KSP2 EA Grand Discussion Thread.

[Pthigrivi]

Bro Ive spoken my peace. We’re done here. 

[VlonaldKerman]

3 hours ago, kdaviper said:

Maybe that's why they don't sell BMW:Early Access

Yes xD. Though, fun fact: KSP 2 wasn’t going to be early access either until October of 2022!

 

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Okay, so let's do this one last time and have it done. The question is why did KSP2 take so long and why was it in the state that it was in spring of 23'.

To me, that is one question, but another would be, “why did they pretend like it was ever going to release in 2020, or 2022, or 2022, or 2023?” (in may ‘22 they claimed it would release in early ‘23, with no mention of early access).

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Do people remember this all happened during COVID? Every business I deal with was set back at least a year cumulatively by the collective disruption that happened over the 2 years from 2020 to 2022. 

It did not happen during COVID. In 2019, they claimed the game would release in 2020. How long should COVID extend a year of dev time? Double it? Triple it? Quadrupole it? I don’t think COVID delays were instrumental in causing this debacle.

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Each of these was communicated to players. There are whole dev blogs and dev videos devoted to explaining the technical challenges. There was a whole dev video on how frustrating and disruptive COVID was for them and their process. Folks who have been following this for years or went back and watched those videos all know this history. We've talked about it at length many, many times.

None of those posts conveyed the state that the game was in accurately. If they did, everyone would have been shocked, given what the release date supposedly was! This applies to blogs in 2019-2022, because at any given time, release was supposedly only months away!

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Again my question was not Was KSP2's history relevant to its current state? or Why are people allowed to bring up the past when talking about the state of the game?  It was: What is the point of rehashing 6 years of dev development 20 times a month?  Why are we filling every other thread on this board with SAME. EXACT. CONVERSATION. OVER. AND. OVER. AND. OVER.

Personally I read it as two things:

1) Frustration at being lied to wrt. “KSP 2: Lithobraking near you in 2020!” Where else should vent their frustration about KSP 2? Like I said, I find substantive forum threads to be largely rant-free. Others are not. Such is life.

2) A manifestation of concern over a beloved franchise and a would-be beloved game. That is why the issue of developer/manager competence is so present- we may have no control over it so talking about it is in that sense “useless”, but people will still want to talk about it because you add the long dev timeline + repeated false statements over the course of 3+ years and you have one hell of a concerning plot arch if you’re a fan of KSP.

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

The original studio is no more and was replaced, obviously, but they did announce a full product for 2020. The studio that replaced them also announced full products for 2021, 2022, 2023, and then 5 months before release switched to EA. This cannot be ignored at any stage and will remain a glaring issue until clarified. It is also obvious for anyone that such a full product might have never existed, but even then we'd need explanations of why they chose lie to our faces 4 times. "le greed xd" is not an explanation, much less when coming from a user

Exactly.

[Infinite Aerospace]

With regards to COVID, I don't think that's a great avenue to use as an excuse for slips in timeframe. Software development is one of those industries that's not burdened with having to *actually* be present, at 'the work'.  In a digital world, surely a digital product could be developed in a remote sense if needs be, sure it might impact development time a bit but surely it shouldn't affect it to that extent. Just playing devils advocate here.

[Periple]

19 minutes ago, Infinite Aerospace said:

With regards to COVID, I don't think that's a great avenue to use as an excuse for slips in timeframe. Software development is one of those industries that's not burdened with having to *actually* be present, at 'the work'.  In a digital world, surely a digital product could be developed in a remote sense if needs be, sure it might impact development time a bit but surely it shouldn't affect it to that extent. Just playing devils advocate here.

It depends! If you already have a culture, infrastructure, practices, and tools that support remote work then it’ll be a speed bump, but if you haven’t allowed remote working at all then it’s going to take a lot of time and effort to set that all up and figure out how it works. I think before covid most places were somewhere between the two but closer to the “no remote working” end of the scale.

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, VlonaldKerman said:

Yes xD. Though, fun fact: KSP 2 wasn’t going to be early access either until October of 2022!

