KSP2 EA Grand Discussion Thread.

[The Aziz]

1 minute ago, Vl3d said:

What have you been doing for 100 hours?

Uhhhh the usual? Flying, landing, crashing, testing, bugencountering...

[Guest]

I’ve got about 70, most of them in 0.1.0-0.1.2. The same! 

Edited October 31, 2023 by Periple

[Vl3d]

29 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Uhhhh the usual? Flying, landing, crashing, testing, bugencountering...

Don't you want some hinges?

[The Aziz]

Are we really not talking about these?

 

[Spicat]

20 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Are we really not talking about these?

Volcano?

Edited November 1, 2023 by Spicat

[Vl3d]

33 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Are we really not talking about these?

 

Not much to talk about - it looks stunning.
I'm excited for the new way Kerbol is rendered.

[The Aziz]

2 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

Not much to talk about

Of all people, you're the one to say it

Who are you and what have you done with Vl3d?

This place is boiling at any sign of dev activity for the last 3 years and now there isn't much to talk about

I'm speechless 

[PDCWolf]

54 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Are we really not talking about these?

 

What's there to talk about? Blackrack's immense work for sure, but other than that? Yeah, there's gonna be easter eggs, and mountains. The rover doesn't seem to have anything new on it, or anything you could look at and say "wow they added that to the game!?!?!"

The whole concept of POIs doesn't really add much to the gameplay.

[Vl3d]

21 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Of all people, you're the one to say it

Who are you and what have you done with Vl3d?

This place is boiling at any sign of dev activity for the last 3 years and now there isn't much to talk about

I'm speechless 

Blackrack's got it locked down. He's been delivering ultra HQ stuff for years. See the resemblance?

 

When we see this in KSP2 I promise I'll jump a little.

 

[Mikki]

On the topic of steam connection during play... my connection regurarly cuts of from steam (about every hour once) which freezes KSP2 very hard. So i resort to offline game with very rare CTDs. Does anyone else have this issue?

[Wheehaw Kerman]

3 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

What's there to talk about? Blackrack's immense work for sure, but other than that? Yeah, there's gonna be easter eggs, and mountains. The rover doesn't seem to have anything new on it, or anything you could look at and say "wow they added that to the game!?!?!"

The whole concept of POIs doesn't really add much to the gameplay.

You mean you’ve never gone looking for Vallhenge or the whale skeleton or the dead Kraken on Bop?  Finding the Easter eggs in KSP was a lot of fun.  And if the POIs are as pretty as that Laythe screenshot…

[PDCWolf]

5 minutes ago, Wheehaw Kerman said:

You mean you’ve never gone looking for Vallhenge or the whale skeleton or the dead Kraken on Bop?  Finding the Easter eggs in KSP was a lot of fun.  And if the POIs are as pretty as that Laythe screenshot…

I've seen them just so my missions had a point of getting there at all. Other than that, it's a repeatable experience we share in common, and when you think about the game having 3 star systems with many planets each, all of us going to the same places to see the same sights is kinda sad.

[Wheehaw Kerman]

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

I've seen them just so my missions had a point of getting there at all. Other than that, it's a repeatable experience we share in common, and when you think about the game having 3 star systems with many planets each, all of us going to the same places to see the same sights is kinda sad.

What would you have said if they gave us a game with no discoverables?

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

I've seen them just so my missions had a point of getting there at all. Other than that, it's a repeatable experience we share in common, and when you think about the game having 3 star systems with many planets each, all of us going to the same places to see the same sights is kinda sad.

what sort of non-repeatable experiences that we cannot share in common were you hoping for in the game?

[Dakitess]

10 hours ago, Wheehaw Kerman said:

You mean you’ve never gone looking for Vallhenge or the whale skeleton or the dead Kraken on Bop?  Finding the Easter eggs in KSP was a lot of fun.  And if the POIs are as pretty as that Laythe screenshot…

Did you really enjoy the Easter Egg in KSP1 ? I really found them ultra lazy, random assets being drop down with barely no adequation to the environment, no lore, etc.

Regarding the "POI" shown in KSP2, so far, it's the very same, it's cruelly lacking proper design and integration with the environment, the textures, the lightning, the whole aesthetic design seem completely off with the rest of KSP. Even the last one shown is really not convincing by any mean to my eyes.

Yeah, best word is "laziness" when it comes to these POI... And it actually kinda prevent the dev to build actual scenery everywhere rather than very localize and weird thingies.

We can expect some integration to the Exploration mode though, some lore, some story line... Otherwise, damn, I would not get it, and I'll allow myself to strongly doubt, based on the past.

