The soul of KSP

[Bej Kerman]

2 hours ago, KSK said:

I haven't played KSP2 so I don't know what its overall vibe is

Certainly a lot more consistent in the tone, writing and art style. 

[Bej Kerman]

1 hour ago, Vl3d said:

Squad kerbals talked back and had scientist and astronaut tongue-in-cheek jokes.. Intercept kerbals just want to be your friends and be happy.

Again, you're writing your own personalities for characters that barely had any real personality, and citing that as a difference between KSP 1 and 2.

[Vl3d]

I think this is great:

[KSK]

2 hours ago, Vl3d said:

Play it for a few dozen hours and you will see it's presented as a game that fathers would play with their 6 year old children to get them into science and space. That's a great thing! The problem is that a lot of the writing is also for 6 year olds and the game insists on only triggering addictive dopamine hits with "cute silly feel good vibes" without also having enough grounded astronaut humor edge and spice.

This comes from a new interpretation of what kerbal means - for Squad they were little green animated courageous and sometimes stupid crash-puppets that you put on actual rockets and shoot them up into the unknown... for Intercept they're cute and silly diverse green aliens with emotions and helpful personalities.

Squad kerbals talked back and had scientist and astronaut tongue-in-cheek jokes.. Intercept kerbals just want to be your friends and be happy.

But that's just my opinion. At least for me there's an obvious difference. KSP 2 lacks that "je me sais quoi" that gave the first game so much "chaotic good" charm.

As I said, I haven't played the game so obviously can't speak to the writing quality, but I have to admit that that mostly sounds pretty good to me. I could go with feel good vibes from diverse green aliens with emotions and helpful personalities, and I suspect 'cute and silly' is likely in the eye of the reader.  That's all probably helped by the fact that I never really saw the KSP1 kerbals as stupid crash-puppets (and have probably spent more time writing kerbal headcanon than actually playing the game - see signature file ), but YMMV.

Genuinely curious about the astronaut humor from KSP1 and Squad kerbals talking back with scientist and astronaut tongue-in-cheek jokes though, because that's not what I remember at all.  Again, probably in the eye of the reader, but if you could sling out a couple of examples, I'd be interested in seeing them.

Edited January 3 by KSK

[Bej Kerman]

26 minutes ago, KSK said:

Genuinely curious about the astronaut humor from KSP1 and Squad kerbals talking back with scientist and astronaut tongue-in-cheek jokes though, because that's not what I remember at all.

Because there's barely any writing and proper characterisation, 99% of "KSP 1 had this and that" comes down to the headcanons people came up with. Even in promo material, they just made guttural noises a la Steamboat Willie and most of their character came from pantomime and bog-standard slapstick.

Edited January 3 by Bej Kerman

[Periple]

Jeb, Val, and the rest have literally no writing. They just have two stats and a flag, and all they do is change the way animations trigger. Everything else is headcanon.

[Vl3d]

59 minutes ago, KSK said:

Genuinely curious about the astronaut humor from KSP1 and Squad kerbals talking back with scientist and astronaut tongue-in-cheek jokes though, because that's not what I remember at all.  Again, probably in the eye of the reader, but if you could sling out a couple of examples, I'd be interested in seeing them.

And that's without going into text for later missions, for R&D nodes and for parts. There are also all the funny easter eggs with cultural references - like the toilet, the car, the crashed saucer etc. even the Squad logo military gorilla face monoliths (which I hate).
Here's more:

Jokes about AI takeover:

Joke about nuclear war:

And of course there are jokes about crashing:







And of course there are all the official animations which have a lot of gutsy humor and awkwardness:

Spoiler

 

The snacks references originate from the contraband sandwich on Gemini III, the golf ball experiment actually happened on the Moon... KSP 1 is a really funny game for me with a lot of references to astronaut pranks and dangerous situations.. Squad actually had the courage to do something interesting with the game, they made the kerbals awkward go-doers by design. Unfortunately KSP 2 is going out of its way to be a "cute, silly, colorful" toy for children with a lot of it's awkwardness and humor toned way down. If you think this is all in my head and you can't understand the feeling I'm describing.. so be it.

KSP 2 does not have enough edge.

 

Edited January 3 by Vl3d

[Periple]

I don’t see what’s edgy, adult, or sophisticated about any of that. It’s just goofy jokes. Suits the game well but then so does the KSP2 writing. The only remotely edgy thing about KSP that I can think of is WvK and with him I think that’s accidental: it probably didn’t occur to HarvesteR that there’s another side to his reputation than the Apollo program.

[Vl3d]

Game needs more spice like this great material:

Spoiler

 

Edited January 3 by Vl3d

[hatterson]

I would very much expect more stuff like that as the game matures. It's version 0.2 of early access. Guys like Just Jim do great work, but understandably right now the focus of development isn't going to be having witty banter sprinkled all through the game, it's going to be on providing something that works.

As new released come, I'd be shocked if we didn't see more of that type of stuff added in mission briefs, science tooltips, tech nodes, etc.

[Bej Kerman]

48 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

KSP 2 has this attitude as well.

49 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

Jokes about AI takeover:

Joke about nuclear war:

And of course there are jokes about crashing:

These are clichés I see all the time in larger sci-fi circles.

