Any update of when to expect new content?

[VlonaldKerman]

14 hours ago, K^2 said:

I understand that you might have missed all of this, or for some reason haven't connected it to the delay, but the information was there. To be more forthcoming, Private Division would have to make flashing neon signs.

I am aware of all of this...

15 hours ago, K^2 said:

the original devs were very publicly dropped, new studio to work on KSP2 was spun up

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall reading that most of the dev team ended up transferring. Thus, with respect to a "neon sign", I don't think it's obvious at all that the game had to be scrapped and restarted. Sure, I would expect delays and difficulties, and that's why it made sense when they delayed the game for a number of months, rather than years. Everyone in the community seemed pretty understanding, and still cautiously optimistic. I don't remember it being widely known or discussed that they were essentially starting from scratch. Again, correct me if I'm wrong.

14 hours ago, K^2 said:

The fact that Private Division hasn't immediately announced a TBD delay for the release date was a bad move, of course. I have no idea what sort of corporate checkers were involved in decision to keep pushing it back about a year at a time instead. I don't know if Intercept was involved in setting these intermediate release dates or if this was entirely T2/PD internal shenanigans. In either case, that's one place where there should have been more transparency. "The game is delayed, and we'll let you know a new release date once we have it," would have been a much better call, at least in terms of optics. Again, I have no idea what sort of internal pressures they might have been dealing with.

I completely agree with what you've said here. The point of my post was to highlight the fact that messaging/communication is largely responsible for the backlash that KSP 2 has received. Indeed, as many have pointed out, the game is in early access, and many early access games release in various states (I would argue most better off than the 0.1 release of KSP 2). However, those games don't receive 50% positive reviews on Steam, therefore, something must be different about KSP 2. Are KSP fans more negative than the average fanbase? I would say certainly not. My post was about my interpretation of the negative reception of the release- that is, that either:

1) The game was in development for multiple years before the planned release date and should therefore be in a more advanced state, especially given that (if I recall correctly, may be wrong) they didn't initially plan on releasing early access (certainly not this early) and so such messaging arrived at the last minute, or,

2) The game had to be scrapped when T2 took over, and redone from scratch. In this case, I think it would be fair both to criticize STG for wanting to release a game that evidently was so bad it had to be trashed, and T2/PD for the bizarre schedule of delays, and a lack of transparency about why those delays were taking place. As you point out, it would have been better for them to say, "Turns out, game is in a bad state, we're going to have to do a lot of work. It will likely be several years, maybe tentatively 2022+". People would have been disappointed, but I think it's important to remember that every time they announced a delay the overwhelming sentiment from the community was, "take your time, do it right."

 

With respect to the topic of this thread... the timetable for new content release is obviously dependent on what exists so far. The good news is that if in fact development had to be restarted 3 years ago, I would say that development has moved at a reasonable pace. Therefore, I would expect EA to be nearly complete in a couple of years at most. I suspect updates will be sparse as they work on core systems and other "back-end" stuff, and a lot of the chunkier "content" updates will be more rapid as many of the assets/implementation are already actually written, though not yet integrated.

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

25 minutes ago, VlonaldKerman said:

Therefore, I would expect EA to be nearly complete in a couple of years at most.

Not with pace and ambiguity of how current patches are being delivered.

They need to step up big time to make that kind of progress in a couple of years, unless the roadmap gets smaller or features become simpler. 

Edited April 28, 2023 by GGG-GoodGuyGreg

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

35 minutes ago, VlonaldKerman said:

My post was about my interpretation of the negative reception of the release- that is, that either:

1) The game was in development for multiple years before the planned release date and should therefore be in a more advanced state,

2) The game had to be scrapped when T2 took over, and redone from scratch.

To me only the second scenario would explain the huge gap between how the game was allegedly almost done for this EA launch and what we actually got on day one for 50$ and would explain why no new feature was added since launch.

I really think they should come clean and tell us what really happened, instead of The team claiming to be proud in AMAs about how the game looks today. 

[regex]

17 minutes ago, GGG-GoodGuyGreg said:

I really think they should come clean and tell us what really happened, instead of The team claiming to be proud in AMAs about how the game looks today. 

