KSP2 Six-Month Anniversary

[Vl3d]

When I walk home from work, I sometimes look up at the clouds and imagine the re-entry streaks of players coming home from their travels. At night I see the faint glows of interstellar ships burning to leave the solar system. I look off into the distance and in the radiant heat on the horizon I see the contrails of science planes doing research. The park pathways mark the busy routes of my transport rovers. I look at interesting buildings and ask myself: "is this what my colony will look like?". When it rains, I imagine what color the weather is around tall mountain peaks on some distant planet.  I talk to AI about space-ship designs, I dream about the future and.. I know that some day I will explore the stars with all of you.

Keep the dream alive, keep KSP2 in your hearts!

 

Edited August 24, 2023 by Vl3d

[Alexoff]

Over the past six months, we have learned a lot about KSP2, about the developers, and about ourselves. There is no doubt that we will continue to learn a lot of new things!

[cocoscacao]

It was a slow day at work. I kept the release timer on a laptop screen while trying to distract myself with some documentation on the monitor. After downloading the game, the first thing I built was the dumb mk1 + small booster directly below. The countdown started, and "ohco" was the cutest thing I've heard in a long time....

[VlonaldKerman]

I ordered chic fil a

[moeggz]

Oh yeah that’s today. 
 

Which means I was wrong for saying that the first major update in duplicating features would be 1/2 a year from release date. That update will take even more than 1/2 a year.

And I was way to optimistic in that comment too because I didn’t even mention reentry heating, expecting that to come out well before now. So I was crazy, unbelievably wrong because I wasn’t nearly pessimistic enough. 
 

When that debate was happening I was heavily disagreed with not just here but also on the still mostly positive Reddit for being too pessimistic. And I wasn’t pessimistic enough. 
 

Go through launch threads, and early dev updates. It’s time to admit that the gaslighting and goal post moving was slow enough lots haven’t even realized how much their expectations have been lowered with time, but it’s undeniable now that the state of the game is worse than anyone expected for 6 months in. And we’re supposed to be excited about a bug patch. Not a feature update, they’ve beat us down so far to hype a bug patch as a big deal and they can’t even meet their own deadlines on that.

 

Go ahead and debate me saying how it’s probably a misunderstanding and they read it as one or two years and not one half of a year. But recognize you’re arguing for a more pessimistic take than anyone had 6 months ago and if they keep it up here pretty soon even that misinterpretation will prove to be accurate. Do we really believe we’re getting science in the next six months?

Edited August 24, 2023 by moeggz

[regex]

10 minutes ago, moeggz said:

Do we really believe we’re getting science in the next six months?

I ain't putting money on it but yeah, I think we'll have the science update within six months from now.

Which is fine, Armored Core 6 just came out and there are a ton of other great games to check out, I got plenty to do while waiting for KSP2 to mature.

[Alexoff]

19 minutes ago, moeggz said:

Do we really believe we’re getting science in the next six months?

Of course we'll get science in the winter! It will be the same as in KSP1, only bugged. But we all know that bugs are part of the KSP DNA, right? We must look forward, very far forward, someday everything will be fine

[The Aziz]

There's a sense of irony coming from some people's posts that can be smelled from lightyears away

[Kerbart]

It took me about 4 months to get to a level of "not caring." Don't get me wrong — I think the game has great potential. Kerbals are no longer motionless robots sitting in their craft, orbit lines are not polygons when zooming in and the sound track has enough variation, drama and appropriateness to keep it from being turned off.

I also haven't started the game in like two months, I went back to KSP1. Once in a while I'll run it, think to myself "why did I do that" and shut it down. So for me it doesn't really matter when the Science update comes. At the one year anniversary (my bet)? Fine. Whatever the update is, I'll run the game for five minutes, and then think "meh, still a turd." Or maybe, maybe not, and I'll keep playing it. But until that day comes I won't be terribly upset over the current state. It is what it is.

Edited August 24, 2023 by Kerbart

[Periple]

11 hours ago, moeggz said:

Do we really believe we’re getting science in the next six months?

I think we’ll get it in 2-4 months and there’s a good chance of getting colonies in the next 6. Resources not that far behind. Interstellar and multiplayer are clearly a way out.

