Why play (suggestions)

[kfsone]

The missions and storyline in KSP2 definitely give it a little something to latch on to as you work thru the early game, but once you've done Minmus that source of motivation dries up. Pre-release: got it, but I can't highlight the strengths of the missions/story up to that point if I don't observe the as-is is stony cold dead at that point.

What I specifically want to point out are three major weaknesses I see recreated from KSP1 in KSP2 as it exists now:

1- Auto-fear: Resistance to adding rails for fear of "spoiling the sim", (e.g 'auto' things, docking pilots, etc),
2- Too flimsy of a tech tree,
3- Inherent reward for risk only,

 

Auto-fear:

Once you've returned from Minmus and are eyeing the next planet, there are two reasons you might fire up KSP and and launch a rocket. 1/ To start a journey; Duna, Eve maybe, Jool? 2/ For the sake of launching a rocket and experimenting.

Rewind a second. "To start a journey"? Yep - you were with me, too. But that's not what the game is going to let you do. The game is going to make you go through all the same rookie slog involved in getting your vehicle to orbit. While that's not the worst thing, if KSP2 wants to be more than just a launch sim, it needs to break the vice-like grip of the fear of automation. Why do we allow you to start with a fully loaded vehicle, why don't we make you wait for tanking? Why doesn't the game ship with bad weather so you might have to wait until tuesday next week (real time) to launch your rocket?

I'm not proposing that launch needs to be skippable, but by the time you're ready to start heading to Duna/Eve, you ought to be able to play passenger on your kerbin launches.

In MMO terms, KSP2 forces you to start every level by walking back to Stormwind/Orgrimmar, doing kill-10-rat quests for all the vendors/random npcs, before finally working your way up to a single quest you will now be able to get 1-2 quests for the zone you now have to walk back to.

If I'm in the mood for flying each and every one of my launches to assemble my manned trip to Jool, I can do that. Having an autopilot doesn't prevent me doing it, but it does reward me for my work so far by allowing me to spend more time on the next part of the gameplay. Hell, sometimes I want an auto-feature so I can just *watch* kerbal space program.

 

Flimsy-Tree:

One of the purposes of tech-trees is player-teaching. "Try this engine", "you've tried a solid engine, now try a liquid engine", "and here's a parachute".

KSPs tech tree is one of the worst in the industry. Near random gluts of stuff, sometimes with no obvious relation. And the way they're mixed makes it real hard to forge your own path, and the jumps in sc-cost tends to lead people to completion-spend. Which means they never experiment with those science-spends.

There need to be way more nodes, more layers and more options. Infact, maybe we, as players, don't need to see the tree at all. You could visualize various different vehicles and highlight the parts that scientists are currently "experimenting" with as a way of showing what's currently available to research.

IMHO almost every single upgrade - except variants - should be individually selectable.

But won't that require a lot more science? Yes, and that leads into the 3rd item

 

What's the pay off?

Excerpt from a 90s TV interview: 
Q. "But what do we get from going to space?"
A. "Surviving in space challenges scientists and engineers in ways that our safe environment down here doesn.t It was NASA scientists that invented the microwave ovens and cellular telephones!"

KSP struggles with a lack of things to do - other than fly rockets, which is going to be a game killer when you want people to build bases. But doing things *can* be inherent - KSP already relies on that fact heavily, it just doesn't leverage it.

Watching stuff explode or crash is fun, but it's also punitive: you get nothing for it. KSP ought to reward failure to properly integrate it as part of gameplay.

As long as parts of crashed vehicles are recoverable - and you could build around that - they could produce science, for instance. You should be able to get 1 science point from every single component in the game by launching a launch-clamp holding one and dropping it from > 100ft. "crash tolerance". Another point for burning one up in every atmosphere? How about some science for overheating and destroying engines? Blowing up a tank with a badly placed separatron? 

Look at this way:

Player has two vehicles in orbit for their first attempt at docking. The game autosaves, and they begin docking, but they're not watching their mp and when they finally get an accidental roll under control they realize they're out of fuel and the two vehicles are going to crash at unsurvivable speed.

Does the player:

a) let the vessels crash, return to VAB and launch 2 more ships?

b) hit esc and avoid the annoying mistake?

Why would anyone select a? Buuuuut... If science "experiences" paid off, well, now that might be some justification to roll with the occasional punch.

 

 

[gluckez]

3 hours ago, kfsone said:

Rewind a second. "To start a journey"? Yep - you were with me, too. But that's not what the game is going to let you do. The game is going to make you go through all the same rookie slog involved in getting your vehicle to orbit. While that's not the worst thing, if KSP2 wants to be more than just a launch sim, it needs to break the vice-like grip of the fear of automation. Why do we allow you to start with a fully loaded vehicle, why don't we make you wait for tanking? Why doesn't the game ship with bad weather so you might have to wait until tuesday next week (real time) to launch your rocket?

isn't that the point of the game? You build your rocket, and you account for the types of engine, fuel, the total weight, the different stages. You plan everything in advance, based on the kind of mission you want to do. if the game is just going to put you into an orbit, why bother adding the first 2 stages, and why bother caring about drag? being able to put a massive, fully fueled lander in orbit, docking it with an interplanetary stage that you also launch from the surface is part of what makes the mission fun for me. 
You can use the cheat menu if you want to cheat your vessel into an orbit I guess, but the last thing I would want is that the game plays itself for me...

