What went wrong?

[Spacefan101]

It's been 4 months since release of early access and there is still one dominant question in the community unanswered and that is what went wrong. There are multiple interviews where the developers talk about how their focus is on rebuilding the game from the ground up to have it be performant and as buggyless as possible yet years after those interviews happened the game is the complete opposite. Note I am not saying that it's not getting better because so far the updates have been great but I and I think that the whole community would love to hear what went wrong with the development. Is it just a really hard thing to develop, was there a restart at some point, did coronavirus really affect development that much, just what happened?

And another thing is the developers stated multiple times that they've played with future roadmap features and had a lot of fun and most of us wonder how that is possible since the game is still barely playable without those features?

[Scarecrow71]

1 hour ago, Spacefan101 said:

just what happened?

That's the billion dollar question right there.  Unfortunately, we are never going to get an answer, which is nearly as frustrating as having the question to begin with.

[Little 908]

Yeah i dont have much of an idea on it. they kinda just gave us a crumb of the cookie, they clearly have a multiplayer already

[Buzz313th]

Just now, Scarecrow71 said:

That's the billion dollar question right there.  Unfortunately, we are never going to get an answer, which is nearly as frustrating as having the question to begin with.

Just speculation here....   

 

The answer is probably embarrassing and probably could have been avoided easily, or the internal politics were so bad that people left, key people, like the engineering department.  Maybe malicious code was installed before they left, just to give the final "Up yours" to the company?  This would explain why nobody at IG has a handle on the code and why most of the bugs are attached to the most basic mechanics of the game.  

 

[The Aziz]

2 hours ago, Spacefan101 said:

Is it just a really hard thing to develop, was there a restart at some point, did coronavirus really affect development that much

Most likely yes to all.

2 hours ago, Spacefan101 said:

And another thing is the developers stated multiple times that they've played with future roadmap features and had a lot of fun and most of us wonder how that is possible since the game is still barely playable without those features?

Because they existed in some form that wasn't ready for public release. You can have a lot of fun in your game even if you wouldn't release it in current state. Normal thing in development.

[LoSBoL]

What do I gain by knowing? Nothing, it brings me nothing. It doesn't help the state of the game. It's not me that can learn from made mistakes, it's PD and IG that may learn. 

We're not going to know 'what happened', I don't feel happy or unhappy about it. It's just the way it is. I try to only get frustrated about things I can personally have an influence on, getting frustrated about stuff I don't have an influence on is a waste of time.

[Wheehaw Kerman]

1 hour ago, LoSBoL said:

What do I gain by knowing? Nothing, it brings me nothing. It doesn't help the state of the game. It's not me that can learn from made mistakes, it's PD and IG that may learn. 

We're not going to know 'what happened', I don't feel happy or unhappy about it. It's just the way it is. I try to only get frustrated about things I can personally have an influence on, getting frustrated about stuff I don't have an influence on is a waste of time.

I have to say that although I agree that the speculation is pointless, I’m still a little curious.  Maybe one day, once the dust has settled, somebody will do an interview.  In the interim I’m not going to get fussed about it.

Edited June 25, 2023 by Wheehaw Kerman

[samhuk]

What was supposed to happen:

It's all but certain that, regardless of what actually happened, the IG development team clearly *had* an original plan (before it imploded ~4 months ago):

1. Release core game that is similar to KSP1 but nicer UI and gameplay.
2. Work on extra "bolt-on" features like colonies, interstellar, etc.

What actually happened:

Now, as it all turned out, that didn't happen. What happened is that the development team released what they knew to be a very buggy game that was essentially unplayable as far as any reasonable standards for a AAA game. I recall many retreating to the "it's an EA" defense, but that level of unplayability and 4 months of still-not-fixed time, far exceeds that defense.

Why did it happen:

Well, there are many factors as play here. First off, AAA game development is really hard. There are several million dollars at stake, with a lot of investors (funding Intercept Games, et al) essentially making a huge gamble that only might pay off in many years' time. Those investors have investors, those investors have performance reviews and a balance sheet, and it all boils down to them.