I'll respond here because you're actually asking in good faith and you and I have not already had this conversation 100 times. I think it's pretty obvious that the initial date of 2020 put forth by Star Theory was wildly implausible given the advertised  scope of the game. While none of us knows, nor for legal reasons are we ever likely to know, I think it's not difficult to put 2 and 2 together that this wild overpromise was directly related to the change in studios and the fact that most of the folks involved in its development moved with the game. That in itself put IG in a pretty difficult position having to own up to Star Theory's bonkers timeline expectations. By the time they were ramping up and re-solidifying the team they were in the midst of COVID. I also work in design and almost everything I do is in CAD or photoshop or illustrator, and the inability to have in-person design sessions, sketch out ideas together, and quickly stop by a colleague's desk to help work out a problem absolutely slowed our process down and affected delivery dates, and we were a fully-staffed, well oiled team who all knew each other. I think they also probably didn't realize until they dug in just how difficult this was going to be so they gave the best estimate they could... another 2 years. 2 years turned into 3, which again happens with lots of games. Right now I'm absolutely psyched for Frostpunk 2 and so far we've seen exactly nothing. No gameplay. No assets. Almost no description of its proposed mechanics. They still haven't even given a specific release date. We barely knew Elden Ring existed up until 6mo before its release. IG was much more open with us much earlier on than many other studios are. Probably from the reaction they're seeing now they might even be regretting that. Maybe they never should have shown us anything back in 2021 or 2022 and just kept the whole thing entirely secret right up till it was fully complete and polished and ready to release. It would have been next year anyway, but folks wouldn't feel like someone had deliberately or maliciously deceived them. Folks feel lied to because they saw assets in editor and heard how excited Nate was and just assumed the game was nearly finished when in reality it was going to take a lot more time. I think it was genuinely unwise to force it to be released this spring instead of giving them more time so that the actual product was more usable. I have little doubt that decision was forced on them. 

And again, no one at Intercept has access to a time machine. They can't go back and fix many of the things you're describing. Apologies don't do much for me, but I get it and I can see why it would matter to others. I'm not saying this topic isn't interesting or relevant. Im saying there are a number of people who are spamming every conceivable thread on the board with the exact same historical rehash of grievance literally copy-pasted in some instances as a tactical means of extracting recompense and it makes having any other kind of meaningful conversation that could materially improve the game much more difficult.  

Edited August 12, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[regex]

46 minutes ago, Infinite Aerospace said:

With regards to COVID, I don't think that's a great avenue to use as an excuse for slips in timeframe. Software development is one of those industries that's not burdened with having to *actually* be present, at 'the work'.  In a digital world, surely a digital product could be developed in a remote sense if needs be, sure it might impact development time a bit but surely it shouldn't affect it to that extent. Just playing devils advocate here.

Working remote severely hampered collaboration when we first started and we already had people working remote, with infrastructure and practices in place. Even now, several years after COVID and a year after we shut down the physical office, it's not entirely ideal to be working with people who can't even meet the majority of the team locally because they're literally thousands of miles away. Remote work is just fine the majority of the time but nothing can replace in-person meetings with a whiteboard, and I just work business software, with requirements set by negotiation between a product manager and outside clients; I can't imagine how that would affect a more creative and collaborative endeavor like a video game which largely stays in-house.

Edited August 12, 2023 by regex

[Infinite Aerospace]

3 minutes ago, regex said:

Working remote severely hampered collaboration when we first started and we already had people working remote, with infrastructure and practices in place. Even now, several years after COVID and a year after we shut down the physical office, it's not entirely ideal to be working with people who can't even meet the majority of the team locally because they're literally thousands of miles away. Remote work is just fine the majority of the time but nothing can replace in-person meetings with a whiteboard, and I just work business software, with requirements set by negotiation between a product manager and outside clients; I can't imagine how that would affect a more creative and collaborative endeavor like a video game which largely stays in-house.

I can understand that it wouldn't be ideal conditions, but at least 'the work' (as a bit of an Expanse nod) could continue, more than most other industries during the pandemic at least.

 

I suppose part of the COVID topic is, people are just curious to know what went on between 'insert date' and now that caused such profound delays.

 

It's understandable from both sides of that, at least those from the outside. I don't work in the game industry so I can't claim to have firsthand knowledge as to how in-person meetings affect development (I'd love to hear more about the ins and outs of that to be honest though!). Where I work we do often have meetings about what perhaps a big section being lifted, or moved into the yard but it's very much more 'physical', tangible objects in that respect.