[Presto200]

I love this post let me give my opinions:

I disagree with your first point of "auto-fear" I think that the beauty of the game is getting to learn how to launch rockets and get good at the process. I like that they avoid automating parts of the game because if you automate something people will default to it and not learn the actual game. I can see how you may find that tedious however, luckily for players like you there will be orbital colonies that you can launch from already in orbit! This means once you can set one of these space stations up after the colonies update you wont have to worry about launching from Kerbin again unless you want to. 

 

I do agree that the tech tree should be a subject that the developers are always looking over and listening to the community about. I myself haven't really sat down and thought about what I think about the tech tree but I have seen a couple posts here bringing it up. They should make a thread specifically for tech tree improvement suggestions and they should take those suggestions heavily into consideration.

 

Finally I love love love the idea of in game rewards for "failure" because they always say they see the game loop as "design - launch - fail/learn - redesign" and I agree this is a great loop but having in game reward like science (even if it is just 1 per component per failure type) makes the whole process much less frustrating and more rewarding! I think that is a great idea! It does also keep you from just quicksaving and making sure all your launches in the "in game timeline" are perfect. This is one of the best ideas I've heard for new gameplay!

[kfsone]

15 hours ago, gluckez said:

isn't that the point of the game? You build your rocket, and you account for the types of engine, fuel, the total weight, the different stages. You plan everything in advance, based on the kind of mission you want to do. if the game is just going to put you into an orbit, why bother adding the first 2 stages, and why bother caring about drag? being able to put a massive, fully fueled lander in orbit, docking it with an interplanetary stage that you also launch from the surface is part of what makes the mission fun for me. 
You can use the cheat menu if you want to cheat your vessel into an orbit I guess, but the last thing I would want is that the game plays itself for me...

"plan everything in advance" - is exactly my point.

Perhaps, for you, KSP is a game of jenga, where you just keep repeating the same basic gameplay over and over but aiming for a taller tower.

For the majority of players, that's called "grind". I'm not proposing a "skip to launch" feature, modders can provide that. Rather, I'm proposing some eventual lenience to allow players to earn their way to focusing less on the reach-kerbin-orbit steps of the game. 

As for the flip-side of your argument, if all KSP2 is supposed to be is a shinier version of KSP1, it'll never make it to release. Everything I've read suggests that KSP2 is supposed to be extending game play (adding bases, interstellar, etc) and very, very, very few of the potential audience that could fuel a long healthy life for this product will get that far if there is no sense of "progress", and all because some don't want an assisted-launch option.

[kfsone]

11 hours ago, Presto200 said:

I disagree with your first point of "auto-fear" I think that the beauty of the game is getting to learn how to launch rockets and get good at the process. I like that they avoid automating parts of the game because if you automate something people will default to it and not learn the actual game. I can see how you may find that tedious however, luckily for players like you there will be orbital colonies that you can launch from already in orbit! This means once you can set one of these space stations up after the colonies update you wont have to worry about launching from Kerbin again unless you want to. 

Again, not talking about "magic me to orbit" - but I am choosing to be a little evocative in the hopes some will think about their own carte-blanche aversion to any kind of orbit assist.

I used to work for an MMO called WWII Online, half-scale map of Europe with realistic guns/tanks/planes/yadda. When it launched, you could spawn at any friendly forward base alone the front line, and drive, ride, or walk, towards the nearest "enemy" town. The dream come true. Do you know how fun it is to talk 15km in a video game with birds tweeting in the distance, only to find an empty, poorly modelled village? Or to crawl thru ditches towards one for 2 hours only to have your screen go black inexplicably, because the bullet reaches you before the sound of the shot. Well, that's one of the reasons not many people have heard of the game (even tho it is *still* running, lol).

One of the biggest cluster-fs in the game was finally realizing the melding of the naval aspect of the game and the land aspect: cargo ships. But, not wanting to break the spirit of the simulation, every troop and vehicle that the ship was going to carry had to be loaded onto the ship. That is:
1. Spawn the ship,
2. Convince people they want to ride a freighter to the battle happening _right now_ in Kaalmthout or Antwerp or somewhere,
3. Sail the ship into harbor and line it up against the dock,
4. Raise the crane and turn it out over the side of the ship,
5. Get a tank/atg/truck to drive in under the crane,
6. Lower the crane, find the hitching point, get the vehicle hitched,
7. Raise the crane, carefully, swing it over the hatch,
8. Gently lower the vehicle without damaging it and place it onto the cargo bay,
9. Unhitch the vehicle without dropping it,
10. Have the vehicle find the parking spot and "mount" the ship,
11. Repeat,
12. Sail a WWII freighter vessel across a half-scale English channel, while the players stay connected to their in-game troopers/vehicles,
13. Hope the fight remains at a coastal town you can reach during the *2 hours sailing time*,
14. Try not to get bombed/strafed/sunk by enemy air patrols who have a reasonably good sense of where freighters would be launching from,
15. Try to reach a piece of coastline sufficiently far away from the fight that you won't get shelled/bombed before you can unload,
16. The freighter didn't have a cargo ramp, so ... find a spot where you can use the crane to unload vehicles without dropping them into the water. Use the life boats to lower troopers down and hope you're not too far out...
17. Despawn, because f**k sailing back.
18. Never do this again after all the complaints you get from people who disco'd, sank, drowned, or who didn't get to the target until after it had been captured and the frontline moved away.