They’ve said that they only have a few developers maintaining the 0.1 branch with the rest on 0.2. There’s no way for us to tell when 0.2 is ready to roll out because they’re not saying (and wisely so).  

They also said that heating will start to roll out before it. 

Going by that I’m guessing their plan is to roll out 0.1.5 with heating in a month or so, then 0.2 in another month, give or take a month.

There’s no question that development has been slower than I expected. I hope they’ve figured out where the frictions were and addressed most of them by now.

Edited August 25, 2023 by Periple

[cocoscacao]

21 minutes ago, Periple said:

I think we’ll get it in 2-4 months and there’s a good chance of getting colonies and in the next 6

I'm not so sure. These few critical bugs proved hard for them to fix. Some causes are still unknown. The ground on many bodies looks barren. There has been no mention of switching or staying with PQS system.

While I also suspect further roadmap updates will come with more speed, there's plenty of stuff to be done before the first one. 

[moeggz]

24 minutes ago, Periple said:

I think we’ll get it in 2-4 months and there’s a good chance of getting colonies and in the next 6

If they can achieve this I think they’ll change the sentiment not only on Reddit but also solidly get steam reviews back to mostly positive. And we’ll have tons to talk about on the forums.

 

25 minutes ago, Periple said:

There’s no way for us to tell when 0.2 is ready to roll out because they’re not saying (and wisely so).  

Yes this is how I would prefer as well. I thought they were solidly on this strategy after tweeting out the apology and timeline… and then they missed the one date they gave. 
 

Community trust is low, the reviews are more negative these days there’s no reason to give dates you can’t make 100%. 
 

Whatever happened in the past is the past, and I was ready to move on to their new developments but then those new developments were more “promise things” and then not deliver those things on time. Combined with communicating the delay on Twitter, and the update on the new “date” on the discord. So, from my perspective, they tried to start a clean slate with an apology (which I bought in on) and then proceeded to follow the SOP that got us into this mess. 
 

All that said, from the poll on Reddit it seems most responding to the poll (skewed by sample selection bias I’m sure) don’t expect science within 6 months. So, the good thing about low expectations from the community is that surpassing expectations is a sure fire way to regain good will (see no man’s sky.) Right now we’re all just guessing, but I hope it plays out the way you think it will.

I just, 6 months ago, even with the buggy launch, was having fun (assuming the bugs to be short lived) and definitely thought we’d be in a better position by now. 

[modus]

10 hours ago, Kerbart said:

It took me about 4 months to get to a level of "not caring." Don't get me wrong — I think the game has great potential. Kerbals are no longer motionless robots sitting in their craft, orbit lines are not polygons when zooming in and the sound track has enough variation, drama and appropriateness to keep it from being turned off.

I also haven't started the game in like two months, I went back to KSP1. Once in a while I'll run it, think to myself "why did I do that" and shut it down. So for me it doesn't really matter when the Science update comes. At the one year anniversary (my bet)? Fine. Whatever the update is, I'll run the game for five minutes, and then think "meh, still a turd." Or maybe, maybe not, and I'll keep playing it. But until that day comes I won't be terribly upset over the current state. It is what it is.

This is very much how I feel (except I don't play ksp1 anymore).

Game sucks, so be it. Don't really care anymore. When it's good enough to play (in my opinion, dont really care about version numbers or ea)  I'll probably play it.

For now, very much looking forward to cities skylines 2 (talk about a different path to release)

[royying]

By this speed, I'm wondering can KSP2 get out of early access stage within 3 years

[Dakitess]

My initial guess was 2.5 years to get through the roadmap. And it was totally OK in all fairness. Things take time to get done right, it's KSP, we want to love it and to support a long successful dev, with new cool features and being a playable and enjoyable empty KSP1 equivalent at first, technically up to date and running well to start with. Sigh. We're already 6 months in, I would guestimate something like 3.5 years in total but with a somewhat very faded  / damaged result compared to what it should have been, including based on what they would have expected as Dev. 

At this pace, maybe 5 years would be required to do something "correct" (at most, since the basis is so fragile and already outdated), but I think they will try to reduce the expectation with limited new contents and feature compared to what they planned, to avoid having a non-ending dev, and maybe then concentrate to DLC to get some fresh cashflow. Maybe it will even stick to 2.5 from the EA, but gosh, the result will be terrible and the priority would be cashflow in any sort of way.