[Wheehaw Kerman]

2 hours ago, Dakitess said:

Did you really enjoy the Easter Egg in KSP1 ? I really found them ultra lazy, random assets being drop down with barely no adequation to the environment, no lore, etc.

Regarding the "POI" shown in KSP2, so far, it's the very same, it's cruelly lacking proper design and integration with the environment, the textures, the lightning, the whole aesthetic design seem completely off with the rest of KSP. Even the last one shown is really not convincing by any mean to my eyes.

Yeah, best word is "laziness" when it comes to these POI... And it actually kinda prevent the dev to build actual scenery everywhere rather than very localize and weird thingies.

We can expect some integration to the Exploration mode though, some lore, some story line... Otherwise, damn, I would not get it, and I'll allow myself to strongly doubt, based on the past.

On a high level, you’re right about the KSP Easter eggs.  Too random and in-jokey, no connection, and overall poorly thought out.  A missed opportunity - to either do something awesome or fail miserably and develop lore/story that reduced the game to cold designed by committee writing room gruel.

Thing is, they were still fun.  One save I did revolves around building a base at Vallhenge.  That was a lot of hours of fun, and all it took was some geometric objects.

We don’t know much about the discoverables system yet.  I’m excited, though.  Even if they’re just flag-planting spots with pretty views, they’ll still be fun and make for some nice screenshots.

I am worried about the possibility of lame lore, though.  My biggest aesthetic gripe about the game is the fact that most of the Kerbals look like Arts students from a third rate university that were recruited from barista gigs - there’s none of the Cold War/Space Race buzz cut The Right Stuff vibe that made the first game resonate with history so well.   Once we get Kerbal management I am only hiring Kerbs with the right aesthetic stuff…  and if IG hires the wrong writers with no sense of history who haven’t read The Expanse or seen For All Mankind, their lore could make noodle rockets look like a good time.

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, Dakitess said:

Regarding the "POI" shown in KSP2, so far, it's the very same, it's cruelly lacking proper design and integration with the environment, the textures, the lightning, the whole aesthetic design seem completely off with the rest of KSP. Even the last one shown is really not convincing by any mean to my eyes.

The "I" in POI means "Illuminati". Proper eyes can read proper signs.

Probably...

[Dakitess]

Yeah, theses POI are really the best lever to offer a "simple" yet comprehensive story line to the Kerbal Universe. Even without a whole narration, no cutscenes, etc, you can do a whole lot with proper selection and good integration. Actually, it could pretty much be the kind of mechanism we got in Outer Wilds ! Did not played it but one of the very best video about it is surely the one from TheGreatReview, a french Youtuber : no or not much story lines, no specific orders, just incentive to discover, and to reassemble the puzzle.

But since in KSP it's going to be a very very (very) "poor" content, just dropping assets after creating and writing the lore, at least it needs to be very well done. Something like 30-40 POI, 90% in the original star system and the rest in other ones, for instance.

I've actually done that myself in KSP, using a save to share a "world" where there is some crafts, some flags as message holder, some decal to hold other messages in RP way. The story has a big "Foundation" feeling (well, i'm not Asimov by any means xD), while it was totally not planned since I read it 15 years ago and did not recall of it at all until I saw the TV Show. Anyway, yeah, it's possible to write a whole story in KSP, a whole universe, background, lore, call it the way you want, that set the story, the characters, etc, without the need of anything else than KSP as it's nowadays. But it needs to be good enough to offer proper incentives to the mass, not only the more passionate about Kerbals.

[PDCWolf]

12 hours ago, Wheehaw Kerman said:

What would you have said if they gave us a game with no discoverables?

My worry is not discoverables or no discoverables. Easter eggs are great, and I probably took them for granted until this point (having already landed on one before refunding). Discoverables seem to be another name for easter eggs, or some remarkable hand-made feature planted in a procgen world. My worry is what about the entire rest of the planet sized map those discoverables are in? More discoverables? More barren procgen uninteresting wastelands? Is science only tied to discoverables or does the biome system make a comeback, or something better/worse?

If the science gameplay revolves around discoverables, then we're all gonna be playing exactly the same game, and almost exactly the same route.

12 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

what sort of non-repeatable experiences that we cannot share in common were you hoping for in the game?

Some time ago I realized my top games in my whole life were the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Series, Kenshi and Mount & Blade Warband. At first, it looks like a wild, disjointed selection, but in reality they're all games that share something very important in common: Emergent narrative elements in a world where the player is just another person, rather than the protagonist. Save for common story elements on the first series, every experience you will have is different, every goal you could craft is different, every way of achieving that goal is different as well.

