What happened to the reworked core systems?

[herbal space program]

33 minutes ago, Skorj said:

It really makes me wonder whether the senior dev guys left during that studio takeover (and it usually is the senior guys who go when the situation gets unpleasant, because they're the ones who can easily find jobs elsewhere).  That would also explain the lack of focus in KSP2.  I've heard that fragments of all of the feature sets we didn't get have been found in the code, the beginnings of career mode and colonies and multi-player and so on.  Working on everything at once and not finishing anything is such a basic leadership failure, I'm really wondering how that happened.

Whatever happened, the idea that this is the product of several years of dedicated work by an effective team of game developers is pretty hard to swallow. But maybe there's a whole lot of good stuff that's been done but is still not ready to roll out precisely because it was left 80% finished by people who are now gone. If that's indeed the case, then we could get some pretty major improvements in the upcoming updates.  I could optimistically imagine that's why they're holding off on the next one, so that they can get us back by effectively implementing at least one boffo new feature.  Even just showing us one surface-level landscape that lives up to the hype of the teaser videos could win back a lot of trust.

[RocketRockington]

32 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

If that's indeed the case, then we could get some pretty major improvements in the upcoming updates.

If that was the case, we'd have seen more progress by now.  It's just people spouting copium and moving the goal posts at this point who thinks that, imagining they're nearly  done with all the missing features but not releasing them because they want to put the finishing touches on the game.  They clearly are ok with releasing a lot of half-finished, mostly broken stuff, and previewing it to kingdom come before they do so - they haven't even previewed science gameplay at all, just a model of a part in the blender.

But hope springs eternal - you can go back through the release threads here to see people talking about 'oh the roadmap will start falling into place fast' or 'we'll see KSP2 1.0 in 6 months'.  It doesn't even seem like they'll have science mode out 6 months after the EA launch - time enough to have coded it from scratch.

[VlonaldKerman]

2 hours ago, Skorj said:

I've heard that fragments of all of the feature sets we didn't get have been found in the code, the beginnings of career mode and colonies and multi-player and so on.  Working on everything at once and not finishing anything is such a basic leadership failure, I'm really wondering how that happened.

I believe I posted about this shortly after the EA launch- I'll summarize my theory: Until recently, they had never intended to do EA. They suffered repeated cost/time overruns due to a mix of technical/engineering challenges and poor management/etc. Then, T2 decided to light a fire underneath the devs by forcing them to release into EA. Thus, for the vast majority of the development time, they were developing the game as if it would all release at once, rather than focusing on the feature which would be present at release. The proof that I cited at the time was the lack of re-entry heating and bugs such as teleporting KSC- under no circumstances would those things be not present, and present, respectively, were it not for a hard corporate deadline.

2 hours ago, herbal space program said:

Whatever happened, the idea that this is the product of several years of dedicated work by an effective team of game developers is pretty hard to swallow.

This is why many people believe (want to believe?) that the initial scope of the game was much more limited and they scrapped it when T2 took over. That way this version of the game is only ~3 years old. All of this despite the obvious large scope seen in the trailer and the fact that they never intimated that development was restarted- rather, they posted blogs, screenshots, and short videos which seemed to show a steadily progressing game.