KSP2 EA Grand Discussion Thread.

[regex]

31 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

I can tell you another game that is early access, is an open world sandbox, is a sequel of a renowned game from few years back, and has been a huge success on day 1 despite little content, and also has very low player count. It's not really shocking.

I'm still trying to figure out why player count actually matters right now while the game is in early access. Is this game supposed to bring constant joy for the next few years or something, just an endless stream of dopamine, constant endless content?

[m4inbrain]

1 hour ago, Alexoff said:

In 2k23 it's not shocking, check Redfall, Forspoken or Gollum. But of course, these are far from the best examples and hardly anyone is happy to be in the vicinity of such games. Although they were expected and hyped no less than KSP2.

You had me in the first half, not going to lie.

Of course these games are widely considered as absolute failures, expedited by the fact that they were also vastly overhyped. Does sound familiar.

 

58 minutes ago, regex said:

I'm still trying to figure out why player count actually matters right now while the game is in early access. Is this game supposed to bring constant joy for the next few years or something, just an endless stream of dopamine, constant endless content?

 

Because it's an indicator whether or not a game incentivises you to play. I'm not quite sure how one could argue that player count doesn't matter, considering the trade-offs. No one playing means no one is testing (as we by now know). No one is "advertising", or even talking about the game. Which means no further sales. Which, you guessed it, means ultimately no further development. It's not rocket science, it happened time and time again that games released out of early access basically half way done because no one but a minority even cared about it. 

Now, you can argue that "well other successful games don't have many players either", like some people tried to do, which of course is a rather asinine argument. Successful by definition means accomplishing a desired aim. Having less than hundred players interact with your "successful" work that you've spent potentially tens of thousands of man-hours on, i mean.. Yeah, nah. That's just a dumb argument. Of course success is measured in player count. Low player count = low success. 

Here's how the rest of this argument is going to play out. I'll say: Baldur's Gate 3. Someone else will say "Yeah but triple A title, doesn't count". I'll say okay, what about Factorio then? and that person will say "well that's a different genre duh, what about Juno?" to which i probably would point out that it really isn't as great a deal for a game with the Kerbal Space Program nametag to (barely) beat a game with no marketing that many people never even heard of as some might think.

Fact of the matter is that there's an easy comparison. KSP1, and KSP2. At their respective early access releases, they had: 3068 peak players (KSP1), and 4361 peak players (KSP2). Not surprising so far, KSP2 of course had an established player base with KSP1, people were excited for a continuation of their (and my) favourite game. From there, KSP1 rose to 8330 peak players in four months. KSP2 in the same timeframe? 601. That's the difference. Here's the numbers for you to check yourself. 

https://steamcharts.com/app/954850

https://steamcharts.com/app/220200

By this time in the early access program, which is around what, 7ish months, KSP1 had 10245 peak players. From 3068. In the same timeframe, KSP2 managed to get from 4361 to 283. You don't see how that is an issue? 

1 hour ago, The Aziz said:

I can tell you another game that is early access, is an open world sandbox, is a sequel of a renowned game from few years back, and has been a huge success on day 1 despite little content, and also has very low player count.

Just out of curiosity, is the "success on day 1" qualifier a sly attempt of creating an escape route? I'd like to see that game, the only one i could think of fits most of your statement, except the part where it has a very low player count - Sons of The Forest. Which is an open world early access sandbox, a sequel of a renowned game from 2018, and has been a huge success on Day 1. The only "problem" is that it has three times the amount of players currently than the predecessor The Forest, so i guess that's not what we're talking about. 

Which highly successful successor does have barely any players?

[MechBFP]

14 minutes ago, m4inbrain said:

You had me in the first half, not going to lie.

Of course these games are widely considered as absolute failures, expedited by the fact that they were also vastly overhyped. Does sound familiar.

 

 

Because it's an indicator whether or not a game incentivises you to play. I'm not quite sure how one could argue that player count doesn't matter, considering the trade-offs. No one playing means no one is testing (as we by now know). No one is "advertising", or even talking about the game. Which means no further sales. Which, you guessed it, means ultimately no further development. It's not rocket science, it happened time and time again that games released out of early access basically half way done because no one but a minority even cared about it. 

