Speculation On the Last Four Years

[Pickelhaube808]

This thread is not the place for mean-spirited or baseless accusations towards the team currently behind KSP2, but if you're like me, you are curious as to what has happened for the last four years in regards to KSP2's development.

Instead, this thread is aimed at trying to work out what could have logically transpired during that time (in addition to the obvious factors such as COVID) which extended the time-to-release from the projected 6 months to over 3 1/2 years.

 

Since we may never get an answer from someone on the inside due to PR, the curious among us may have to try to establish some sort of timeline using the data and hints we can find.

 

Here's a few of my thoughts and questions on what could have happened:

• Much of the planning must have had to been done before the announcement back in August of 2019. A game isn't just announced without knowing what it will be, and then scheduled to be released 6 months later. Therefore, the entire team couldn'tve just been planning for the last 3.5 years.
• The first public build of KSP2 is very primitive and appears to contain many things that were pulled and quickly touched up/altered from the original game (should the files be looked into). There is no way that this build was started in 2019, 2020, or 2021. I speculate that this first public build was cobbled together within the last six months, based on the obvious bugs released on day one that could be found and fixed had the devs and playtesters had more time. If the code for KSP2 was in active development since the very initial announcement, I have a feeling things like inferior PQS terrain (no cave support, among other downsides) would be a thing of the past. Also, this is not definitive evidence of anything, but the first build upload for the game shown in SteamDB happened about 6 months ago
• Was there an initial build that was trashed in late 2019? Was it built directly from KSP1 or did it start from the ground up?
• The reason KSP2 released like it did is almost certainly not the sole fault of the developers. Look what a tiny team with a limited budget did back in 2011 for KSP1, and in only a matter of a few months. This whole nested conglomerate is much more massive than Squad ever was, and a bigger company with more departments will cause everything to slow down drastically after a critical size. There are obviously parts of the companies and business deals that made it take this long. I mean... it's T2.
• Pressure was almost certainly exerted on the dev team to get this out by a certain deadline. They must have known how it was going to go and hunkered down by release day. If they got to choose when to release the first build, it would've certainly been at a later date with most of the current gamebreaking bugs fixed. No developer of any kind WANTS to release a bad product and then face harsh criticism for it.

 

These are some of my late night ramblings I've had on my mind since the day it released and I played it for the first time (I made sure not to watch any videos or read anything about it beforehand as I wanted to go in and form my own opinions). I am neither a game development expert nor an expert in business, so I am definitely interested in insights others may have about this.

[razark]

1 minute ago, Pickelhaube808 said:

Since we may never get an answer from someone on the inside due to PR, the curious among us may have to try to establish some sort of timeline using the data and hints we can find.

We will either never get an answer, or get multiple answers (because every person involved has their own view on what happened).  Knowing what might have (or even what actually) happened doesn't change the past, present, or future.

How does wild-ass-guessing about what may have happened resolve anything?

[RocketRockington]

I doubt we'll get an answer for this.  Noone working for the company will ever share an honest story because, as we've seen from the communications over the years, they constantly say everything was going well, and the only time they said things went badly, they blamed externalities - COVID,  huge technical challenges, the need to reach quality, etc.  Even with Nate's post today, claiming it was a  'bumpy' launch - it's all spin to make things sound like they're the most diligent publisher and developer ever.  T2 is very very on message.

Anyone who wants to publically share that information risks both lawsuits over NDAs they've signed and being blackballed by the industry for being willing to leak.

And anyone who anonymously tries to speak about such things will be laughed at as a poseur.

The only possibility is some sort of journalist willing to privately vet developers and then let them speak off the record, like the limited information we got about the star theory breakup.  But that was a juicy story, vs this just being another dime a dozen botched launch.

Gamasutra used to do a thing ages ago where developers talked about what went right and wrong with a project which was slightly more honest - but even that was spin doctored, though not as heavily as T2s public coms.

Edited March 4, 2023 by RocketRockington

[Pickelhaube808]

8 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

... like the limited information we got about the star theory breakup.  But that was a juicy story, vs this just being another dime a dozen botched launch.