As it stands right now, the only thing that makes your experience of KSP1/2 different to mine (before mods) is how we design our rockets. Anything but that is the exact same for you and me, and the challenges we'll face will be the same: Land on the easy bodies, maybe try Moho and Eeloo, a Jool 5, make an SSTO, and an Eve ascent vehicle. Anything after that is roleplay. KSP2 is shaping to be the same, even if they include a grotesque amount of "discoverables", and there's one thing that makes the idea worse: They're selling it as an exploration game, even if what we'll end up exploring, seeing, and achieving is almost exactly the same.

This is sadly the current state for most single-player experiences: A bottled in little story with few divergences, that requires you to not look at anyone else doing it, lest you spoil the experience for yourself, because it's literally gonna be the same for you.

I honestly don't know what I expect, but I do want to see the narrative side taken further since they mentioned hiring writers.

Edited November 2, 2023 by PDCWolf

[Vl3d]

48 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

My worry is not discoverables or no discoverables. Easter eggs are great, and I probably took them for granted until this point (having already landed on one before refunding). Discoverables seem to be another name for easter eggs, or some remarkable hand-made feature planted in a procgen world. My worry is what about the entire rest of the planet sized map those discoverables are in? More discoverables? More barren procgen uninteresting wastelands? Is science only tied to discoverables or does the biome system make a comeback, or something better/worse?

If the science gameplay revolves around discoverables, then we're all gonna be playing exactly the same game, and almost exactly the same route.

Some time ago I realized my top games in my whole life were the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Series, Kenshi and Mount & Blade Warband. At first, it looks like a wild, disjointed selection, but in reality they're all games that share something very important in common: Emergent narrative elements in a world where the player is just another person, rather than the protagonist. Save for common story elements on the first series, every experience you will have is different, every goal you could craft is different, every way of achieving that goal is different as well.

As it stands right now, the only thing that makes your experience of KSP1/2 different to mine (before mods) is how we design our rockets. Anything but that is the exact same for you and me, and the challenges we'll face will be the same: Land on the easy bodies, maybe try Moho and Eeloo, a Jool 5, make an SSTO, and an Eve ascent vehicle. Anything after that is roleplay. KSP2 is shaping to be the same, even if they include a grotesque amount of "discoverables", and there's one thing that makes the idea worse: They're selling it as an exploration game, even if what we'll end up exploring, seeing, and achieving is almost exactly the same.

This is sadly the current state for most single-player experiences: A bottled in little story with few divergences, that requires you to not look at anyone else doing it, lest you spoil the experience for yourself, because it's literally gonna be the same for you.

I honestly don't know what I expect, but I do want to see the narrative side taken further since they mentioned hiring writers.

Nah man, we'll get to discover a mysterious new distant planet full of ruins of an ancient civilization.. guiding us to DebDeb.

[cocoscacao]

56 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

As it stands right now, the only thing that makes your experience of KSP1/2 different to mine (before mods) is how we design our rockets. Anything but that is the exact same for you and me, and the challenges we'll face will be the same

Aaand, you would improve that how?  You can also argue that warband is repetitive. Sure, I am fighting for different lord and reason, but the fight is the same. Here, the rockets are different, reasons are the same. 

Edited November 2, 2023 by cocoscacao

[PDCWolf]

33 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:

Aaand, you would improve that how?  You can also argue that warband is repetitive. Sure, I am fighting for different lord and reason, but the fight is the same. Here, the rockets are different, reasons are the same. 

You could chose to not fight and open enterprises and trade, which'll get you to retire richer than fighting. You can choose to not ally with any lord, or take on the cause of the exiled lords. There's also the fact that what happens on your map, and thus the story of your character, will be completely different, as that's pretty much emergent narrative. That's the thing with open ended, emergent narrative games.

KSP2 is open ended, but has almost no narrative elements save for whatever story will come out of the easter eggs or discoverables, which even if told non-linearly, will start and end up in exactly the same place on your first or hundredth play-through.

How to fix that? I'm sure there's hundreds of ways that me and others could've thought of, and not a single one of them realizable because we're getting another puddle depth lego game. They could've turned the contract system into something remarkable by transforming it with allegiance/sponsorship mechanics with different companies, governments, competing space programs/nations and so on. Colonies could be an interesting point as well if included in that same system. Kerbals could actually be unique individuals rather than having different hair and skin colors and randomized stats. Heck, just think of similar games like Stormworks or From The Depths, just having a purpose for vehicles other than get X to Y place, drives players to extremely different playstyles, where you'll find some people never ever develop a water tanker helo/plane for forest fires, others just do trains, and so on. In KSP2 the only way for those to be born is self imposed restrictions, or role-play, because not even contracts are there to challenge you anymore. 

