn't posted since the released I've noticed. 

I imagine you will also hold faith in this new vision of reality where it's totally ok to release a feature incomplete alpha version to the public for $50 and that's not indicative of massive dysfunction in development. Guess I'll check in with you in 6 months but for now I'm done discussing it.

[Bej Kerman]

2 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

It's not a good alpha build by normal standards of Alpha.

Normally an Alpha means "Feature complete but content incomplete" and it's the very first time you can expose the product to complete testing.

But KSP2 is not feature complete.  Not by the standards of what they claimed they were releasing.

It is ready for it's first round of complete testing.  Something the public should never have been exposed to - much less charged for.

Clearly you're highly invested in the product mentally and in your own narrative though.  That's a level of blind faith that is unassailable by reason.  People like Master39 who was on this forum refuting any naysayer for years had that level of blind faith that the project was going to be this wonderful thing when released - that the dev team was delaying so that everything could be done right. 

He hasn't posted since the released I've noticed. 

I imagine you will also hold faith in this new vision of reality where it's totally ok to release a feature incomplete alpha version to the public for $50 and that's not indicative of massive dysfunction in development. Guess I'll check in with you in 6 months but for now I'm done discussing it.

If you don't mind sharing, your expertise in the gaming industry is...?

[RocketRockington]

53 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

How can they lie about that when they said nothing of the sort, and all we heard is that the game was delayed, nothing else?

Nate Simpson, posting  in May of 2022, 10 months ago

"We are building a game of tremendous technological complexity, and are taking this additional time to ensure we hit the quality and level of polish it deserves. We remain focused on making sure KSP2 performs well on a variety of hardware, has amazing graphics, and is rich with content."

I don't know you're you're going to weasel around the above NOT being a total lie.  They did not 'take the time to hit the level of quality and polish it deserved'.  They did not 'focus on making sure KSP2 performs well on a variety of hardware'.  If you can't see that, then I'm sorry, but you're not worth debating with 

Just now, Bej Kerman said:

If you don't mind sharing, your expertise in the gaming industry is...?

Game developer for 15+ years.  I'm not going to further dox myself to satisfy you though.

[K^2]

17 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

Normally an Alpha means "Feature complete but content incomplete" and it's the very first time you can expose the product to complete testing.

But KSP2 is not feature complete.  Not by the standards of what they claimed they were releasing.

Besides multiplayer and science, everything else they promised for the game is in the early access build, some of it disabled. Colonies are there - we have KSC, just the editor disabled. Tech progress is there, as we have tiers of complexity and sizes - mostly taken from KSP, of course, minus the actual tech tree with unlocks. Resource system is there - we just can't gather them. Debdeb system we're judging from screenshots only, but it's clearly been built to an alpha quality.

One big milestone of an alpha build is "complete playthrough possible," and we are seeing people build interplanetary ships and various waypoint stations to enable these missions. Obviously, that's a workaround for colonies, but it's there and working.

This is a definitive alpha. No publisher committee I've ever gone up against would reject this as an alpha build.

Edited March 3, 2023 by K^2

[omega2003]

We just have a static KSC and a category in the list of places. It's not even 0.1% of what is needed to talk about a colony system.
We have elements of several sizes, but no resource management. We have no way of detecting areas that contain them. In fact, all the components that would allow them to be found are missing. We also do not see a list of resources needed for the components currently available.

I do not see how one we conclude that the system of colonies or resources is programmed.

[Strawberry]

33 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

Nate Simpson, posting  in May of 2022, 10 months ago

"We are building a game of tremendous technological complexity, and are taking this additional time to ensure we hit the quality and level of polish it deserves. We remain focused on making sure KSP2 performs well on a variety of hardware, has amazing graphics, and is rich with content."

I don't know you're you're going to weasel around the above NOT being a total lie.  They did not 'take the time to hit the level of quality and polish it deserved'.  They did not 'focus on making sure KSP2 performs well on a variety of hardware'.  If you can't see that, then I'm sorry, but you're not worth debating with 

Are they not literally taking the time right now during early access to give the game the quality and the polish it deserves? Like this is their goals, we don't know the state of the game ten months ago but I struggle to imagine it performed better then the current build. I dont think its lying to say that they are working towards making sure ksp2 does these things as that's literally what they are working on right now and presumably have been for the past few months. 

[Bej Kerman]

34 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

I don't know you're you're going to weasel around the above NOT being a total lie.  They did not 'take the time to hit the level of quality and polish it deserved'.  They did not 'focus on making sure KSP2 performs well on a variety of hardware'.  If you can't see that, then I'm sorry, but you're not worth debating with 

And you're going to do the mental gymnastics to blame the schedule T2 gave them on the devs themselves?

[RocketRockington]

40 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Besides multiplayer and science, everything else they promised for the game is in the early access build, some of it disabled. Colonies are there - we have KSC, just the editor disabled.

Oh yeah totally, how did I miss that.  That solves everything.  Actually, by that standard, they have science too - they added the model for the research center to KSC!  And they have multiplayer.  Just hot seat multiplayer! You're totally right, all the features are basically in, they just have to flip a flag '#MkGamWurkGud' to true, and it's all set.

I'll look forward to the game working great after a patch or two, based on your clearly unbiased, well informed  and objective statements.