I will be honest - I am so diehard Squad that I have been out of touch with stuff that happened after about 1.3.1. Played since 0.17 and never moved on to 1.4 and beyond due to just not liking where the game was headed.

I think it is all coming back to me now that you mentioned this- I had completely forgotten all of the drama that happened after Squad had left the picture. Now this is all starting to make sense. Thank you.

Edited March 4, 2023 by Pickelhaube808

[RocketRockington]

4 minutes ago, Pickelhaube808 said:

I will be honest - I am so diehard Squad that I have been out of touch with stuff that happened after about 1.3.1. Played since 0.17 and never moved on to 1.4 and beyond due to just not liking where the game was headed.

I think it is all coming back to me now that you mentioned this- I had completely forgotten all of the drama that happened after Squad had left the picture. Now this is all starting to make sense. Thank you.

Yeah there was a bit there with 1.4 and 1.5 where things were iffy with Squad, but I like where they headed after 1.6 and beyond.  Breaking ground was a good expansion, and they reversed course on a lot of old decisions like not providing dV information.

[Pickelhaube808]

6 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

Yeah there was a bit there with 1.4 and 1.5 where things were iffy with Squad, but I like where they headed after 1.6 and beyond.  Breaking ground was a good expansion, and they reversed course on a lot of old decisions like not providing dV information.

Was about that time when I made sure to back up my mostly-complete archive of versions up to that point as the (then new) TOS change had entirely shut down any sort of legal distribution of even free versions. Glad I did that as it must be impossible to do nowadays without a time machine. Sadly most of what I have before 0.7.3 are just screenshots... 0% chance any new content is coming from that era again.

[Kubas_inko]

I can't speak for myself as I have no idea, but if this post has at least some truth to it, it can explain a lot.

 

[Periple]

3 hours ago, RocketRockington said:

Anyone who wants to publically share that information risks both lawsuits over NDAs they've signed and being blackballed by the industry for being willing to leak.

That's not the main reason we don't like talking about internal stuff in public. The main reason is that if you do, you put yourself in the middle of a social media excrement hurricane and that is really unpleasant!

Sometimes really dramatic stuff does happen but most of the time it's much more boring than you'd think. Just things being more complicated than you'd expect, or a key person leaving and having to find a replacement, or only discovering that something that looked really good in the prototype isn't actually fun in the game so you have to do it over, or a system that worked well in isolation causes impossible bottlenecks when integrated, and so on and so forth. 

Like most of the time the publisher really isn't the bad guy! They want the game to be finished and polished and fun and successful just as much as the developer, and they often have a lot of knowledge and ways to help! Also there are stupid people with bad ideas everywhere in the industry, it could be a publisher, it could be a studio lead, it could be a game director, it could even be a principal developer. There are also many more smart people with wonderful ideas, and sometimes these wonderful ideas collide and somebody's idea doesn't make the cut and they get upset.

But mostly the industry really is so secretive because the fans are so hysterical, they latch onto every little thing and blow it out of proportion and make a huge drama out of it, so it's much easier just to keep your head down. I wouldn't want to be posting this with my real name and position for this reason, not because anyone at my studio would get mad!

[RocketRockington]

1 hour ago, Periple said:

But mostly the industry really is so secretive because the fans are so hysterical, they latch onto every little thing and blow it out of proportion and make a huge drama out of it, so it's much easier just to keep your head down. I wouldn't want to be posting this with my real name and position for this reason, not because anyone at my studio would get mad!

That's true when you're posting about someone else's game.  I was talking about someone theoretically 'in the know' about what happened with KSP2.   T2  is know to have hires sign pretty strict contracts about use of social media in relation to their work to be employed by them, so I do think a current employee there would be concerned about that, T2 is very litigious. 

Further, I think given the long delays, the state of the product, and the shennanigans with Star Theory, there's more going on with KSP2 than the standard industry turmoil you describe.  Most projects are just normal workplace stuff - even ones that fail.  Some are cursed though, I'm sure the Duke Nukem 3D team had a lot to say about thiers.

[Periple]

4 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

That's true when you're posting about someone else's game. 

