KSP2 EA Grand Discussion Thread.

[Kubas_inko]

7 minutes ago, TLTay said:

Very few people are making this the fun of their weekend after all the hype. 2/3 of people haven't even played 3 hours. Only 5% could be considered to be making KSP2 a primary entertainment choice this weekend. Looks like it's getting refunded or put back on the shelf for later by a great many people.

How can you make this fun when less than 25% of player base meets the minimum requirements and even playing on that is pain? Your average Joe is not forgiving when he paid 50 bucks for a buggy game with bad performance (and no, EA is not an excuse).

Edited February 25, 2023 by Kubas_inko

[Bej Kerman]

14 minutes ago, Multivac said:

"Omg the NERVs are unbalanced! My strut broke! It didn't have features X, Y, or Z (that KSP2 doesn't really have yet either!) Worst! Game! Ever!" is not an argument I'm gonna spend tons of time or energy refuting.

Nor am I going to waste time with strawman arguments made because you can't just ignore someone who isn't speaking about your favourite game using the words you would hope they'd use. I'm addressing the people who ignore KSP 1's issues and aren't being constructive with KSP 2's issues, not the people who give it fair criticism.

17 minutes ago, Multivac said:

KSP1 was more than merely a success, it was something that people loved, and still love, and rightly so.

It was a success because A. there was 0 competition, and B. there were no standards for casual space flight sims.

[PopinFRESH]

6 hours ago, MechBFP said:

Flying a plane, quick save. Later on quick load and the wings rip right off the plane every time I load. You can still control the wings with w, and s strangely enough but the rest of the craft becomes an uncontrolled missile.

Eventually the camera gets too far away from both pieces of the craft.

Click the EVA and the Kerbal hangs on for dear life no were near the door that he was supposed to come out of but surprisingly never gets thrown off. Jump off and determine the terminal velocity of a Kerbal is 180m/s, quit the game.

Ya I’ve had just about enough of this for now. 

Ditto, very sad because there are some nice improvements I do really like in the VAB but this was just not ready for prime time in the slightest. I tried to give it a good solid go but when there are new things worse than the Kraken with nearly every launch it just isn't a remotely enjoyable experience. I ended up refunding it after an hour and a half of frustration. This was not the KSP2 launch I was hoping for a year ago and I'm honestly growing less confident that this will survive to a full feature-complete product the more I watch others videos of it and see how poorly it is being received by the wider audience.

[Chilkoot]

Personal feedback:  I've been really trying to enjoy the game, but some major issues are raining heavily on the parade:

• Performance.  If there's a celestial body in-frame, FPS goes down the toilet - even with no atmosphere.  But while in space, 70-100 FPS no problem.  This isn't a physics problem, it's a terrain rendering problem, and the CPU/GPU performance stats show that pretty clearly.
• The VAB interface falls short in a number of important ways.  Information display and readability being one of the main issues, lack of hotkeys for a number of common tasks (like closing popups) is another.
• The UI art direction is really poorly conceived and inconsistent.  The map view does a pretty bad job of letting you see important conics stats, with blocky icons occluding important info.  Transfer planning is clunky and frustrating.

The upshot here is that players will find many of the most critical elements of the game borderline unusable, coupled with the bare-bones sandbox features... it's understandable that there are so many negative reviews.

Fortunately, all of this is fixable with time/resource/will - esp. the terrain-related performance problems, which may well have the game's future in a death-grip at the moment, if player sentiment is any kind of barometer.

[Stephensan]

1 hour ago, TLTay said:

Review of hours played by people who have reviewed the game as on now:

6840 total reviews.

66% have played for 1 hour or more.

41% played for 2 hours or more

29% played for 3 hours or more

20% played for 4 hours or more

9% played for 5 hours or more

5% played for 6 hours or more

5% for 7 hours+

5% for 8 hours +

3% for 9 hours +

That's a pretty steep dropoff for a release weekend. Very few people are making this the fun of their weekend after all the hype. 2/3 of people haven't even played 3 hours. Only 5% could be considered to be making KSP2 a primary entertainment choice this weekend. Looks like it's getting refunded or put back on the shelf for later by a great many people.

100% of the userbase playing this game cannot run it as a game..