Now, you can argue that "well other successful games don't have many players either", like some people tried to do, which of course is a rather asinine argument. Successful by definition means accomplishing a desired aim. Having less than hundred players interact with your "successful" work that you've spent potentially tens of thousands of man-hours on, i mean.. Yeah, nah. That's just a dumb argument. Of course success is measured in player count. Low player count = low success. 

Here's how the rest of this argument is going to play out. I'll say: Baldur's Gate 3. Someone else will say "Yeah but triple A title, doesn't count". I'll say okay, what about Factorio then? and that person will say "well that's a different genre duh, what about Juno?" to which i probably would point out that it really isn't as great a deal for a game with the Kerbal Space Program nametag to (barely) beat a game with no marketing that many people never even heard of as some might think.

Fact of the matter is that there's an easy comparison. KSP1, and KSP2. At their respective early access releases, they had: 3068 peak players (KSP1), and 4361 peak players (KSP2). Not surprising so far, KSP2 of course had an established player base with KSP1, people were excited for a continuation of their (and my) favourite game. From there, KSP1 rose to 8330 peak players in four months. KSP2 in the same timeframe? 601. That's the difference. Here's the numbers for you to check yourself. 

https://steamcharts.com/app/954850

https://steamcharts.com/app/220200

By this time in the early access program, which is around what, 7ish months, KSP1 had 10245 peak players. From 3068. In the same timeframe, KSP2 managed to get from 4361 to 283. You don't see how that is an issue? 

Just out of curiosity, is the "success on day 1" qualifier a sly attempt of creating an escape route? I'd like to see that game, the only one i could think of fits most of your statement, except the part where it has a very low player count - Sons of The Forest. Which is an open world early access sandbox, a sequel of a renowned game from 2018, and has been a huge success on Day 1. The only "problem" is that it has three times the amount of players currently than the predecessor The Forest, so i guess that's not what we're talking about. 

Which highly successful successor does have barely any players?

People keep forgetting this game is coming to consoles. The PC sales are largely irrelevant compared to that market. 

[regex]

10 minutes ago, m4inbrain said:

Because it's an indicator whether or not a game incentivises you to play.

It's an early access game in active development, why would you want to play it? Every time I do that I miss out on the developer's end vision for the game. Got burnt out on Factorio while it was in development and did the same with KSP1. I'm not actively playing KSP2 for that very reason. A game in development is in flux, things can and will change, bugs will get fixed, features added, and it'll take a long time for all that to pan out.

14 minutes ago, m4inbrain said:

You don't see how that is an issue?

Nope. Why would that be "an issue"?

[TLTay]

I think a lot of people are wondering this. We're over 6 months since EA release, and basic things like reentry haven't been added yet. You're still discussing having discussions about plans for features.

In the month of September 2023, how many people were working exclusively on KSP2 and no other title for 40 hours or more per week? Don't twist this question, it's a simple question the community deserves an honest response to.

People deserve some honesty. What portion of the team has been allocated to work on a title other than KSP2?

Edited October 11, 2023 by TLTay

[Superfluous J]

As part of "people" I feel the need to say I don't think this information needs to be made public.

Just in case they're listening to some dude on the Internet's opinion.

 

[Periple]

2 hours ago, MechBFP said:

People keep forgetting this game is coming to consoles. The PC sales are largely irrelevant compared to that market. 

That’s not true and it largely depends on the genre. Our games are multiplatform and PC is the best-selling one by a wide margin for that reason. I think this will be the case for KSP2 as well even if the console version is much better than with KSP.

[Alpha_star]

Maybe somewhat too optimistic.

