"Style over substance" thoughts

[Mutex]

I've seen a number of comments about KSP2 focusing on style over substance, or more specifically that more effort was put into the appearance, graphics and style of the game over the basic gameplay mechanics. Evidence for this idea is that manoeuvre nodes are incomplete and buggy, and the huge number of bugs in physics, staging, docking etc. Meanwhile the Kerbals animation is done and looks great, the art assets in general are high quality, nice effects with the sun shining through the atmosphere etc.

I don't think this means the art had a higher priority. I expect both the art side AND the basic gameplay mechanics, were expected to be complete by the 24th Feb. What happened is the devs working on gameplay had a lot of unexpected complications and took longer to complete work than expected. Meanwhile the artists completed their work on time, since there were no hidden complications in what they were trying to achieve.

When you're solving problems, you can't really estimate very accurately how long it'll take you to solve it. You really don't know how long it'll take until you've done it. Much of what has happened with KSP2's development/release history can be explained with this. In interviews I've seen the development leads say the existence of multiplayer, and all that it implies, has massively complicated basically every feature they've added to the game. Simply keeping track of where the spacecraft is, and where it's going, in a way that scales to interstellar distances, was a massive challenge.

I think there's also an assumption going around that what we can actually see in the game right now is EVERYTHING the devs have worked on for the last 3+ years, and anything we can't see will have to be started from scratch. This does not seem to be the case. I've heard (I forget where, Scott Manley?) that multiplayer is almost done and the devs are testing builds with it. Some systems were nearly done and not yet enabled in the build like heat. I get the impression that once the base game stabilises, the features on the roadmap might be added quicker than we're expecting.

In any case lets not be so quick to harshly judge the developers for their speed and ability to deliver features and a working game. There is far, far too much we don't know to make any accurate judgements. We're not even sure how long they've been working on the codebase, and none of us have ever developed a game like KSP2.

[The Aziz]

Making shiny stuff is easier than coding the shiny stuff to work as intended. 

7 minutes ago, Mutex said:

What happened is the devs working on gameplay had a lot of unexpected complications and took longer to complete work than expected. Meanwhile the artists completed their work on time, since there were no hidden complications in what they were trying to achieve.

Pretty much.

But the deadline was set (I believe that was a decision that came from the upper level), and I guess they did what they could.