 

Do you work at Intercept, and could potentially shed a little light (or perhaps developer in another sense) on the road-blocks that cause these sorts of delays? Like I say I'd love to hear about that side of things.

[Periple]

14 minutes ago, regex said:

I can't imagine how that would affect a more creative and collaborative endeavor like a video game which largely stays in-house.

It’s very difficult! Apart from the creative collaboration there’s also a LOT of coordination, and a lot of strong feelings which easily go bad in online contexts. We have to get together every so often for it to work at all!

[regex]

5 minutes ago, Infinite Aerospace said:

I suppose part of the COVID topic is, people are just curious to know what went on between 'insert date' and now that caused such profound delays.

I can give you insights into how that affected my company. We already had a VPN and security procedures ready because we had a few remote people, and we store government data so that's a requirement. So when the lockdowns arrived everyone had to potentially upgrade their internet, permissions had to be added, risks ascertained, and new development environments brought online for everybody. Then we had to deal with slowdowns on those environments, constant upgrades to those environments and figuring out how to do that efficiently with everyone, bandwidth issues because everyone goes through the VPN, testing new environments and tools, etc... This persisted for well over a year, and while our velocity even improved slightly at the end of it that took a lot of effort on the part of everyone involved, and was a huge headache when I pulled four fifteen-hour days to meet a deadline (Never again! Thankfully that PM is gone.)

Now Intercept (or Star Theory, whoever) doesn't necessarily have to deal with our requirements but they do have their own, plus the creative aspect. I can easily see development slowing by a significant margin during that time.

[Alexoff]

What other games have been so affected by covid? Even the creators of cyberpunk didn't complain about the pandemic. And then I get the feeling that IG suffered the most from covid, since KSP2 was not only delayd for three years, but also rolled back from the full release to the buggy remaster of alpha versions of KSP1.

[Vanamonde]

Communication will be more frequent some times and less frequent at others, but has not stopped.  Meanwhile this thread has turned into a repetition of arguments already taking place elsewhere and so it has been merged into the Grand Discussion thread. 

And if someone's posts really bother you, why not spare yourself the aggravation of reading and answering them repeatedly and simply set that person to ignore? 

[Bej Kerman]

13 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

20 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

The CM isn't being provocative or mean. Dev teams are simply sick of being used as your (and everyone else's) doormat and you don't like what they have to say. 

If I called you the things Dakota called the reddit community, I'd be out the forums for at least 15 days for insulting language.

Having a backbone =/= insulting. If you were being told what the dev team are being told every day, you would have much worse things to say than the dev team has. If anything, Dakota is being nice.

[PDCWolf]

2 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Having a backbone =/= insulting. If you were being told what the dev team are being told every day, you would have much worse things to say than the dev team has. If anything, Dakota is being nice.

I'm not a paid professional in a position that's supposed to act as the bridge between community and dev team. It is not my job to be professional or even civil towards people. By the rules of the forum alone (following my example of using them as a yardstick), Dakota's post would qualify as combative, inflammatory, and containing insulting language. Whether you justify, endorse, agree or enjoy the message at a personal level has nothing to do with the content, and said content is clearly insulting.

[Socraticat]

This is so ridiculous. Show me where Dakota called someone a bot directly. Where is it? Because it didn't happen. Stop fabricating things folks.

Dakota mentioned the feeling of being "botted"- this is a perfectly reasonable worry on platforms like reddit.

We live in 2023 and bot farms are a thing. It's a perfectly reasonable concern.

[PDCWolf]

21 minutes ago, Socraticat said:

This is so ridiculous. Show me where Dakota called someone a bot directly. Where is it? Because it didn't happen. Stop fabricating things folks.

Dakota mentioned the feeling of being "botted"- this is a perfectly reasonable worry on platforms like reddit.

We live in 2023 and bot farms are a thing. It's a perfectly reasonable concern.

Yeah, a subreddit with 1.5 million followers has a single guy with a "3 to 10" strong "bot farm" not to downvote him but for "vote manipulation", also used to upvote negative comments. He then goes on to call reddit an echo chamber, and that his time spent on that community was, because of this, "futile", which is something after saying that the place is an echo chamber and the feedback is "super positive".