[GigFiz]

3 hours ago, K^2 said:

And yes, I absolutely might be too optimistic about it, because maybe I'm suffering from confirmation bias, but so far, everything is lining up pretty close to the trajectory I was expecting from the time Intercept started publishing their first updates on progress.

Hmm, I'm not sure that even falls under confirmation bias. Because you may want it to be true, but if it is lining up with what you would have hypothetically mapped out at the start, and you have the experience that makes you well prepared qualified to analyze the situation, that would suggest that maybe you would be inclined to interpret ambiguous stuff more charitably, but that's probably about it. The fact (I strongly suspect) that any major red flags would probably jump out and scream at you much too loudly to be ignored also makes it less likely to get overridden by bias and hope.

So I lack any of the industry relevant experience that you bring to bear (and the insight from that is always really interesting and useful), but a similar-ish (in the expectation/reality side-by-side sense. Very -ish, I know) kind of analysis, in the generalized sense, based on reading between the lines of the messaging and the overall vibe of the communications/interviews we've had direct from the devs along the way, has largely kept me in a standpoint of cautious optimism (along with totally staying off the hype train, but that's not anything specific to this; those just pretty much never end well) and, while the launch didn't go quite as well as I might have hoped, I still feel fine about the stance I've taken, and do not see sufficient evidence yet to stop hanging out there

[WingC3]

One thing that is evident from the save file structure is that multiplayer is clearly already beings structured. Craft have an attribute both for an owner and for a player holding control authority.

[tstein]

13 hours ago, K^2 said:

Besides multiplayer and science, everything else they promised for the game is in the early access build, some of it disabled. Colonies are there - we have KSC, just the editor disabled. Tech progress is there, as we have tiers of complexity and sizes - mostly taken from KSP, of course, minus the actual tech tree with unlocks. Resource system is there - we just can't gather them. Debdeb system we're judging from screenshots only, but it's clearly been built to an alpha quality.

One big milestone of an alpha build is "complete playthrough possible," and we are seeing people build interplanetary ships and various waypoint stations to enable these missions. Obviously, that's a workaround for colonies, but it's there and working.

This is a definitive alpha. No publisher committee I've ever gone up against would reject this as an alpha build.

By a checklist it is an alpha indeed, a bit crude on the appearance  (considering the stupid interface bugs), but indeed an alpha.

 

My problem is with the word "possible" being very extreme here. I need to try several times to get a ship  to moon without a bug  rendering the mission unusable. It is  surfing the  edge of the "complete playtrough possible" concept.

13 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

And you're going to do the mental gymnastics to blame the schedule T2 gave them on the devs themselves?

depends on who you consider the devs.. the programmers or you counting the managers as well. NEver ever underestimate the capacity of a manager to  reduce anyone's productivity by 50%

[THE_KERBAL]

I am glad that the ksp 2 team is committed to finishing the game. Developing a space simulator is hard. Creating a game with interstellar travel, colonies, and highly detailed planets is something else altogether. The game has a complexity scale unmatched by most other games. Early access is not supposed to represent the final version of the game. It is a preview to the public that helps them find the underlying issues and develop the game we want.  Our negative feedback matters. I am confident that the game will be “playable” in the next months.  

[Periple]

2 hours ago, tstein said:

By a checklist it is an alpha indeed, a bit crude on the appearance  (considering the stupid interface bugs), but indeed an alpha.

My problem is with the word "possible" being very extreme here. I need to try several times to get a ship  to moon without a bug  rendering the mission unusable. It is  surfing the  edge of the "complete playtrough possible" concept.

It would be nice if more studios let fans in earlier in the process so you can see how a game takes shape. It’s a lot of fun to see it come together. It would also dispel a lot of misconceptions.

You don’t usually make games one thing at a time. You make the whole thing and then near the end you make it work properly. Alphas are usually really rough! Sometimes even rougher than the vertical slice which you get earlier in the process, that one you do try to polish because you use it to get your production pipelines working which means you need to be able to get assets to game ready quality.

(And also to have something to show the publisher when you want more time and money )

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

22 minutes ago, Periple said:

It would be nice if more studios let fans in earlier in the process so you can see how a game takes shape. It’s a lot of fun to see it come together. It would also dispel a lot of misconceptions.

They do.  They're called "Alpha" and "Beta" and this game would have benefited from either one.

Except what they chose to do was host a VERY PUBLIC "Open Alpha" with the unique feature that you get to pay $50 to participate.  Most Alphas and Betas, btw, are free and run in a completely different way.  Go look at the Twitter - it's all "Everything is fine - let's do a challenge!"

Go look at the Discord - it's just a chaotic mess, where anything of substance disappears almost immediately.

If you want to be totally confused about what is going on and have no clue how to fix it; spend time on both of those 'socials'.  If you want to see what dedicated players are doing and frustrated with; here's the place... and the place where the CM team is decidedly, NOT.

Edited March 3, 2023 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[Alexoff]

18 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

And this is what I've been trying to tell @Alexoff et al. KSP 2 is already big for how young it is, that's not even considering the roadmap features that the devs have been working on over the same three years as the core experience. Glad to hear it from professionals

Everything big in the game seems to be a roadmap with no dates. As I understand it, the game will become an adult in 18 years, when most likely no games will be interesting to me due to age. And today it is very bad, I am not going to give any advances to developers.