49 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

And of course there are all the official animations which have a lot of gutsy humor and awkwardness:

The pantomime and bog-standard slapstick?

50 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

Squad actually had the courage to do something interesting with the game, they made the kerbals awkward go-doers by design.

I wouldn't call the jokes Squad came up with clever, and that same "awkward go-doer" attitude can be seen in KSP 2 as well - my favourite probably being the part description for the reactor.

[KSK]

@Vl3d Cheers for the examples.

Definitely an 'eye of the reader' situation here, I think. To me, those examples were mostly callbacks to the old 'dumb kerbals' (OK, lets be nice about this  'cheerfully haphazard kerbals with ramshackle technology') and 'parts lying by the side of the road' memes from the early versions of the game, with a sprinkling of pop-culture references in there too. And I think even those memes largely came from the playerbase, or from the "It's hardly rocket science" comics put out by one of the early devs (apologies - I don't recall their name).

If you see them differently, that's cool, but they weren't especially edgy or gutsy to me.

[Vl3d]

10 minutes ago, KSK said:

they weren't especially edgy or gutsy to me

Try KSP 2 and you'll see what I mean..

[Bej Kerman]

1 minute ago, Vl3d said:

Try KSP 2 and you'll see what I mean..

I have and I can back KSK up on their opinion here. Only difference between KSP 1 and 2 is that everything is being written with an actual style in mind rather than "what does the fanbase find funny this month?".

[Wheehaw Kerman]

2 hours ago, Periple said:

Jeb, Val, and the rest have literally no writing. They just have two stats and a flag, and all they do is change the way animations trigger. Everything else is headcanon.

And yet some of that headcanon is epic.  Remember Brotoro?

I’ve come up with a solution to Kerbonauts showing up at the Training Center with non-regulation, The Right Stuff-lacking haircuts.  This may change if parts, fuel, and recruitment costs get added to the game, but as of today I’m just assigning those Kerbs to test pilot and one way mission duties.  
#noreverts

[Bej Kerman]

55 minutes ago, Wheehaw Kerman said:

And yet some of that headcanon is epic.  Remember Brotoro?

Second only to Graggle Kerman

[Wheehaw Kerman]

11 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Second only to Graggle Kerman

Brotoro’s Long Term Laythe series made me realize just what the game was capable of, taught me all sorts of useful things, and also proved that I had nowhere near his patience.  I don’t remember Graggle, though?

Edited January 3 by Wheehaw Kerman

[asmi]

On 12/21/2023 at 11:38 AM, Vl3d said:

It was not the wobble of the rockets that made KSP special, it was the comedy of spending hours improvising with parts that look like they were found in the trash bin and designing a craft, saying "ok, I'm done, I'll try it like this" and then having it mess up your SAS and you stressing over controlling it on ascent because you built the damn thing too tall.

That was only comedy for the first couple of times, beyond that is was just annoyance. Definitely not miss that crap.

[Bej Kerman]

On 1/3/2024 at 10:24 PM, asmi said:

On 12/21/2023 at 4:38 PM, Vl3d said:

It was not the wobble of the rockets that made KSP special, it was the comedy of spending hours improvising with parts that look like they were found in the trash bin and designing a craft, saying "ok, I'm done, I'll try it like this" and then having it mess up your SAS and you stressing over controlling it on ascent because you built the damn thing too tall.

That was only comedy for the first couple of times, beyond that is was just annoyance. Definitely not miss that crap.

Remember when Doctor Who was being ran by Steven Moffat and everything sucked, but then Chris Chibnall happened and everyone was ready to forgive Moffat at the drop of a coin because "it was the good old days"? It seems regardless of TV show or game, peoples' critical thinking completely disappears when a new thing shows up and suddenly criticism of the old stuff becomes a taboo. Vl3d literally uses expletives related closely to frustration when describing the "cute, quirky charm" of KSP 1's problematic physics. Nobody misses wobbly rockets and I guarantee you that if they removed the stabilization options For Science gave us, we'd see a massive drop in players, because frankly nobody is playing KSP 2 to relive the stupid bad "but it's quirky" qualities of KSP 1.

Sorry, but I've seen this discussion happen in too many fandoms and I just want to make everything clear, X doesn't become good because you think something's missing from Y. 

[Vl3d]

26 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Vl3d literally uses expletives related closely to frustration when describing the "cute, quirky charm" of KSP 1's problematic physics.

While even in your quote I literally said:

On 12/21/2023 at 6:38 PM, Vl3d said:

It was not the wobble of the rockets that made KSP special

But it's ok, I will clarify my point: it was not the "wobbly rockets" that gave KSP 1 its "quirky charm", it was the engineering comedy of dealing with the consequences of building a rocket too tall.

26 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

nobody is playing KSP 2 to relive the stupid bad "but it's quirky" qualities of KSP 1

Exactly my point - I want to play KSP 2 to have a great semi-realistic engineering experience in a semi-realistic physics simulator with some spicy astronaut humor mixed it. I don't play it because it's "cute and quirky", I want to play it because it penalizes bad designs in comedic ways with interesting failure modes. That's what I communicated - the wobble is not kerbal, but having a laugh while failing because of bad engineering ..is.

Edited January 5 by Vl3d