First of all, as pointed out, what we have in the game is less than what has been made in total. Even if we just count additions to the game, it would still be 696 bug fixes in 6 months, 5 days from the start of Early Access to the release of patch 0.1.4.0, which is around 110 fixes per month. If we say each developer works something like 20 days per month, then the total amount avrages out to 5-6 fixes per day for the team dedicated to squashing bugs. And if we assume each developer takes a day to fix a non-critical bug (might be wrong in either ways) and larger ones caused by multiple causes such as orbital decay, then we can assume that there are 6-8 developers in the bugfixing squad.

Moving on, based on the public progress of feature and parts, I can say with somewhat confidence that at least one or tow developer(s) is/are working on adding new stuff to the game that will come out along with patches. Adding the number on top of my previous result gives us something around 10 developers. There are also some other people we can confirm working on the game. such as Chris Adderley (Nertea), Alexander Martin and Paul Zimmer. Even if the two groups I mentioned are overlapped, I don't think my opinion has changed too much.

Last but not least, data miners have found the addition of new code along with patches, which I believe can add another bunch of people to the group. At least 12-15 is my answer.

As a conclusion, my pointless assumption is anywhere from 15 to 40 developers. Since we do not have access to all the progress, anything related to this topic remains a guess.

Edited October 11, 2023 by Alpha_star

[The Aziz]

Slime Rancher 2. 95% positive reviews on steam, also started with 20k+ players. Now it's 300. Already had one content update that didn't rise the numbers for very long.

Of course we're still in wobbly rockets chat and there aren't any lately.

[The Aziz]

Linkedin points at 11-50.

The game credits will list more because of former employees.

No number will be made public, that's beyond "honesty".

I say whatever the number is, is not enough. Thanks T2/PD for understaffing/underfunding the project of this complexity.

[Periple]

A number wouldn't actually mean much without knowing a lot more about the internals of the project. 

For example, consider parts. To make them, you need a concept artist, a designer, and a bunch of artists who make the actual game-ready assets, plus animators for parts with animations. Once the parts are designed, the concept artist and designer can move on to other things. Once the game-ready assets are built, the artists and animators can do the same. That's easily 20 people taken off the project simply because they're not needed there anymore, while the gameplay design, programming, and environment art teams are still plugging away full steam.

(As an aside - if I was a CM, I would be inclined to just ignore the OP. Fans who purport to speak on behalf of the community, make demands, disparage the developer, and are generally confrontational aren't worth engaging with, as they're unlikely to be receptive to anything the studio says anyway. The same message would be much more likely to elicit a response if it was couched as something like "Hey I'm curious about something, you've said that you've started work on a second Kerbal game. Could you tell us anything about how people are rolled off KSP2 and onto it? Like, how many people are working full-time on each project right now and what are they doing?")

[Alexoff]

I think we also need to distinguish between games made by a division of large corporations and several developers in a garage. The latter can sell one hundred thousand copies at the game's early access release and ensure their existence for several years. Fifty corporate developers are much more expensive and the big boss can cut funding whenever he wants.

[Lyneira]

The underlying question I gather from the OP is: "What is holding back KSP2's progress?"

From the type of issues that are sitting at the top of KERB now and the issues I've experienced personally over the past months, it's clear there is a bottleneck in the engineering side of the project right now, not so much the content creation. (planets, environments, music, sounds, parts etc.)

Can the bottleneck be removed by adding more engineers? There's a common adage that very likely applies here: "Adding more workers to a late project makes it later", so hiring new engineers right now won't give any short term benefits. But there may be plenty of engineering work left for the roadmap that it will be worthwhile for the future.

Could the bottleneck have been prevented? Perhaps with different processes or a larger engineering staff in the years before launch. The confidence about "slaying the kraken" from communications prior to launch compared to what we experienced after launch suggests the engineering task turned out to be more difficult than expected.

[m4inbrain]

9 hours ago, regex said:

It's an early access game in active development, why would you want to play it?

I don't know, maybe because it's an early access game and not a Kickstarter or GoFundMe? That's some odd logic there. I haven't burnt out playing Factorio, neither was the case for KSP1 - that's a "you" problem, not a general one. 

The Steamworks Documentation deliberately and literally says that Early Access is not a way of crowdfunding a game, which is what you're suggesting. It also says it's a tool to get your game in front of users for feedback. For that, people need to play the game. 