What information there would be in any way actionable to the individual player of the game? Why does it matter one bit?

For all we know they actually are pretty happy with the release because they're getting raw data on what people actually want from the game.

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

4 minutes ago, regex said:

What information there would be in any way actionable to the individual player of the game? Why does it matter one bit?

For all we know they actually are pretty happy with the release because they're getting raw data on what people actually want from the game.

It matters because if they keep a tight lip about everything else as they did so far, it might be only way we would know what kind of pace we should expect as we progress through the roadmap.

And I think we deserve to know what is going on for being early adopters at this price tag. 

[regex]

Just now, GGG-GoodGuyGreg said:

It matters because if they keep a tight lip about everything else as they did so far, it might be only way we would know what kind of pace we should expect as we progress through the roadmap.

And I think we deserve to know what is going on for being early adopters at this price tag. 

In other words it doesn't mean anything or provide you with any information that is in any way actionable. Gotcha.

[K^2]

1 hour ago, VlonaldKerman said:

I think it would be fair both to criticize STG for wanting to release a game that evidently was so bad it had to be trashed

That's reaching a bit. I don't think STG started out making the same game that the Intercept did. It's hard to say precisely at what point the scope went from, "We're making a big enough expansion to KSP to sell it as a new game, but still, fundamentally, on the same tech, recycling much of KSP code and art," to "We're reworking every game system, building a new art pipeline, and will need completely new code and assets for KSP2." I'm obviously guessing a bit on the specifics and even more on the timeline, but it seems that when STG were contracted around mid to late 2017, it was the former, and by some time in early to mid 2020 the game was with the Intercept and it was scoped to the latter.

If the scope was already rapidly changing by late 2018 to early 2019, yeah, STG completely dropped the ball on getting their act together, communicating needs for significantly more resources and development time, etc. If the scope only started changing around E3, possibly just weeks or days prior, it's much more hazy, and it's easier to excuse STG, shifting more of the communication blame onto PD. But the latter might have been restricted in what they could say at the time if they were negotiating with STG for the scope expansion. We know that STG was trying to get more funding and dev time from PD by late 2019. I have no idea how reasonable their requests were, and we were still in the dark at that point, but the outcome is known. Negotiations broke down, STG got the boot, and Intercept was created.

So, while I agree that there was a failure at some level, saying that STG was doing a poor job of making the game they initially set out to make might be unfair. We don't know what that really looked like, and we might never know. That wasn't the game that was eventually made, and whether the quality was a factor, or if it was entirely just a matter of PD deciding on massively expanding the scope of the game, is not clear from the public information we have.

1 hour ago, VlonaldKerman said:

Thus, with respect to a "neon sign", I don't think it's obvious at all that the game had to be scrapped and restarted.

I understand if it wasn't obvious at the time. I work in games, so this might have been more clear to me than general public as soon as the first concepts screenshots of WIP started dropping from Intercept in late 2020 - early 2021, and I had absolutely no expectation of the game coming out any time soon back then, but to everyone else, yeah, maybe the ETA of late 2021 release sounded reasonable. And the fact that it wasn't communicated then is definitely a misstep in my opinion.

But in retrospect, now that we're seeing an alpha build being released as early access in 2023, I think it should be pretty easy to look back at the info that was available about the studio shakeup and realize that, yeah, Intercept basically started the work from scratch. Like, a lot of the detail is missing, but I don't see a need for further explanation of why the game is so late. Some sort of an explanation for why it wasn't communicated clearly right away? Sure, that'd be nice. Don't think it's happening, though. Corporate doesn't like to talk about such things. (And in some cases can't due to legal restrictions.)

[Alexoff]

43 minutes ago, K^2 said:

"We're making a big enough expansion to KSP to sell it as a new game, but still, fundamentally, on the same tech, recycling much of KSP code and art,"

Perhaps this would be the best approach. In 5-6 years, several dozen developers could unravel the KSP1 spaghetti code, find bottlenecks, improve graphics (which modders successfully do) and performance. Would anyone care about this fact? Portal and l4d are made on the basis of HL2, is anyone against it? But now they seem to have decided to meet with all the problems that the developers of KSP1 solved with one way or another success.