It’s even more true when you talk about your own! I’d love to talk more about what we do but I won’t because somebody would latch onto every little thing, blow it out of proportion, and start a hate campaign. Even if I didn’t say anything bad! I don’t want to do that to my colleagues and I don’t want to deal with it myself! 

[RocketRockington]

5 minutes ago, Periple said:

It’s even more true when you talk about your own! I’d love to talk more about what we do but I won’t because somebody would latch onto every little thing, blow it out of proportion, and start a hate campaign. Even if I didn’t say anything bad! I don’t want to do that to my colleagues and I don’t want to deal with it myself! 

Fine but again, we're not talking about you at your.presumably much more permissive studio, and presumably much more reasonable development process, where you haven't been promising a release sometime in the next 6-12 months for the last 4 years, only to deliver an EA with terrible performance, showstopper bugs, missing both planned improvement features and parity features with your prequel, etc.   We're talking about a hypothetical person slipping the beans about KSP2.  Can you understand that there would be a difference, or can you only continue to relate it to your own personal status?

[Periple]

12 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

Can you understand that there would be a difference, or can you only continue to relate it to your own personal status?

My studio has had its share of negative publicity. When the fans are upset, it is incredibly unpleasant to wade in. Anything you say will be used against you. If you say anything at all negative it’ll turn into a witch hunt. If you say anything at all positive you’ll be branded a company man, PR agent, and paid shill or worse. It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

You could always write a book but who has time to read them. Your best bet is that a very rare bird, an investigative journalist who actually wants to know what’s going on as opposed to scandal mongering, and who’s good at their job, takes an interest. And even then the fans who have made up their minds won’t care.

It’s not the studio, it’s not the publisher, it’s not the legal eagles. It’s you, the fan base.

[LoSBoL]

So, what really happened? Well, Star Theory kept theorizing and when T2 got word of a theory that entailed Kerbals being replaced by tigers they stepped in. Nate was reprimanded for not noticing those theories as he was to busy building weird planes with his daughter, he really shouldn't have asked for a test build for this sole purpose. So Intercept got things rolling again, but the QA team was stuck in interstellar space and while Nate spent 75% of his time scrolling screenshots, 35% of his time still playing on the test build with his daughter, and a mere 15% tracking development he didn't notice that all the developers were having a laugh with multi-player instead of developing. But then it went completely south, Jim pressed time zoom and here we are... 

All this can be found on a platform with a bird, and must be true, because the account giving this insight had a blue tick. 

[Moons]

What really is weird to me is the old footage:

 

This is footage from 25.08.2019 - and its probably a bit older than that. It already has lots of things in the game we see now - how can the EA state of the game right now be at the state as it is now when it was already in this state more than 3 years ago?

 

I would really like to know what happened? Is the EA now just a part of what is already developed? Because if thats most of it besides some more models etc. from cinematics etc. i really wonder when this game is supposed to be finished?

Edited March 4, 2023 by Moons

[CastleKSide]

It's easy to get something looking like solid gameplay in a 3 second clip. Especially with no interaction. Most of the could be just assets running in engine with no code like thrust or inputs or anything 

Not saying it isn't fishy, just that the video footage doesn't really tell us anything

[Moons]

7 minutes ago, CastleKSide said:

It's easy to get something looking like solid gameplay in a 3 second clip. Especially with no interaction. Most of the could be just assets running in engine with no code like thrust or inputs or anything 

Not saying it isn't fishy, just that the video footage doesn't really tell us anything

Looks like a launch to me - and its called "alpha gameplay" so i doubt its just some sort of cinematic video.

[CastleKSide]

Parts might have been welded, there might have been a simplified drag model, that might have been the only usable footage from 4 hours of crashes and bugs.. it's hard to tell the exact state of the game from a short video clip which is why I don't agree with the "it was in a better state then"

I could cut up the preview footage from Matt Lowe and Scott Manley into a pristine trailer, just by snipping out 2 or 3 second sections and putting on the given soundtrack.

[Moons]

9 minutes ago, CastleKSide said:

Parts might have been welded, there might have been a simplified drag model, that might have been the only usable footage from 4 hours of crashes and bugs.. it's hard to tell the exact state of the game from a short video clip which is why I don't agree with the "it was in a better state then"

I could cut up the preview footage from Matt Lowe and Scott Manley into a pristine trailer, just by snipping out 2 or 3 second sections and putting on the given soundtrack.