9 hours ago, regex said:

Nope. Why would that be "an issue"?

If you don't see how it could be an issue that no one is playing (and subsequently talking or selling) your game anymore - a game with a diehard community at that - then i can't really help you. I can however tell you that PD and T2 will see that very differently. 

9 hours ago, MechBFP said:

People keep forgetting this game is coming to consoles. The PC sales are largely irrelevant compared to that market. 

This is just nonsense. KSP as well as KSP2 are primarily PC games, since you're so limited in controls on a gamepad. In fact, we know it's nonsense, since KSP1 has a console version too, and it's awful. And some of the stuff that makes it awful you can't work around (controls mainly), unless you're willing to basically entirely re-design the game. The very fact remains that simulation type games, regardless of sub-genre, do vastly better on PC than on console. Be it vehicular simulations of any kind (Bus Simulator, Snow Runner etc), racing simulations (i-Racing), flight simulators (DCS, MSFS) or weird stuff (Powerwash Sim, Gas Station Sim and all those). And it shows with KSP, since, again, KSP1 does exist on console. On paper, anyway.

4 hours ago, The Aziz said:

Slime Rancher 2. 95% positive reviews on steam, also started with 20k+ players. Now it's 300. Already had one content update that didn't rise the numbers for very long.

I did like SR1, though i wouldn't have thought of it as renowned. I did check SR2 and you're indeed correct about the player numbers, although the trend mostly mirrors that of SR1. What's more important though is that i had a quick gander into the steam forums for the game, biggest thread on the first page is named "Is the game abandoned?", with illustrious posts like "Were there improvements to Slime Rancher 2? I played through it and it just felt like Slime Rancher 1. With less content.". Which sounds horribly familiar, except that SR2 doesn't appear to have released into EA as a barely functional, minimum viable product (though this is speculation on my part), which explains the reviews to an extent. I haven't followed the game though, so i can't really say anything else. 

edit: but you're right, this is supposed to be about rocket wobble, so i'll bow out here. I don't really have anything to add in regards to wobble that hasn't been said before. For me personally, it's not as big a deal as it seems to be for others, but i'd very much prefer to have stiffer vehicles too if i had a choice.

Edited October 11, 2023 by m4inbrain

[The Aziz]

4 hours ago, Lyneira said:

Could the bottleneck have been prevented? Perhaps with different processes or a larger engineering staff in the years before launch.

 

[MechBFP]

2 hours ago, m4inbrain said:

KSP as well as KSP2 are primarily PC games

Haha, great stuff. Well I don't need to say anything else, I'll simply sit back and let time show you the results.

[Alexoff]

34 minutes ago, MechBFP said:

Haha, great stuff. Well I don't need to say anything else, I'll simply sit back and let time show you the results.

Did KSP1 really sell well on consoles? Are there any statistics?

[VlonaldKerman]

5 hours ago, Lyneira said:

Could the bottleneck have been prevented? Perhaps with different processes or a larger engineering staff in the years before launch. The confidence about "slaying the kraken" from communications prior to launch compared to what we experienced after launch suggests the engineering task turned out to be more difficult than expected.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, there is a popular theory that development got restarted at some point in 2019-2020, likely because of unforeseen engineering issues or a different vision (different engineering vision) for the game. This would likely hit engineering/backend much harder than asset creation bc a lot of the models, SFX, etc would transfer right over. Given that they were shooting for a full release with no early access, all the features were developed simultaneously, giving no special priority to the one’s that would appear in an ideal “early access” build.

This would explain why a) The cosmetic aspects (aside from technical ones like terrain detail) of the game (parts, SFX, etc) are so advanced relative to the engineering and feature aspects of the game, and b) Why so many “basic” features like reentry heat are missing from the EA build, while there are supposedly distant roadmap features in a relatively advanced state in internal builds.

All we can hope for is that the apparent difficulty of KSP 2’s engineering challenges is surmountable to the point where they can deliver the ambitious, performant game that was promised. However, the reasons for skepticism are obvious.