[K^2]

1 hour ago, Alexoff said:

In 5-6 years, several dozen developers could unravel the KSP1 spaghetti code, find bottlenecks, improve graphics (which modders successfully do) and performance.

Original scope implied smaller budget, a tiny team, and 3 years of development. But even if they wanted to rescope while keeping the original code base, you seem to be under some faulty impression that a mod doing everything we see in KSP2, even just the visual stuff, would be any better in performance and stability. The mods are there. You're absolutely welcome to install a high-res terrain, parallax cranked to the max, cloud mods, lighting mods, engine FX mods, and report back on how you enjoyed the loading times, frame rate, and your overall experience.

One of the big differences I see on the forum is between people who looked at modded KSP footage on YouTube and complain about KSP2, and people who actually took time playing modded KSP, and seem to be of much more favorable opinion of the state of KSP2.

[gussi111]

On 4/20/2023 at 6:54 PM, Little 908 said:

I mean, if we only get bug fixes for a year, the game lacks anything new to enjoy, since its basically the same as modded ksp 1. So they would be fixing bugs for the 0 players playing the game. So it kinda is required for new content to come in.

I think that the game has so few players exactly because of performance and bugs, vast majority of rigs can't even start the game at the moment.

[Alexoff]

7 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Original scope implied smaller budget, a tiny team, and 3 years of development.

It seems there were about 30 people, now less than 50, not too big growth. About the budget then and now we can only guess.

9 minutes ago, K^2 said:

But even if they wanted to rescope while keeping the original code base, you seem to be under some faulty impression that a mod doing everything we see in KSP2, even just the visual stuff, would be any better in performance and stability.

If you bothered to read what I wrote, you would have noticed that I suggested that the development team get inside the KSP1 core and improve it, and not take ready-made free mods. Portal 2's engine is roughly the same as HL2's, but much improved. This is not a mod with new textures!

11 minutes ago, K^2 said:

One of the big differences I see on the forum is between people who looked at modded KSP footage on YouTube and complain about KSP2, and people who actually took time playing modded KSP, and seem to be of much more favorable opinion of the state of KSP2.

In this case, it turns out that KSP1 is played without mods, and the rest are playing KSP2. There are also no mods. And mods are only loved by those who look at KSP on YouTube or Twitch. Am I understanding this idea correctly?

13 minutes ago, K^2 said:

You're absolutely welcome to install a high-res terrain, parallax cranked to the max, cloud mods, lighting mods, engine FX mods, and report back on how you enjoyed the loading times, frame rate, and your overall experience.

I tried, much better than KSP2

[K^2]

1 hour ago, Alexoff said:

get inside the KSP1 core and improve it

That's more work than writing it from scratch. A lot more work. Plus attrition, because engineers know it's more work, and it's miserable work on top of it.

You're welcome to open up your own games studio if you really think you can take an old game code, overhaul it to support a modern rendering pipeline, and do so on a smaller budget than it would to just write that stuff from scratch. There's great money in re-releasing classics with improved graphics. If you could undercut the competition with a better rate, you could be a rich person in no time. Go for it. I'm rooting for you.

[RocketRockington]

6 hours ago, VlonaldKerman said:

Therefore, I would expect EA to be nearly complete in a couple of years at most.

I like how after 3 years of delays, spending another 2 years in a beta purgatory has now become the standard for things going well in some people's minds.  KSP2 may not be good at many things, but it's been a fascinatingly effective at getting  people to lower thier expectations.

[Alexoff]

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

That's more work than writing it from scratch.

Where does such information come from? The game has not yet reached the KSP1 level, so we cannot answer where the work is finished.

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

You're welcome to open up your own games studio if you really think you can take an old game code

I did not buy KSP1 with all the giblets, will someone provide me with all the sources?

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

overhaul it to support a modern rendering pipeline

Is it true? And on what version of the engine does KSP1 work, and on which KSP2?

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

and do so on a smaller budget

Yes, where will T2 get the money from, they have as much money as I have!