 

99% of the player base doesn't have literal flagship rtx 4090's besides some cc's to play this game in a "anime animation frames per second" with very simple craft.

 

most players hear, early access, as an access to be able to play it.. not able to save it for later so we can play it.. people will see it not working with there high end hardware, just to "see what the fuss is" and realize, oh god, this is not a game at all, and return it in less than 2 hours to get there refund.

 

there marketing right now, is literally borderline complete false compared to the actual product, you see a game with modest graphics and see a trailer that is 30fps that seems smooth, shows actual gameplay filtered throughout the entire marketing on steam or Epic Games without UI, and seems like it will run perfectly ok.. its not, and it really shouldn't have been released like this..

[Bej Kerman]

8 minutes ago, Chilkoot said:

The UI art direction is really poorly conceived and inconsistent.  The map view does a pretty bad job of letting you see important conics stats, with blocky icons occluding important info.  Transfer planning is clunky and frustrating.

That sounds more like a minor misdirection than "poorly conceived and inconsistent". There are examples of poorly conceived UIs, and I certainly don't think KSP 2 is one of them. You don't have to look far from KSP 2 at all for examples of "poorly conceived and inconsistent" interfaces, in fact. Most of the things you said are fair, but I think saying this over something that can be fixed with little adjustment to the overall direction of the UI isn't fair.

[Alexoff]

What about mods for KSP2? Maybe modders can fix the game faster than developers?

[Bej Kerman]

4 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

Maybe modders can fix the game faster than developers?

Piling on 50 mods to fix some issues is just going to introduce 100x more issues.

[The Aziz]

What's with the aero in this? I feel like a noob. 10 reverts per launch is a norm, circularization worth ~1500m/s at best as well. I saw Scott Manley launching a sphere into space, he tapped D, hit prograde and it flew on its own. When I do that, with perfectly streamlined, symmetrical rocket, it will randomly wiggle off the marker for no reason at all, halfway up, and flippy we go. Is 1.4TWR not enough? Why I can only start doing the gravity turn at 20km? (Because doing so anywhere lower ensures revert). Is this the game or just me?

[Yakuzi]

On 2/24/2023 at 7:23 PM, regex said:

I find it amusing to see the comparisons to KSP1 considering just how little KSP1 had at 0.7.3 release. People have some really short memories.

I agree, it is kinda amusing comparing KSP1 to KSP2:

KSP1 went into EA less than 1.5 years after one passionate dude started development and was generally received well. KSP2 went into a EA after ~5 to 5.5 years of development by a dedicated professional software studio with 48 employees (as per Intercept Games LinkedIn page), which had full access to KSP1's source code and the backing of a multi billion dollar producer, and it's a mess in more ways than I can be bothered to sum up here. Early Access KSP1 was a buggy mess too you say? Sure thing, but after 5 years of development KSP1 was... *checks notes*... fully released and had received multiple additional updates (v1.0.5 ), after 5.5 years we had KSP1 v1.1.3 and were well on the way to KSP v1.2.

Amusing but also a bit sad don't you think? People have some really short memories indeed and will resort to some hefty mental gymnastics to keep ignoring the red flag parade.

[Fluke]

3 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

What's with the aero in this? I feel like a noob. 10 reverts per launch is a norm, circularization worth ~1500m/s at best as well. I saw Scott Manley launching a sphere into space, he tapped D, hit prograde and it flew on its own. When I do that, with perfectly streamlined, symmetrical rocket, it will randomly wiggle off the marker for no reason at all, halfway up, and flippy we go. Is 1.4TWR not enough? Why I can only start doing the gravity turn at 20km? (Because doing so anywhere lower ensures revert). Is this the game or just me?

"I feel like a noob". I swear the aero is different. For me in KSP1 grav turn is this (1.5TWR):

Wait for 90m/s for good center of pressure

Start turning roughly 75 degrees until 5km

Gradually turn to 45 degrees and hit 20km

At 20km Ap should be 40km or so

Go from there until desired Pe

I do this in KSP2 with identical tanks/ stages and I'm burning stage 2 at 35km...crazy. I've manged to massage my way to better orbits, and I'm still adapting, but it feels strange. 

 

 

 

 

[regex]

3 minutes ago, Yakuzi said:

I agree, it is kinda amusing comparing KSP1 to KSP2:

KSP1 went into EA less than 1.5 years after one passionate dude started development and was generally received well.