I probably express myself misleadingly - i meant it more in a way of - how can it only have progressed as far as what we see now when it was already in a state like this 3 years ago (if there really were 50 people working on it for the last 3 years). I didnt mean to say it was in a better state - obviously not.

Edited March 4, 2023 by Moons

[Vl3d]

9 hours ago, Pickelhaube808 said:

not liking where the game was headed

What do you mean?

[HebaruSan]

That preview video has absolutely no UI in it, so bugs with staging, fuel flow, orbit stability, maneuver nodes, etc., would be impossible to notice. It does have one big wobbly rocket in it, though.

I have a few wild speculations about root causes. I'm trying to follow the maxim of, "Never attribute to malice...", because I don't think anybody wanted a bad outcome.

First, the scope of the original vision was massively under-estimated. The "big 4" new features were never going to all ship by the original date in 2020. Done well, this is a huge, huge project, and somebody told the publisher it wasn't (probably not intentionally). I suspected this at the time but had no solid basis to say it, but the result speaks for itself. Snapshot a 12-year project at the 5-year mark and you get missing features, severe bugs, and poor performance.

More recently, the devs all got siloed into their individual project areas, and nobody in a coding role felt responsible for the big picture of how the product played as a whole. If you can't reliably get to orbit because of problems with staging or fuel flow or parts falling off or weak joints, well that's not my problem, I'm just on the interstellar team and I have to focus on my deadlines for that. And so on across the other new features. The publisher saw this in internal demos and decided early access would be a way to hold the studio's feet to the fire of the reality that someday somebody was going to try to play what they were working on.

To reiterate, this is pure speculation based on widely known observations. As already noted, it will likely never be possible to confirm any of it.

[Kerbart]

11 hours ago, Pickelhaube808 said:

Much of the planning must have had to been done before the announcement back in August of 2019. A game isn't just announced without knowing what it will be, and then scheduled to be released 6 months later. Therefore, the entire team couldn'tve just been planning for the last 3.5 years.

I'm not sure about that. My theory is that the initial (2019) design was not a lot more than KSP1 "overhauled." When the new team came on board they revamped that vision. Now they need an architecture that supports all the extra stuff they want.

Here's a fictional timeline I'm pulling out of where the sun don't shine:

• Take over initial 2.0 project, study code base, where is it heading, come to conclusion this is not a viable long term design? - 3 months
• Develop plan for what game should be instead - 6 months
• Come up with architecture supporting the roadmap - 3 months

I have no experience in game development but I cannot imagine these processes can be finished in mere weeks. On top of it, these are all "sit together in a room with whiteboards" kind of processes and it was at the height of the pandemic, so that doesn't speed things up either.

Of the original 2.0 game a lot of the assets could be recycled - there wasn't anything wrong with those. So from the looks of it, it might seem that the game was in this state in 2019. In reality that's just the shape of the parts and how they're rendered - about 5% of total development? C;early a lot of work was done i between, that's just work we don't see that easily.

[Periple]

One big thing that not many people seem to have pointed out is that the new part models are overall much higher quality than in KSP1. Masses of work has gone into that.

[regex]

32 minutes ago, Periple said:

One big thing that not many people seem to have pointed out is that the new part models are overall much higher quality than in KSP1. Masses of work has gone into that.

The terrain generation as well. That alone... I've been really impressed by the amount of work already gone into this game.

[Monger]

4 hours ago, Moons said:

What really is weird to me is the old footage:

 

This is footage from 25.08.2019 - and its probably a bit older than that. It already has lots of things in the game we see now - how can the EA state of the game right now be at the state as it is now when it was already in this state more than 3 years ago. 

That is a really common misconception. Cranking out mockups that look like the real thing is suprisingly simple. But it is also less than 1% than the desired final state. Often more like 0%, because you often toss away your prototype and start from scratch once you understand the lessons learned from your prototype. 

[Nerdsie]

14 hours ago, Pickelhaube808 said:

appears to contain many things that were pulled and quickly touched up/altered from the original game

What makes you say that?