I remember how during the development of version 1.2 a lot of nonsense was discovered in the KSP1 code, which was eliminated by modders from the forum. Unfortunately, then almost the entire team left Squad. Maybe T2 should have tried to find them, maybe they could keep improving the core of the game. Of course it is difficult, life in general is a complicated thing. And it turned out to be difficult to assemble the KSP again, the developers of KSP2 coped badly.

[Heretic391]

Let's wait and see how often updates are released and what content. That way we can figure out approx how long it would take to complete ksp2. We should also add time as a buffer to as I'm sure there will be unexpected issues. 

[K^2]

1 hour ago, Alexoff said:

I did not buy KSP1 with all the giblets, will someone provide me with all the sources?

1 hour ago, Alexoff said:

Is it true? And on what version of the engine does KSP1 work, and on which KSP2?

You should know all of that. You're the one who knows how to make the game better than people making it. Chop, chop. Money's out there, and you're letting it go somewhere else.

[Scarecrow71]

1 hour ago, Heretic391 said:

Let's wait and see how often updates are released and what content. That way we can figure out approx how long it would take to complete ksp2. We should also add time as a buffer to as I'm sure there will be unexpected issues. 

Well, updates are now delayed with no real cadence given.  2nd paragraph.

 

[Heretic391]

11 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Well, updates are now delayed with no real cadence given.  2nd paragraph.

 

They likely can't answer due to many unknowns with development, execs etc. I work in IT and do projects daily, and on a project management front this is a failure. 

 

 

 

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

2 hours ago, Heretic391 said:

They likely can't answer due to many unknowns with development, execs etc. I work in IT and do projects daily, and on a project management front this is a failure. 

 

 

 

I also work in tech, and I know when someone is stalling because they can’t get their stuff together, while spoon feeding irrelevant smaller “improvements”. Flowers. 

[RocketRockington]

Not surprised at all the see KSP2 further slowing down updates.  The past 2 months have been an all hands on deck situation for them.

 Unfortunately, due to their terrible project management, all hands on deck meant 'barely tolerable development rate'.  They're going to revert to their standard slow as molasses speed now, the one that got the game so delayed and launched in such a bad state.

But when a good chunk of your community is happy to keep waiting no matter how much you delay, why bother?  I bet we'll see more merch coming out at a fast clip though.

Edited April 29, 2023 by RocketRockington

[Heretic391]

Hot damn those are some good perks. I wish I could apply  

https://careers.take2games.com/job/4723530?gh_jid=4723530

Benefits. Medical (HSA & FSA), dental, vision, 401(k) with company match, employee stock purchase plan, commuter benefits, in-house wellness program, broad learning & development opportunities, a charitable giving platform with company match and more!
Perks. Fitness allowance, employee discount programs, free games & events, stocked pantries and the ability to earn up to $500+ per year for taking care of yourself and more!

[Alexoff]

10 hours ago, K^2 said:

You're the one who knows how to make the game better than people making it.

And you think it's impossible to improve games. And doing it again is very difficult, almost impossible. It probably has something to do with your abilities.

10 hours ago, K^2 said:

Chop, chop. Money's out there, and you're letting it go somewhere else

So you decide to ignore everything I wrote? Or do you have nothing to object to, except to suggest that I do everything myself, since the developers do not succeed?

[VlonaldKerman]

21 hours ago, K^2 said:

It's hard to say precisely at what point the scope went from, "We're making a big enough expansion to KSP to sell it as a new game, but still, fundamentally, on the same tech, recycling much of KSP code and art," to "We're reworking every game system, building a new art pipeline, and will need completely new code and assets for KSP2." I'm obviously guessing a bit on the specifics and even more on the timeline, but it seems that when STG were contracted around mid to late 2017, it was the former, and by some time in early to mid 2020 the game was with the Intercept and it was scoped to the latter.