And was in development for the next twelve years with varying team sizes despite making Squad a truckload of money. It never had good graphics, had tacked-on mechanics that amounted to nothing more than "right-click, receive reward", and was plagued with issues up to and past release.

3 minutes ago, Yakuzi said:

KSP2 went into a EA after ~5 to 5.5 years of development by a dedicated professional software studio with 48 employees (as per Intercept Games LinkedIn page)

I love how the time changes for everyone. Was it three years behind schedule? Six years behind schedule? Was it one team? Was it two? Was there a turnover?

3 minutes ago, Yakuzi said:

, which had full access to KSP1's source code

Which means nothing much because KSP1 was literally indie-quality code and had a lot of problems.

3 minutes ago, Yakuzi said:

Amusing but also a bit sad don't you think?

lolno.

[Bej Kerman]

9 minutes ago, Yakuzi said:

Early Access KSP1 was a buggy mess too you say? Sure thing, but after 5 years of development KSP1 was... *checks notes*... fully released and had received multiple additional updates (v1.0.5 ), after 5.5 years we had KSP1 v1.1.3 and were well on the way to KSP v1.2.

It's fully released because they say so.

Feature complete, in what universe?

The devs added an ion engine and never got round to adding persistent thrust, which should be simple if some modder can do it. But nope. A core feature missing for ten years. The KSP 2 "launch" (it's not but whatever, I'm tired of explaining EA vs Release) was a trainwreck compared to what we hoped it'd be in 2019, yes. But at least the developers clearly CARE. KSP 1's early developers lacked skill and its later developers lacked passion. Just because Squad declares the game is complete doesn't mean the 1.x.x label means anything. It's a useless metric in determining if a game's worth is anything but a negative integer. dV readouts came a staggering FOUR YEARS after """release""" (again, just an arbitrary thing that means literally nothing) - that is just ridiculous and frankly depressing, certainly more so than the issues KSP 2 has. At least there are basics here whose absence in KSP 1 rendered many parts of gameplay unuseable, like ion engines. At least I won't be waiting... *checks notes* 6-7 years for a stock dV indicator and competent maneuver readouts. KSP 1 had planets that long before you could even determine how far your rocket could get. Really elemental and trivial things like that. Yeah, you're upset you only got a foundation. At least it's a foundation and not a pile of debris you can hardly rest a bigger structure on.

12 minutes ago, regex said:

21 minutes ago, Yakuzi said:

I agree, it is kinda amusing comparing KSP1 to KSP2:

KSP1 went into EA less than 1.5 years after one passionate dude started development and was generally received well.

And was in development for the next twelve years with varying team sizes despite making Squad a truckload of money. It never had good graphics, had tacked-on mechanics that amounted to nothing more than "right-click, receive reward", and was plagued with issues up to and past release.

Indeed. As I said in my reply to Yakuzi, the money isn't the problem, it's that the developers seemingly didn't care much. Specifically, they cared more about adding useless parts and facelifts that only have worth at face value than providing necessities, and for 1.12 they didn't address any elephants (again, persistent thrust! Impossible to play without!) or dump a massive bugfix fest, all they added was a little part that generates procedural particles. That's all it takes to make 1.12 a good update apparently.

[regex]

Opinions clearly differ. That's fine, makes the world interesting. If you've gotta wait on KSP2 to be out of EA, or if you have to go back to KSP1, or if KSP2 is just too expensive, or if you think the team is a joke, I totally get it. Quite frankly I'm blown away by the game I have in my hands. Yeah, it's a buggy mess, but it's not like I haven't seen that before, and considering the promise of all this stuff (far more than what KSP1 promised me at EA) I'm happy to shell out for early access. Everyone needs to make that evaluation for themselves.

[ProtoJeb21]

6 hours ago, TLTay said:

I've said it before, and I'll say it again to unreceptive audience: if you're very attached to this game, you need to prepare yourself for the possible event it gets cancelled. T2 made their promise of release this fiscal year by a week. The promise was kept, now what happens next depends on the finance department's assessment of ROI. They'll be looking at metrics and sales, you can't signal them not to cancel. They only care about money. If they project continued losses going forward, that's it. Plug pulled. They will write it off. They've written off bigger.