This is why I have so little faith in "exploration mode".

In fact, to continue the rant, here's another piece of mind: for my stint as a gaming journalist, one of my personal jobs was to review the Sims and its expansions. EA would provide us an account with access to all DLCs forthe Sims 4 every time they added a new one. Do you know why the Sims 4 is such unfunny, soulless garbage? Exactly for the same I'm describing. Every DLC is its little uninspired, disjointed, bottled in experience. Back in Sims 1, 2, and even parts of 3, Sims would act on their own most of the time, and every non-asset DLC would add stuff to the world. This meant every sim could partake in the new features. You'd have your neighbors be turned into vampires by a random visitor, people marrying and having children, cheating, doing good or bad at their work, and so on.

Conversely, Sims 4 is a dollhouse where nothing happens unless you directly intervene for it to happen. You can start your save, play for 7 generations of Sims, go out of your house and realize the world is exactly the same as when you started. Added DLC? That's something only you can partake in, and will only meet the sims pre-generated for the DLC plus maybe one or two visitors from the homeless sim pool. Once you're back from the DLC area? no one cares, no one knows, and no one will ever partake in that. Thus every DLC is a droolfest pit of clicking, and then going back and never playing it again, or seeing its effects again.

[AtomicTech]

[Wheehaw Kerman]

7 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

My worry is not discoverables or no discoverables. Easter eggs are great, and I probably took them for granted until this point (having already landed on one before refunding). Discoverables seem to be another name for easter eggs, or some remarkable hand-made feature planted in a procgen world. My worry is what about the entire rest of the planet sized map those discoverables are in? More discoverables? More barren procgen uninteresting wastelands? Is science only tied to discoverables or does the biome system make a comeback, or something better/worse?

If the science gameplay revolves around discoverables, then we're all gonna be playing exactly the same game, and almost exactly the same route.

It’s hard to say at this point, but the good news is that we’re going to find out in sixty days at most.  Biomes seem to make a lot of sense - I’ll just point at Mars.  The devs for Human Space Program did a pretty good job there, with cool ice caps, the northern hemisphere sea bottom, and those honking big volcanoes and canyons.  The humans are already yeeting probes at all of those.   On the other hand, Squad both over-did and under-did them in KSP1.  I was never one of the players who finished the tech tree in Kerbin SOI, but I usually managed it with a couple of labs on and around Duna before heading off to Jool.  Using science to incent exploration more seems like a no brainer.

As for the procgen wastelands, this is actually a big problem with Starfield for me (and was an even bigger problem with No Man’s Sky).  Starfield’s worlds are pretty, diverse, and kinda lacking in interest, probably because of how I got there.  Click, click, click, without any dreaming, building, or flying (and crashing, and quoting ShadowZone). No Man’s Sky’s worlds were even more obviously procgenned - infinite diversity in ultimate sameness.  In both cases I enjoyed running around on them a lot less than rover traverses of Duna, and I am not sure why.  Maybe it’s a question of human-created art versus machine process.

And that brings me to your why you like certain games point - for me, it’s first person exploration.  I spent most of late 2004 to early 2005 exploring Azeroth - just running around, looking at scenery, climbing mountains, and getting massacred in the high level zones.  The game’s lack of a Tourist or Hiker class was what killed it for me.  And then there’s KSP - simply flying around Kerbin enjoying the landscape is great, let alone building up a bit of a base somewhere and then going for a drive.  KSP2 is great already in this respect - with the exception of the Mün, which is kind of blah, the CBs I’ve been to have been plenty engaging.  Especially Laythe in 1.5.  Sunsets and sunrises are really pretty, and I’ve only lost one Kerbal to falling through the surface and another one getting mysteriously stuck on terrain.

[cocoscacao]

8 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

In fact, to continue the rant, here's another piece of mind: for my stint as a gaming journalist, one of my personal jobs was to review the Sims and its expansions

Kinda forgotten to write a reply, but other correspondence reminded me.

It all kinda falls on expectations. Would you say that Half-Life 2 and Ubisoft's Prince of Persia trilogy we're good? From game mechanic standpoint, yes... As sequels to their original games? Nooooooooooooooooooo...