In any case, I don't have much hope anymore about it. I've always been very skeptical, pessimistic and critical regarding the state of the game but the first 3-4 months would be "damn this launch is a mess, it ruins the KSP franchise, let's hope for the best it might have been a rushed launch". Now... Well, yeah, past 3 months seem to show that it's not going anywhere promising, the technical basis is so poor and the aesthetic is so weird and dated that it won't improve by much just because "multiplayer, colonies and sciences". 

Edited August 25, 2023 by Dakitess

[Periple]

39 minutes ago, Dakitess said:

My initial guess was 2.5 years to get through the roadmap. And it was totally OK in all fairness. Things take time to get done right, it's KSP, we want to love it and to support a long successful dev, with new cool features and being a playable and enjoyable empty KSP1 equivalent at first, technically up to date and running well to start with. Sigh. We're already 6 months in, I would guestimate something like 3.5 years in total but with a somewhat very faded  / damaged result compared to what it should have been, including based on what they would have expected as Dev. 

At this pace, maybe 5 years would be required to do something "correct" (at most, since the basis is so fragile and already outdated), but I think they will try to reduce the expectation with limited new contents and feature compared to what they planned, to avoid having a non-ending dev, and maybe then concentrate to DLC to get some fresh cashflow. Maybe it will even stick to 2.5 from the EA, but gosh, the result will be terrible and the priority would be cashflow in any sort of way.

In any case, I don't have much hope anymore about it. I've always been very skeptical, pessimistic and critical regarding the state of the game but the first 3-4 months would be "damn this launch is a mess, it ruins the KSP franchise, let's hope for the best it might have been a rushed launch". Now... Well, yeah, past 3 months seem to show that it's not going anywhere promising, the technical basis is so poor and the aesthetic is so weird and dated that it won't improve by much just because "multiplayer, colonies and sciences". 

In my view this is overly pessimistic. I would seat-of-the-pants the entire development schedule for a game like this with a team like this at about 5 years, assuming you had a studio and a team ready to go. I'd give it another year or so, maybe 18 months. If it's more than that then it likely really is in development hell and what happens then is anybody's guess.

[cocoscacao]

2 hours ago, royying said:

By this speed, I'm wondering can KSP2 get out of early access stage within 3 years

At this speed yes... My guess is that once the crucial bugs are gone, the rest will slam down way faster

Edited August 25, 2023 by cocoscacao

[Dakitess]

@Periple So your guess is that in about 18 months, we have the whole road map done, 1.0 released ? Do you expect it to be "correct enough" with most of the planned features or reduced to the Minimal Viable Product as long as the delay are respected as the whole main priority ? I guess it can be done in 18 months indeed if it's THE deadline, but I would not bet on something "good" or nearly as complete as what would have been planned.

But indeed as Cocoscacao said, we are currently dealing with bugs more than anything else, no place to move forward to content. Once bugs are things of the past (enough to be enjoyable), even if it takes 4-6 other months, it's not totally unlikely to get the actual roadmap in a well condensed and prepared year. But... Yeah, I don't trust the actual basis of the game. Bugs or not, the foundations are shaking, cracked, it's not meant to be more than an ersatz of KSP2, I don't see it running nearly as good as it should / must even after 18 months of optimization, and graphics won't probably enhance by more than a mere 30% which would still look sooooooo dated and weird (yeah, not just dated, weird looking, weird choices of aesthetic). Maybe, maybe, in 3 years with some modding... Bah, let's see, I guess.

[Kerbart]

5 hours ago, royying said:

By this speed, I'm wondering can KSP2 get out of early access stage within 3 years

Some will, not unreasonably, criticize your optimism.

[Alexoff]

I don’t really understand why fixing bugs could speed up development. I am sure that each innovation will be full of bugs, which will also take a long time to fix.

[cocoscacao]

@Alexoff Present base game bugs are the hardest ones.

I doubt science will have much in common with orbital trajectories, docking, etc. Bugs found there should be resolved relatively quickly.

The rest of the roadmap relies heavily on base game mechanics. If those are rock solid, that narrows down bug sources significantly. 

[Alexoff]

5 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:

@Alexoff Present base game bugs are the hardest ones.

I doubt science will have much in common with orbital trajectories, docking, etc. Bugs found there should be resolved relatively quickly.

The rest of the roadmap relies heavily on base game mechanics. If those are rock solid, that narrows down bug sources significantly. 

Science can be unplayable, unbalanced, and constantly throwing errors. Heat can ruin the game just like the kraken. We do not know how complex today's bugs are, perhaps they are much easier to fix, it seems that the developers have not dealt with many bugs until recently.

[jacksawild]

The morale of the community is pretty low right now and it doesn't look set to change any time soon. Hopefully things will change.

[Alexoff]

2 hours ago, jacksawild said:

The morale of the community is pretty low right now and it doesn't look set to change any time soon. Hopefully things will change.

Perhaps the AMA with another manager will improve the mood of the community. And if there are new challenges, then everyone will immediately perk up

[chefsbrian]

I'll admit, I've more or less given up on the project entirely. I was among the crowd expecting a rough launch, but rapid improvement. I was expecting Science and some basic level of stability before 2023 was out - Not perfect feature parity or even specifically science being fully completed, but most of it there and mostly working as intended. I was prepared for regular save eating bugs, quirks, parts that got cut from X update last minute because they more or less just didn't work, etc. Reaching science parity with the old game should have been 'easier'. Not easy explicitly, but it was already a reasonably well mapped design space, both technologically and conceptually. Between KSP1 and the slew of mods, there's a good amount of info about what does and doesn't work, what kind of problems are fun to solve, and other such things that are more than enough to build a playable science iteration. The successor roadmap items are a much bigger question mark, and I expected the update cycle to slow for a while afterwards into 2024 just due to the complexity of crafting such systems from more or less scratch. 

To summarize, I expected a chaotic, fast EA experience up to science feature parity with KSP1, and then a pullback and some stabilizing and quiet while the game moved onto the feature net new roadmap items.

What I wasn't expecting was to have the game half a year after release still struggling with fundamental bugs, still lacking heat (Its not explicitly a big deal, but the fact it was stated as 'shortly after' release just highlights how things went wrong) and still being very unreliable mechanically. I don't have much interest in investing time into a long mission when the games just gonna treat my ships construction as a suggestion, and my orbit as something that it can fidget with and change at a whim.

Now all this isn't to say that the game can't come back, or that my giving up has me never touching it again if it improves in the future. Games have been resurrected before. The problem is that as the people who give up and step outta the EA community grows, the quality of your feedback declines. More of your remaining player base becomes the diehard fans that will eat glass to push through on completing a mission. That willingness to push through the bad times can mask a lot of problems - The existing players get calloused to pain points, you don't hear about them much as a developer, and then you don't give them much attention as it doesn't seem to be as big of an issue. Long term, this turns into a development cycle that masks problems rather than facing them, because the wider audience just left and stopped complaining about those problems. Squeaky wheel and all that jazz.

Maybe I'll be proven wrong with a Christmas surprise, but I doubt it at this point.

On 8/24/2023 at 2:01 PM, regex said:

Which is fine, Armored Core 6 just came out and there are a ton of other great games to check out, I got plenty to do while waiting for KSP2 to mature.

And Starfield shortly, should help scratch a bit of that space exploration itch. Remnant 2's been waiting for me to stop being salty about the labyrinth boss and pick it back up. And even in the Indie space, Terra Invicta's been running a decent if slow patch cycle, but the game more or less launched finished anyway. But I didn't give KSP2 Seventy of my Canadian Rubles so I could go buy some other games to play instead. They're getting measured against their peers large and small, who faced the same tribulations of game development, publishers and the weirdness of the last five years, and provided much better game outcomes at the end.

On 8/25/2023 at 9:48 AM, jacksawild said:

The morale of the community is pretty low right now and it doesn't look set to change any time soon. Hopefully things will change.

I think all it'd take is a single, out of the ballpark patch or roadmap item. If the team suddenly pulls a "We fixed all the various mission killing bugs" patch outta their rears, or if they suddenly slam down a really well built, interesting and reasonably stable Science update, the energy of the community would probably turn around fast. Folks love underdog comeback stories, lots of abandoners would hear about it and swing back by, and it could arrest the spiral that's going on right now.