Take Two's fiscal year ends in, what, a month? If they're really planning on cancelling KSP2 are are just trying to recoup some losses with a cobbled together Early Access, we'll probably know then. The next few weeks are also critical to see how fast and successfully the devs are able to respond to the performance and optimization problems with the current build.

I haven't gotten KSP2 yet and I'll probably wait at least a few weeks, hopefully when the game is a little better optimized and isn't guaranteed to fry my potato of a laptop from 2016. I will agree this is a pretty bad and concerning launch state, and that EA was probably forced by T2, but there are some current parts of the game (vastly improved planets, color customization, new interplanetary parts, etc) that I'm excited to try out eventually.

Edited February 26, 2023 by ProtoJeb21

[Frostiken]

7 hours ago, Multivac said:

Absolutely ridiculous how some people keep "dumping" on KSP1. KSP1 was, and remains, an absolutely brilliant and unique game that has given me and, I know, many other players, many hundreds of hours of joy.

While teaching us things about space travel we never understood before, and teaching them in a brilliantly intuitive way. And we have nothing but fun throughout the lesson.

The only reason any of us are here on this forum at all is KSP1.

It's one thing to defend the car crash that is the KSP2 launch, but throwing KSP1 under the bus in order to do so is just low. Whatever bugs or questionable design choices it may have (and I think you're severely overstating how serious they are, I've never had nearly as many issues as you keep claiming to experience, except maybe when trying to figure out new mods) the fact is it still adds up to a wonderful, deeply enjoyable game. I'd pay $50 for KSP1 again today, and it'd be worth every penny.

I don't interpret this as "dumping" on KSP 1, but rather, pointing out that KSP 1... was what it was. A brief look at what the mod community did and how popular certain mods were should have been enough to identify that the game had shortcomings or design that had more potential, and the mod teams stepped up. I look at it like Skyrim... unmodded Skyrim is a world of infinite possibilities, right up until you figure out what you're doing in the game, and then you run into the 'borders' of the game design pretty quickly. Modding fixed it up tremendously, but there's always a certain argument to be made that Bethesda really shouldn't have shipped or developed certain things in a certain way in the first place. I think one of the most embarrassing Skyrim features was the stupid 'puzzle' spinners. They weren't puzzles, they were idiotic. Bethesda should have either cut them from the game or actually put in real puzzles, but instead they left a half-assed feature in.

KSP 1 was cobbled together by like three different dev teams across what at this point may as well be multiple different engines, went through several massive changes in scope, and a decade of active development.

The point of a franchise sequel in a non-story-based game is to really build on where the first entry stopped. Not just... rebuild the exact same game again, even down to recycling the model parts even for parts that were pretty terrible in the first place (Mk. 2 Lander Can, LV-909, etc.). A sequel is exactly the time and place to take where the boundaries of the first game lay and build them further out.

Like imagine it had been years since something like Satisfactory came out, and then they were like 'Satisfactory 2!' and it's literally just the first game on the same land mass but with new graphics.

Edited February 26, 2023 by Frostiken

[Chilkoot]

3 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

That sounds more like a minor misdirection than "poorly conceived and inconsistent". There are examples of poorly conceived UIs, and I certainly don't think KSP 2 is one of them. You don't have to look far from KSP 2 at all for examples of "poorly conceived and inconsistent" interfaces, in fact. Most of the things you said are fair, but I think saying this over something that can be fixed with little adjustment to the overall direction of the UI isn't fair.

I was going to post a number of screenshots showing inconsistencies, but in the process I realized that some are due to screen scaling.  Playing at 1440p, several of the UI elements appear (purposefully) stylistically very different than others, however if I play on a 1080p screen, I realize that what I thought were bizarre design choices are scaling artifacts.

So some of the display elements scale with resolution, vector-type stuff like fonts I suppose, and other elements are static images and are scaled, making them look really out of place.  I recall now ShadowZone noting the same thing, even mentioning he thought some of the assets must have been used accidentally, or were possibly pre-release assets, like the SAS and RCS indicators among many others.

I do stand by my assessment in many ways - particularly in the VAB and Map screens, and will post some screenshots either here or in the suggestions threads.