Unless they didn't initially plan on having interstellar, planning on reusing the KSP 1 codebase would have been a decision worth criticizing. I'm pretty ignorant on this stuff, but if you read the dev blogs, they certainly talk as if the terrain system, colony stuff wrt. supply routes and background processes, and physics resolution at interstellar scales are each deeply challenging technical problems which require rewriting fundamental code. In fact, I remember the reasoning behind KSP 2 being, originally, according to STG, created was that the KSP 1 architecture was insufficient for substantial further improvements to be made. In other words, redesigning core functions was synonymous with the development of KSP 2 from the project's inception. I currently doubt that their intention was ever to, "[make] a big enough expansion to KSP to sell it as a new game, but still, fundamentally, on the same tech, recycling much of KSP code and art."

 

22 hours ago, K^2 said:

If the scope was already rapidly changing by late 2018 to early 2019, yeah, STG completely dropped the ball on getting their act together, communicating needs for significantly more resources and development time, etc.

Personally, if I had to guess, I would guess that this is the way it went, or that the scope never changed, and it was ambitious from the beginning. Again, I'm guessing.

 

22 hours ago, K^2 said:

But in retrospect, now that we're seeing an alpha build being released as early access in 2023, I think it should be pretty easy to look back at the info that was available about the studio shakeup and realize that, yeah, Intercept basically started the work from scratch.

I agree, I suspect it was started from scratch. But, as stated in my prior points, I think it wasn't obvious at all that the initial project had to be scrapped, prior to the new datapoint of the EA release. In fact, looking in from the outside, as you mentioned in your post, with a delay only until 2021, the most reasonable conclusion was that (and the stated reasons at the time were that) a combination of COVID and corporate stuff had slowed progress on the build of the game that was supposed to be released in 2020. 

 

22 hours ago, K^2 said:

I understand if it wasn't obvious at the time. I work in games, so this might have been more clear to me than general public as soon as the first concepts screenshots of WIP started dropping from Intercept in late 2020 - early 2021

This is a fair point. However, the mere fact that the screenshots from 2020-21 were lackluster is not evidence that KSP 2 was initially supposed to be a KSP 1 reskin. It could also be a signal of incompetence/over-ambition of the dev team at STG- many of whom transferred to PD and are still working on the project. For this reason, the history of the development of KSP 2 seems important.

 

16 hours ago, RocketRockington said:

I like how after 3 years of delays, spending another 2 years in a beta purgatory has now become the standard for things going well in some people's minds. 

I never said I considered it to be "going well." Only that, as a statement of fact, it is possible that the game could release in two years, and it wouldn't shock me. It is possible for people to have opinions in between "Everything is going fine and as expected," and, "The recked development of KSP 2 will lead the world into nuclear war."

 

14 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Well, updates are now delayed with no real cadence given.  2nd paragraph.

 

Eek. Saw this. 

[Strawberry]

If you want additional context, read the comments

Development cycles are unpredictable and theyre switching to a different one, but it still should be less then two months between updates

[K^2]

30 minutes ago, VlonaldKerman said:

Unless they didn't initially plan on having interstellar, planning on reusing the KSP 1 codebase would have been a decision worth criticizing. I'm pretty ignorant on this stuff, but if you read the dev blogs, they certainly talk as if the terrain system, colony stuff wrt. supply routes and background processes, and physics resolution at interstellar scales are each deeply challenging technical problems which require rewriting fundamental code.

KSP1 physics is only a blocker if you need thrust under warp. There are ways around that. I would imagine the original vision only having one new star system, and it would have been a lot closer to Kerbol. Everything else is dependent on scale and quality. There was room to improve planet visuals even on KSP1 base without a significant performance hit. And I imagine most of the work would be in trying to get everything else looking better. Add better scattering, clouds, and new materials for rockets. Some of it would need new code, but you wouldn't have to replace the existing terrain system for that. It would, however, restrict you in what you can do for new planets, which seems to have been one of the driving forces for replacing the tech. Finally, colonies could definitely have been done on existing tech. They'd be scrappier, though.

In short, to meet Intercept's objectives at quality they set out to achieve, you needed a lot of the code to change. But if you simply wanted to stuff new features into the existing game, you could have used KSP1 as a base and take some shortcuts. It would look very much like KSP with some visual mods, though. So I'm glad that the concept was pushed a lot further than that.