He said something dumb, and then he insulted Reddit.

Of course, he was promptly proven wrong by what's most of the people still active on that place. https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/15mzyvq/dakota_im_like_95_sure_someone_has_setup_a_few/?sort=top

 

Edited August 13, 2023 by PDCWolf

[Guest]

22 minutes ago, Socraticat said:

We live in 2023 and bot farms are a thing. It's a perfectly reasonable concern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

I could also assume that people giving good feedback to hotfixes which shouldn't be needed in the first place are also bots or dev alt accounts. Since we all can make up random assumptions this is a

"perfectly reasonable concern".

What now? Everyone is a bot?

[Bej Kerman]

2 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

I'm not a paid professional in a position that's supposed to act as the bridge between community and dev team. It is not my job to be professional or even civil towards people. By the rules of the forum alone (following my example of using them as a yardstick), Dakota's post would qualify as combative, inflammatory, and containing insulting language.

A bridge between the devs and community does not need to be a doormat. CMs should be payed to do exactly this, tell communities when they're being inflammatory and insulting. 

2 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Whether you justify, endorse, agree or enjoy the message at a personal level has nothing to do with the content, and said content is clearly insulting.

So: you don't care about others' opinions on the matter, and consider your own opinion that they're being inflammatory (read: having a backbone) a fact that's set in stone?

[Socraticat]

@PDCWolf I'll bite.

First off, you gotta stop with the 1.5 million figure. It's absolutely ridiculous to assume that 100% of those users are available to downvote within 30 seconds. A better figure to use would be the currently online number. It's still in the thousands, but under 10,000. Millions is wildly conflated for this context since we are talking about immediate responses.

Speaking of immediate responses, we are talking about responses within 30 seconds. That is verbatim what Dakota said, right? And the number was what, 6? Six downvotes, bud. That's hardly 1.5 million. Certainly not even 10,000. It was SIX.

So tell me again how Dakota insulted "All of Reddit" and talked down to the community at large. It was a comment on reddit security.  Hell, it could even be about a "upvote downvote fuzzing algorithm". But to jump right to "Dakota insulted me" is so vain. It's not about you. It's about Dakota sharing a concern with trying to communicate the things that you beg for them to give you, Daily. If it's bots downvoting KSP2 posts then your less likely to see the news in the feed.

Holy moly. Get a grip.

[James Kerman]

More content has been removed. All members are entitled to express their point of view so please state your opinion without getting personal or argumentative if another's opinion does not align with your own.

Edited August 13, 2023 by James Kerman
missing word

[Pthigrivi]

I don’t know at this point if 7 out of 10 threads are just going to be repositories for the same performative spam arguments I don’t see myself contributing here much anymore. Its a shame because I’ve really enjoyed some of our substantive conversations in the past. Its just a waste of time to wade through that much bad-faith. Its unproductive and tedious. 

Edited August 13, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[VlonaldKerman]

3 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

I don’t know at this point if 7 out of 10 threads are just going to be repositories for the same performative, copy pasted arguments I don’t see myself contributing here much anymore. Its a shame because I’ve really enjoyed some of our substantive conversations in the past. Its just a waste of time to wade through that much bad-faith. Its unproductive and tedious. 

I wonder if performative arguments have increased, or if there is simply less substantive stuff to talk about these days, because not much new has happened. Most topics have been worn out, so what is left on the forum is a low volume of posts about an issue that’s still salient, which is the fact that the game is currently a mess. Therefore it seems as if the forum has turned negative or unproductive.

I’ll make a prediction: the tedium will become comparatively less impactful once a serious feature update is released in 5 years time.

(okay the last bit was sarcastic, I couldn’t help myself)

[PDCWolf]

15 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

A bridge between the devs and community does not need to be a doormat. CMs should be payed to do exactly this, tell communities when they're being inflammatory and insulting. 

So: you don't care about others' opinions on the matter, and consider your own opinion that they're being inflammatory (read: having a backbone) a fact that's set in stone?

[snip]

I'm saying you're free to have your opinion on whether it is justifiable to say what was said. What was said can be no other than what was said.

15 hours ago, Socraticat said:

@PDCWolf I'll bite.