Now, Nate and no other at IG will ever divulge why it went so wrong and why they released what they knew to be a buggy unplayable first drop, but here are the possibilities:

1. They actually didn't know it was as buggy as it was (QA problem).
2. Investors pressured them to release so that investors get paid back.
3. IG spent all of investor's cash and had to release to literally keep the lights on.

Nate has made comments that have suggested that Cause 3 doesn't apply, and after seeing the awesome talent at IG, I would put doubt on Cause 1, so that leaves Cause 2.

That's why, in all liklihood, investors pressured them to release, with the devs forced to cut a release off of master, knowing it wasn't ready but not being able to do anything about it.

That is why Nate's job is so difficult, by the way. He sits right in the middle of the developers, the wider company, and the player-base. That's a lot of angry parties to be sat in the middle of, all wanting things to be done differently.

The players wanted a less buggy game, released faster. The investors just wanted to be paid back. IG may have just wanted to keep the lights on. The developers wanted more time to release a less buggy game.

All messy, all high stakes, millions of dollars and all - as AAA game development almost always is.

Edited June 25, 2023 by samhuk

[MechBFP]

34 minutes ago, samhuk said:

Now, Nate and no other at IG will ever divulge why it went so wrong

Nah, it will come out eventually. Maybe not for a decade, but it will eventually. People will eventually retire, NDAs eventually run out, the story will be told someday.

[HebaruSan]

My own speculation is on the previous thread on this topic:

[Kerbart]

44 minutes ago, samhuk said:

here are the possibilities:

1. They actually didn't know it was as buggy as it was (QA problem).
2. Investors pressured them to release so that investors get paid back.
3. IG spent all of investor's cash and had to release to literally keep the lights on.

Nate has made comments that have suggested that Cause 3 doesn't apply, and after seeing the awesome talent at IG, I would put doubt on Cause 1, so that leaves Cause 2.

I agree with [2] being the reason but not for the motivation listed. At least not short term.  The project had delays over and over, maybe for good reasons, maybe not (we won't know). And there's plenty of precedent of sequels that got delayed for a very long time (Duke Nukem) and even cancelled (Half Life 3). So, not in a sense of "we need money" but rather "the game will never get published if we don't force them" a hard deadline was set.

Maybe we're actually talking about the same thing (you mention [3], after all, as a separate possibility), but I'd say "because they felt it would never launch without a hard deadline"

We know that deadline was set a lot earlier (the "fiscal year 2023" in a financial report a year earlier) and I suppose the discussion late 2022 went a bit like "sorry we can't make that deadline" followed by "find a way to make it happen." Reverting back to a release with most features stripped out must have been a painful and awful process, but it would give a chance to have less bugs. Imagine we had the "full" release with a half-baked science, colonies and interstellar implementation. What we have now is far more manageable and it's already a fluffing mess.

I suspect most of the code actually was rewritten from scratch, simply because we wouldn't have as many bugs as we have now. That also explains the long time frame. That we see similar bugs as in KSP1 doesn't surprise me. Most of the bugs seem to be logical errors, and if code is supposed to do the same thing it's easy to make the same errors. That's why starting from scratch is such a mixed bag. Yes, you leave behind spaghettified Frankencode that evolved over a decade, but you also leave behind all the fixes for weird things no one thought of at first.

It's all understandable that IG doesn't tell us the whole story. No corporation will happily hang out their dirty laundry. It makes them look bad and rarely anything good comes out of it (remember not just customers, but investors read those Mea Culpas as well). The downside of that is that through all deceit and misinformation (looking at where we are four months after the release it's incredibly hard to be not salty about what we've been told and what is delivered) we now really don't know where we stand. A year from now we can look back at this and either say "they did come through in the end" or "we should have seen the implosion coming." Time will tell.

[Vanamonde]

I don't mean to be harsh, guys, but this is the same discussion that takes place every time the developers come out with a new dev notes. Let's not do the whole thing yet again, please.