[TLTay]

57 minutes ago, ProtoJeb21 said:

Take Two's fiscal year ends in, what, a month? If they're really planning on cancelling KSP2 are are just trying to recoup some losses with a cobbled together Early Access, we'll probably know then. The next few weeks are also critical to see how fast and successfully the devs are able to respond to the performance and optimization problems with the current build.

I haven't gotten KSP2 yet and I'll probably wait at least a few weeks, hopefully when the game is a little better optimized and isn't guaranteed to fry my potato of a laptop from 2016. I will agree this is a pretty bad and concerning launch state, and that EA was probably forced by T2, but there are some current parts of the game (vastly improved planets, color customization, new interplanetary parts, etc) that I'm excited to try out eventually.

Looks like I remembered the wrong end of March. Yes, it's the 31st, not the 1st. That gives them a month to assess whether sales will cover development costs. If there are 50 employees making on average 70k yearly, they'll need to sell 6k copies a month just to cover salary. It's possible, I guess. The trailers look neat. Not sure what the other expenses look like.

Maybe they can keep it alive and turn it into a gem. In the mean time, goodwill has been meaningfully impacted.

 

[Periple]

Budgets for the next FY are already done. KSP2 will get another year of funding no matter what. 

KSP is a valuable franchise and they’ve already started work on other games in it, but KSP2 is the foundation. They won’t cancel because of a rough start to EA. They will only do that if they determine that there isn’t enough interest in the  franchise.

If in six months it looks like it’s treading water, then start to worry. Even in that case the most likely move is changes in the studio.

[kerbiloid]

Six months to make KSP-1 backups and download the relevant versions of KSP-1 mods before they can start driving the community to the happiness with iron hand, or some modders start redoing the (known naval and armor mod) bailing out performance from bad mood.

But better do it right now.

Just recalling the honest "Oh, no! KSP-1 development won't stop on KSP-2 release!!!111one"
That was true. It did even long before.

It can easily become "KSP-1 web resources won't become empty or unavailable!"

Edited February 26, 2023 by kerbiloid

[Kuskejens]

My laptop with i5-9300H , GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q and 8gb ram ran KSP2. Although low FPS and quality settings.
I've had no major bugs yet. Will mostly play on my desktop, and expect higher FPS on that.

I landed on Mun in first go with a simplistic rocket and no landing legs, no sweat although I really missed seeing TWR for each stage in VAB. :S
Experience from KSP helped choose working parts for the right TWR.
I expected more parts, and perhaps some science parts too.. but then EA. Hopefully it gets added fast.

I find I lost interest in further exploration with what I found in the game so far, and prefer reverting to KSP1 until further content is released.
I guess I will check in once a month or so until I feel it piques my interest again.

Edited February 26, 2023 by Kuskejens

[The Aziz]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Just recalling the honest "Oh, no! KSP-1 development won't stop on KSP-2 release!!!111one"
That was true. It did even long before

Apologies but bringing this up now is stupid. Why? Because what you're quoting was based on original 2020 release. And KSP1 was, in fact, still developed after 2020.

[kerbiloid]

19 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Apologies but bringing this up now is stupid.

The bringing this up now is highly relevant, as KSP-1 is currently a more successful competitor of KSP-2, which they may want to remove not only from development, but also from access.
And this can be done by several clicks.

Just unlikely they will hurry up with this before falling into despair about the KSP-2 sales. So, probably not today.

19 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

And KSP1 was, in fact, still developed after 2020.

I like your sense of humor.

It was developed just to create a beautiful mummy before burying it.

Edited February 26, 2023 by kerbiloid

[Periple]

7 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

The bringing this up now is highly relevant, as KSP-1 is currently a more successful competitor of KSP-2, which they may want to remove not only from development, but also from access.
And this can be done by several clicks.

Just unlikely they will hurry up with this before falling into despair about the KSP-2 sales. So, probably not today.

KSP2's development is funded by KSP1's sales. They won't retire it until KSP2 outcompetes it. And when that happens, why bother retiring it?

[kerbiloid]

25 minutes ago, Periple said:

KSP2's development is funded by KSP1's sales. They won't retire it until KSP2 outcompetes it. And when that happens, why bother retiring it?

Once the KSP-1 income starts decreasing the expected income from KSP-2 by distracting the potential buyers from the flagship product, the locomotive becomes an obstacle.