In other words, yes, I agree with @Lyneira.

[PDCWolf]

1 hour ago, VlonaldKerman said:

At the risk of beating a dead horse, there is a popular theory that development got restarted at some point in 2019-2020

Thankfully we have sources that point to this not being the case. Development started 2017.  Why people keep hiding under the same scapegoats time and time again when they've been told by T2, PD and IG that the game started being developed in 2017, that COVID wasn't a problem and that EA was gonna be updated in weeks not months is beyond me. It doesn't even fit as coping, it's either maliciously spreading misinformation, or outright refusing to accept reality.

As for the OP's question: They're not gonna tell us. We know from their linkedin that IG is working on another project simultaneously. So either KSP2 is on a skeleton crew, or they really aren't cut for the position. Sadly time has ran out and there's no other way about it, unless they magically showed up with a complete game they had been developing in DBZ's Hyperbolic Time Chamber.

[shelshok]

8 hours ago, Lyneira said:

There's a common adage that very likely applies here: "Adding more workers to a late project makes it later", so hiring new engineers right now won't give any short term benefits.

I guess my question would be, assuming they started with maybe a couple dozen, how many of those quit or were let go with no capable replacement? I agree with your point, but I too wonder if they have enough devs at this point to ever finish the project as planned. I don't expect an answer to that question.

I do agree that they don't owe anyone a number, but for the cost of EA, they do owe something to reassure those who bought it that they are going to get something worth $50, because what they did get so far ain't it.

Edited October 11, 2023 by shelshok

[VlonaldKerman]

19 minutes ago, shelshok said:

I do agree that they don't owe anyone a number, but for the cost of EA, they do owe something to reassure those who bought it that they are going to get something worth $50, because what they did get so far ain't it.

For my money, I would rather get snippets of gameplay from internal builds that are more feature-complete than details on the inner workings of the dev team.

[regex]

6 hours ago, m4inbrain said:

The Steamworks Documentation deliberately and literally says that Early Access is not a way of crowdfunding a game, which is what you're suggesting. It also says it's a tool to get your game in front of users for feedback. For that, people need to play the game. 

I'm not suggesting that at all, I'm saying it's a game in active development. Why would you expect perfection or even a fully finished game? You play it, offer feedback, then go do something else until the next update, rinse, repeat. Expecting an early access game to be polished, content-complete, and capable of being played pretty much full-time is kind of silly to be perfectly honest. I genuinely don't understand that mentality and actually find it kind of toxic.

6 hours ago, m4inbrain said:

I can however tell you that PD and T2 will see that very differently.

Really? Can you give me a citation where PD, Intercept, and/or T2 mention that player counts are important?

Edited October 11, 2023 by regex

[Scarecrow71]

4 minutes ago, regex said:

I'm not suggesting that at all, I'm saying it's a game in active development. Why would you expect perfection or even a fully finished game? You play it, offer feedback, then go do something else until the next update, rinse, repeat. Expecting an early access game to be polished, content-complete, and capable of being played pretty much full-time is kind of silly to be perfectly honest. I genuinely don't understand that mentality and actually find it kind of toxic.

While I agree with the sentiment, I think the major point is that expectations were not set properly by the company, and this has left a lot of people - myself included - wanting to see what we were told we were going to get.  This hasn't really been the prototypical early access release, and I think people are simply put off by that.  My opinion only, and I can only speak for myself with 100% certainty.

[shelshok]

3 minutes ago, VlonaldKerman said:

For my money, I would rather get snippets of gameplay from internal builds that are more feature-complete than details on the inner workings of the dev team.

As would I (I actually said something to that effect in another thread). It's the silence that is causing concerns that there's nothing (or not enough) going on over there.

For much of last year, I'd get pretty excited every time a new alpha video was posted to Youtube, but progress seems to have slowed from even that period.

[Spicat]

20 minutes ago, regex said:

Really? Can you give me a citation where PD, Intercept, and/or T2 mention that player counts are important?

They even said the opposite: