KSP2 Six-Month Anniversary

[regex]

48 minutes ago, chefsbrian said:

But I didn't give KSP2 Seventy of my Canadian Rubles so I could go buy some other games to play instead.

Probably just me but when I buy into an early access game I expect to put it aside at times, or even for a long time, because getting burnt out on the game before it's fully out is why I didn't play KSP1 past about 1.05. Maybe you can try getting your money back, I'm sure there are levers you can pull.

[Lyneira]

4 hours ago, chefsbrian said:

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.

I haven't lost all hope, but this is what I'm concerned by too. I just today decided to fire up KSP2 again to have a go at making a VTOL aircraft. Slapped some fuselages, engines and wings together and so far so good... Until it came time to configure the engines into action groups. The UI for doing it is finicky and often doesn't respond to my clicks the first time, having to click ui elements or dropdown boxes multiple times to get it to respond. These are the kind of pain points that can be worked around by players who get used to it, but they sap energy out of a play session. When it later turned out my VTOL jets which I had set to independent throttle couldn't be turned off with my action groups nor through the part manager (and this being far from the first time I've had difficulty controlling engines with the part manager), I threw up my hands, gave up and put the game down again in hope for improvements.

Edited August 26, 2023 by Lyneira
Removed accidental doublepost

[bcink]

Give. Us. Modding. Ability.

Get over your games' status and your dreams and what you expected and give modding.

You literally have nothing else to lose at this point.

[chefsbrian]

4 hours ago, regex said:

Probably just me but when I buy into an early access game I expect to put it aside at times, or even for a long time, because getting burnt out on the game before it's fully out is why I didn't play KSP1 past about 1.05. Maybe you can try getting your money back, I'm sure there are levers you can pull.

Is it really necessary to be so passive aggressive with "Well why don't you just take your ball and get out of here then"? At no point did I say I want my money back, just that I want to actually be able to play what I've paid for. There's a difference between "I've seen all the game has to offer at this time so I'm going to put it down" and "The game doesn't work so I have to put it down", and KSP2 is very much the latter.

[regex]

34 minutes ago, chefsbrian said:

Is it really necessary to be so passive aggressive with "Well why don't you just take your ball and get out of here then"?

Calm down, just got that vibe from your reply, I ain't here to defend the game or Intercept.

[Periple]

4 hours ago, chefsbrian said:

I want to actually be able to play what I've paid for.

But there’s the rub, you paid for EA. That’s always a buyer beware kind of situation — even if the seller overhypes it and even if progress on the EA is slower than you hoped or expected. EA is a ticket to the sausage factory, not something that’s usually all that enjoyable in its own right.

If you’re not willing to take these risks — even down to the risk that the game won’t be finished at all — then you shouldn’t buy EA games. I only do if I’m interested in following a game’s progress. For games I just want to play I usually wait a while for them to ripen — not going to buy Starfield on release for example!

[chefsbrian]

6 hours ago, regex said:

Calm down, just got that vibe from your reply, I ain't here to defend the game or Intercept.

Apologies, it was too aggressive. But mentioning refunds as some sort of action to be taken doesn't achieve anything, especially when its well beyond any possibility. Its not constructive, productive, or addressing any of the other issues at hand, so it appears dismissive, right. And seeming to dismiss criticisms by saying "Get a Refund" comes across as a passive aggressive way to tell people "Here's the door".

2 hours ago, Periple said:

EA is a ticket to the sausage factory, not something that’s usually all that enjoyable in its own right.

That's not how it ever has to be. The fact that EA has been abused so badly to the point that people think the prior mishandlings of it somehow justifies telling people that this is how it should be doesn't make it any better. I've been playing update cycle games since before the term Early Access was even coined to widely describe the concept. And even back then, it was well understood that there was a line between "Features" in the larger scope of the things the game would achieve, and "Functionality" in so far as the things you can touch working correctly. At some point, through various bizarre blends of mistakes and human justification behaviors, the idea that "Features were coming but Functionality would work" became "Functionality is coming". An early access shooter where you only got two guns is just a mediocre shooter, but you can enjoy those guns. An early access shooter with two guns that don't shoot straight 80% of the time is just a broken game, and the EA label doesn't make it less broken. If features are the muscle and bone of the game, functionality is the nervous system - don't matter how strong n sturdy the rest is if you can't signal it. But we've seemingly lost the wider consumer expectation for that, where mere functionality is seen as a bonus.

And now we're at the point that the EA label is used to somehow justify a game, a literal entertainment product, not being entertaining due to significant material defects in the aspects that are available. I'm not ragging at you personally for using this line by the way, lots of people do, it just really bothers me to see how far things have gone bad in the whole industry for this to be a line that even gets repeated in anything other that articles from the Onion. I've been in the 'sausage factory', I compete in Game Jams as a hobby and have been involved in much larger software projects of all stripes, and I can assure you there's no good reason for the consumers as a whole to have shifted from the basic expectation of "The thing I got works". Making games is hard. But that's not the consumers problem, and they most certainly shouldn't be expected to pay up anyway when mistakes are made.

2 hours ago, Periple said:

not going to buy Starfield on release for example!

For what its worth, Bethesda gets way too much slack on this too. The whole Features vs Functionality thing has been a growing problem in all games for a while now, and 76 showed how the line they walked of avoiding true gamebreakers was more luck than divine will.

[Periple]

1 hour ago, chefsbrian said:

And now we're at the point that the EA label is used to somehow justify a game, a literal entertainment product, not being entertaining due to significant material defects in the aspects that are available.

I disagree with you on this topic. EA started as a way to have paid public betas on Steam. KSP1 is a case in point — it was barely even a game when it was first made available to the public. Lately people expect them to be enjoyable entertainment products in their own right, especially if they’re priced comparably to full releases. 

So I think that it’s not that EA has been abused, but that consumer expectations about it have changed!

 

[Lyneira]

51 minutes ago, Periple said:

I disagree with you on this topic. EA started as a way to have paid public betas on Steam. KSP1 is a case in point — it was barely even a game when it was first made available to the public. Lately people expect them to be enjoyable entertainment products in their own right, especially if they’re priced comparably to full releases. 

So I think that it’s not that EA has been abused, but that consumer expectations about it have changed!

 

If people cannot expect an early access product to be enjoyable, it follows that potential buyers should buy the product to support its development into its promised state. Otherwise, why is the product even in early access?

But when we talk about consumer expectations of early access, we must also consider the expectations set by publishers and distribution platforms of potential buyers, as exemplified by the warning you get on Steam for any early access product:

Quote

This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you should wait to see if the game progresses further in development.

In essence it tells potential buyers: "Buy only if you would be happy with what you got with no further changes." And indeed, arguments to that effect have been made on these forums many a time in discussions about the state of the game and early access. From this, it follows that potential buyers should wait until such time as the product is enjoyable and not to expect it will be developed any further.

So... Are we buying early access games for what they are supposed to become, or what they are right now with a potential bonus in further development? Certainly, the latter is the safer guideline for a potential buyer. But if everyone strictly followed it, there would have been a lot fewer sales at launch.

[joratto]

On 8/24/2023 at 9:10 PM, Alexoff said:

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

Remember, Nate wanted this game’s development to be “a little more Kerbal” this time around! 

On 8/25/2023 at 5:21 AM, Periple said:

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.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t resource gathering planned for after  interstellar?

One of my concerns is that, given how much I’ve played of ksp1, there really isn’t much that ksp2 can provide for me unless it can match the late-game ksp1 experience of setting up mining stations and reusable vehicles for sustainable kerbolar system colonisation. To me, even full ksp1 science mode without ISRU feels pointless, and sandbox interstellar travel probably won’t entertain me for more than a few hours of admiring the new pretty planets and parts.

So we may be waiting a very long time 

Edited August 27, 2023 by joratto

[Alexoff]

5 minutes ago, joratto said:

Remember, Nate wanted this game’s development to be “a little more Kerbal” this time around! 

I remember one of the main phrases of the gameplay trailer - fail harder. Apparently this problem was decided to be a feature. Once for a screenshot of this moment, I received a readonly for two weeks on the forum, I was quite impressed

[Carraux]

13 hours ago, bcink said:

Give. Us. Modding. Ability.

Get over your games' status and your dreams and what you expected and give modding.

You literally have nothing else to lose at this point.

I second that. Release the modding API please.

[Periple]

5 hours ago, joratto said:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t resource gathering planned for after  interstellar?

You're right, I had forgotten, sorry!

3 hours ago, Carraux said:

I second that. Release the modding API please.

The trouble is that at this time the API will be unstable. It will break frequently. It's also a lot of work to document it and then maintain the docs as it changes, which will further slow down development. I don't think they can afford that!

5 hours ago, Lyneira said:

If people cannot expect an early access product to be enjoyable, it follows that potential buyers should buy the product to support its development into its promised state. Otherwise, why is the product even in early access?

There are two reasons for game to be in EA, one for indie titles made by lone developers or very small teams, and another one for games made professionally and backed by publishers.

For the first group, it is about bringing in a trickle of revenue and co-developing the game with the emerging community. 

For the second group, it's about marketing -- drumming up hype, word of mouth, and getting a snowball effect -- and also about gauging interest in the game: how many sales you get at a given price point for a given marketing budget. 

KSP1 was in the first group. KSP2 is in the second. 

From the consumer's point of view, in both cases it's really simple -- you should only buy an EA title if you're interested in following the game's development close up, and you're willing to take the risk that it won't turn out like you hoped. You really shouldn't buy one just because you want to play it early, because most of the time you will be disappointed!

[Meecrob]

31 minutes ago, Periple said:

There are two reasons for game to be in EA, one for indie titles made by lone developers or very small teams, and another one for games made professionally and backed by publishers.

I think this is where the disconnect lies. "Games made professionally and backed by publishers" sounds suspiciously not  like Early Access; in fact, I'd go so far as to say that professional games backed by publishers should be barred from using the EA model.

[Periple]

21 minutes ago, Meecrob said:

I think this is where the disconnect lies. "Games made professionally and backed by publishers" sounds suspiciously not  like Early Access; in fact, I'd go so far as to say that professional games backed by publishers should be barred from using the EA model.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong about it, although it wouldn’t hurt if the two kinds of EA had different names. BG3 was three years in EA and most people were pretty happy with that — both the fans and the studio — and I think the game benefitted from it too!

[Strawberry]

18 hours ago, Lyneira said:

I haven't lost all hope, but this is what I'm concerned by too. I just today decided to fire up KSP2 again to have a go at making a VTOL aircraft. Slapped some fuselages, engines and wings together and so far so good... Until it came time to configure the engines into action groups. The UI for doing it is finicky and often doesn't respond to my clicks the first time, having to click ui elements or dropdown boxes multiple times to get it to respond. 

Honestly my personal theory is that the reason by some that the game has gotten more buggy when that generally isn't true is that the bug team has (rightfully) focused on those mission ruiner bugs to where your mission is ruined a sixth of the time now instead of half. This means that the bugs that remained less touched is all the relatively minor but very annoying bugs, and with the increased playability it makes these bugs even more noticeable. Once patch 1.4 comes out Id really like to do a (probably two) missions done in both patch 1.4 and patch 1 to compare what bugs I run into and all that stuff, I think itd be interesting.

[Alexoff]

1 hour ago, Periple said:

and another one for games made professionally and backed by publishers

And where does the information that the game is made by professionals come from? How many computer games have the creators of KSP2 developed? In advertising films often sounds - from the creators of the famous blockbuster. However, I somehow do not recall such messages from the developers of KSP2.

By the way, indie studios are often led by real professionals who left the big studios for various reasons.

[PDCWolf]

1 hour ago, Periple said:

The trouble is that at this time the API will be unstable. It will break frequently. It's also a lot of work to document it and then maintain the docs as it changes, which will further slow down development. I don't think they can afford that!

1. It'll become both more and less unstable as time goes on.
2. Everything breaks frequently anyways.
3. It's a lot of work now?  Imagine the work it's going to be when it's completed, to the point where it looks like a huge one-off task nobody wants to go through instead of a small update or two every 6+ months. It'll end up just like KSP1s API documentation: non-existent.
4. I dare them to develop the game slower. Speed stopped being a concern to anyone about 3 months ago, they're factually, comparatively, universally and by every metric, painfully slow, so that excuse and ship has sailed.

 

[Meecrob]

5 hours ago, Periple said:

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong about it, although it wouldn’t hurt if the two kinds of EA had different names. BG3 was three years in EA and most people were pretty happy with that — both the fans and the studio — and I think the game benefitted from it too!

That is all well and good...my issue is that billion dollar companies are shifting the cost to us individuals when they can afford it themselves. Games aren't made for gamers anymore, they are made to make shareholders profit. Whether one thinks that is a plus or negative is their own prerogative, but there is a very obvious sentiment from a significant amount of players that games that are made this way tend to be poor quality when compared using metrics such as budget to produce the game vs amount of fun per hour (or in other words, how much grind). I don't want to derail any more. I am just stating why lots of people are sore about the whole EA thing.

[Alexoff]

1 minute ago, Meecrob said:

Games aren't made for gamers anymore, they are made to make shareholders profit.

In theory, one does not contradict the other, rather the opposite - satisfied players bring more money than dissatisfied ones. For some incomprehensible reason, companies began to earn less money than the owners would like, therefore, costs began to decrease and prices began to rise. For example, T2 bought a zinga for loan funds, which means that a lot of money will be needed to service such a loan.
What do we, the players, care about squabbles in large companies? When I see the internal kitchen dismantling in creativity, it breaks my immersion. It was similar, for example, with the expansion series, where, due to the bad behavior of the actor, the authors decided in a very stupid way to kill one of the main characters. And that's it, I no longer see an adventure in space, I see the stupidity of the creators, because it was possible to change the actor. In the game of thrones, for example, Gregor Clegane was played by three actors, Daario Naharis was played by two actors (as fas as I remembered).

[softweir]

5 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

It's a lot of work now?  Imagine the work it's going to be when it's completed, to the point where it looks like a huge one-off task nobody wants

(tl;dr: Sequential development of Modding API and game engine good; concurrent development of Modding API and game engine bad. In my humble but determinedly held and lengthily argued opinion!)

True - but imagine churning out Megabytes of code to support a modding API, then having to review every line of code and rewrite many of them because of a few critical changes to the underlying game engine that occur between first implementation of the API and completion of the game.

Alternatively, imagine having to review hundreds of lines of code in the modding API implementation because one underlying game-engine method had to be deprecated and replaced with a new method. Abstraction and encapsulation only go so far when a game engine is in a state of flux and methods demand additional arguments that can't be hidden from API users, ie modders.

There is a most excellent rule of thumb: don't write code that's going to be thrown away*. Most especially, don't write code if you will need to rewrite it more than once - especially code which is critical to end-user QoL but not critical to implementation of core functionality. Such is the case with a Modding API!

What does make sense is to spend a few hours every week sketching up a preliminary outline of what the Modding API will look like. If it is sufficiently short on detail then it will serve as a decent roadmap for implementation of the API, while at the same time giving the game engine developers something to look at over their shoulders at as they develop their classes and methods. At the least, it will help them hit the ground running when they do start on the Modding API.

My professional coding days are long over and I decided to ignore the modding scene, except as a user who downloads mods. Nevertheless, I was well aware that mods would repeatedly break with every major update. Often, I grant you, this was because of weird little changes in the physics or graphics engines, but it was also due to changes to the modding API. Usually all that was needed was a recompile of a mod, but sometimes a modder would have to spend hours trying to find out where their code was breaking and then how the blazes they needed to rewrite it to bend to KSP1's whims.

My take on this comes from the days long gone when I developed databases and had to rewrite one after my boss replaced our hooky copy of the DB engine with a legit one that was just one minor release more advanced than the previous one. Cue weeks of hair-loss!

* I do hope the decision to change the KSP2 graphics engine half-way through won't prove to be a mistake.

[Periple]

4 hours ago, Meecrob said:

Games aren't made for gamers anymore, they are made to make shareholders profit. Whether one thinks that is a plus or negative is their own prerogative, but there is a very obvious sentiment from a significant amount of players that games that are made this way tend to be poor quality when compared using metrics such as budget to produce the game vs amount of fun per hour (or in other words, how much grind). I don't want to derail any more. I am just stating why lots of people are sore about the whole EA thing.

That’s a whole another discussion! There’s a lot of truth to it too but really mostly in the AAA space. Smaller games are still made more out of passion than the profit motive.  And sometimes the stars align for something like BG3!

In both cases the economic reality is what it is and a game has to bring in enough revenue to pay everybody involved in making it or they won’t be able to make a new one. The industry as a whole is growing fast and there’s a LOT of money going around but the way it’s distributed isn’t optimal for making great games!

Also KSP2 is a AA passion project, not a AAA cash grab (or “just a quick and dirty reskin” cash grab). Whatever the reasons for its troubled launch and slower than expected development, the evil publisher or their shareholders squeezing fans and developers for profit isn’t it.

 

[RocketRockington]

4 hours ago, Periple said:

Also KSP2 is a AA passion project

Agree to disagree.  I see very little true passion in this project.  I see a lot of attempts at making it more mainstream and trying to broaden the appeal (eg make more money) and certainly the release was a cash grab.  And tbh I don't see why you'd believe that either.  T2 paid for the franchise and I don't think it was at all because they loved Kerbal for kerbal.  Instead they saw the oppurtunity to sell a AAA priced product to a large, dedicated community (5million + users) for a a low-AA development price.  Then they contracted another developer - not the originals - to do this updated version.  And I think they lowballed the contract, sincethe original ship date they contracted for was likely the 2020 date (just 2.5 years of dev), and Uber entertainment not exactly having a sterling reputation and being financially strapped due to multiple development failures at that point. 

A few people on the IG team may be passionate about it - or good at convincing people they're passionate about anything they work on in front of the cameras -but that's not the same as passion product where the majority of the team is passionate about it - and even if the original Uber team had been passionate about it - half of them were lost on the T2 takeover and then new people hired in over time.  Also, do you really think a project like KSP would lose its physics and networking engineers if these two core positions were both filled by people who were passionate about it, vs people who were just hired on to do a job?  Two key roles that are very relevant to core KSP2 features.  Apparently both hiring and retention was a serious problem, at least amongst the engineering team, per this comment on reddit by Paul Furio, which doesn't speak to a great deal of passion amongst the engineers at least - or speaks to very significant countervailing forces.  

 

Edited August 28, 2023 by RocketRockington

[Superfluous J]

10 hours ago, Meecrob said:

Games aren't made for gamers anymore

Games weren't made for gamers in the 80s.

Also, games WERE made for gamers in the 80s.

As has already been stated, plenty of games these days are being made for gamers. Some aren't, some are. You need to make sure you reward (financially) those who make games for you and punish (financially) those who don't. Assuming enough people agree with you (and also stop shoveling cash at crap games) things will get better.

But if you take off your cesspool-tinted glasses and look around, video games right now are doing fantastic. Tons of great games have released over the past couple years.

[Alexoff]

The professionalism of the developers of KSP2 is not confirmed by anything. Their passion for the game too, apart from the words of the managers. But how could one expect them to say that they just need money?