You're still only talking about the very first sentence of the message and not the rest. The message is right there for you to read.

9 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

I don’t know at this point if 7 out of 10 threads are just going to be repositories for the same performative spam arguments I don’t see myself contributing here much anymore. Its a shame because I’ve really enjoyed some of our substantive conversations in the past. Its just a waste of time to wade through that much bad-faith. Its unproductive and tedious. 

If you think people having similar opinions all opposite from yours is "bad faith", then yeah, your time at the forums is not gonna be enjoyable, productive or even fruitful. I'll blame a lot of "feeling the same" to the constant moving of topics or messages to one or another thread. This bit for example was being discussed on a completely different thread but ended up here.

Edited August 13, 2023 by Vanamonde

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, VlonaldKerman said:

I wonder if performative arguments have increased, or if there is simply less substantive stuff to talk about these days, because not much new has happened. Most topics have been worn out, so what is left on the forum is a low volume of posts about an issue that’s still salient, which is the fact that the game is currently a mess. Therefore it seems as if the forum has turned negative or unproductive.

I’ll make a prediction: the tedium will become comparatively less impactful once a serious feature update is released in 5 years time.

(okay the last bit was sarcastic, I couldn’t help myself)

I mean we literally have a whole new game with new UI and updated planets and all kinds of things, plus Science and colonies and interstellar are all on their way. Id love to talk about those things. We went years with much less in the past but still had tons of great conversations about how KSP could get better. Ive always had really lively conversations with folks I don’t agree with. Hearing new ideas is the only way we grow. Having different opinions is great. Repeating those opinions hundreds of times into most of the threads on a message board with the deliberate intent to clog all discussion and get attention from the devs is just run of the mill trolling. Its too bad. This place used to be fun. 

[Alexoff]

What a bad community KSP2 has! It's strange that before this community was good, this community made KSP1 the game that we know about, and then something happened and a significant part of the community became bad and bot. No one did research at what point did this happen? I think we need to call Sherlock Holmes to unravel this mysterious case and show us those villains that ruined everything and made life difficult for Dakota!

[Yakuzi]

On 8/12/2023 at 2:47 PM, Strawberry said:

Well yes what defines serious/good development will be heavily subjective, its close to impossible to objectively measure the quality and speed of development properly, and doubly so in a way that everyone will agree on, thats just the nature of these conversations

Right, that's why professional dev teams don't use your random definition when developing software.

 

On 8/12/2023 at 6:07 AM, Pthigrivi said:

The question I asked was what is the actual point of rehashing 6 years of dev development 20 times a month on this board?  I would like a direct answer to that specific question. 

It seems like you're somewhat curious about why people keep mentioning the ~6 year dev time of KSP2. I'll give you my perspective:

Unsurprisingly, I was quite shocked at the state of the game when KSP2 released in EA. Between the original planned release date of the full game, the multiple subsequent delays and ultimately the shoddy EA release, it is clear something has gone very wrong during the development process. Since KSP is my all-time favorite game, I wanted to know if this was due to one or more isolated events or a more structural concern, which would give some insight into future development/viability of KSP2. Discussing the lack of progress has been difficult on the forums due to persistent mocking, gaslighting, white knighting and other forms of toxic positivity. One of the excuses that keeps coming up is that KSP2 has only been in development for a couple of years, because [insert random unsubstantiated reason here]. So until the forum community accepts that KSP2 has been in development for as long as it has, I'm afraid the rehashing is here to stay (or until all critics give up and leave I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

 

23 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

2) The original studio collapsed and was rebuilt half-way through development. No matter what you personally think about the politics of that it was undoubtedly incredibly messy and disruptive to the process and probably set them back a year all by itself. 

3) Do people remember this all happened during COVID? Every business I deal with was set back at least a year cumulatively by the collective disruption that happened over the 2 years from 2020 to 2022. 

In June 2021 Nate claimed these events didn't affect progress substantially:

Ozzie: "It's been almost two years since KSP2 was first revealed. How has the game's development progressed since and how much of it was affected by the pandemic?"
Nate:  "Well that's a good question. Uh, well, obviously there's been about two years of progress since last time we talked about the game."

So according to the developer, KSP2 progress has been as expected since work started in 2017.

Edited August 13, 2023 by Yakuzi