It absolutely made sense that there be a player-investment in the loading of the vehicle, so that it wasn't just a magic firehose-for-one whereby if one player can get a boat into position X they could spawn an entire army on the enemy; but the vice-like grip of the auto-fear meant that there was no willingness by certain team members to even consider ideas where any part of that process wasn't entirely manual/humanized. My concept was for to add supply trucks/engineers who could execute sorties to the docked ship, the ship would operate its crane to take loads onboard, and then when it reached the opposite end it would be able to provide/deploy an amount of resources corresponding to the amount of effort that went into loading.

Because on the rare occasion when people were insane enough to mount actual coastal assaults, almost invariably the outcome was that the reduction in number of combatants *at* the fight ended up killing the fight. You might be willing to spend 2.5 hours boarding a ship and sailing to 50km away from your planned destination, but will the enemy wait there or despawn and go someplace else?

What I'm aspiring to here for KSP2 is that it be possible in some game modes to earn additional launch assistance so that you can *feel* you are moving your focus onto the next stage of gameplay. And yes, some people will hit launch and then timewarp. But what of it? How does that affect you? I dunno about you but when I watch Matt Lowne videos I'm always glad he doesn't show the whole thing in real time?

I mean: tell me how much of *this* video you actually watch, and how much you think anyone else would watch? 

 

 

[Fizzlebop Smith]

While understand the tedium of repeated launches there is definitely a learning curve in launching a minmus vessel VS a moho capture.

 

Advanced interstellar travels, require increasingly complex & difficult (to orbit) vessels.

Whether you take a multi stage orbital assembly.. or singular monsterous craft.

I agree with some of the alternative solutions VS full automation to launch.

I personally like the way mechjeb progressively requires unlocks and think the degree of automation should be ties to advancing tech unlocks. Similarly to RL. 

(Some of the Mechjeb features I do not use bc i have not mastered the skill. Perhaps some type skill Assessment in game?) 

This is a personal preference, but I feel that launching the craft is too integral of an aspect to gloss over. 

While tedious it is far far less time intensive than the analogous examples from the other project.

I like a tech themed approach over something like a counter that allows automation across the board.

As in all things, there needs to be a balance struck.

Like all things I post. Just my 2 cents.

 

Edited March 30 by Fizzlebop Smith

[Icegrx]

It sounds like you need to get out of your comfort zone and attempt interplanetary missions now.

[kfsone]

2 hours ago, Icegrx said:

It sounds like you need to get out of your comfort zone and attempt interplanetary missions now.

I wonder what inspired you to make such an epiderp?

3 hours ago, Fizzlebop Smith said:

While understand the tedium of repeated launches there is definitely a learning curve in launching a minmus vessel VS a moho capture.

 

Advanced interstellar travels, require increasingly complex & difficult (to orbit) vessels.

Whether you take a multi stage orbital assembly.. or singular monsterous craft.

I agree with some of the alternative solutions VS full automation to launch.

I personally like the way mechjeb progressively requires unlocks and think the degree of automation should be ties to advancing tech unlocks. Similarly to RL. 

(Some of the Mechjeb features I do not use bc i have not mastered the skill. Perhaps some type skill Assessment in game?) 

This is a personal preference, but I feel that launching the craft is too integral of an aspect to gloss over. 

While tedious it is far far less time intensive than the analogous examples from the other project.

I like a tech themed approach over something like a counter that allows automation across the board.

As in all things, there needs to be a balance struck.

Like all things I post. Just my 2 cents.

Amen - but you can't make concessions by starting from a position of refusal to change. And there are people in this community who will burn their KSP2 license if/when they add a built-in autopilot of any kind. 

Again, launch is going to be just the start of the journey, and I think it's entirely reasonable that there be the ability for some folks to enjoy the exploration and base building aspects without having to always demonstrate how unskilled they are at takeoffs.

Anyone who argues that some kind of storylined-earnable partial-auto-pilot is going to make them less wanting to play or injures them more somehow than say sandbox mode, is basically *just* being a turnip.

Edited March 30 by kfsone

[mattihase]

With the promised orbital colonies and supply routes stuff coming up, one might say that getting to a point where you don't have to start every mission on the pad is part of the game's intended progression, and something to be earned via the gameplay investment of setting up that stuff. At least when we get to that point on the roadmap.

Edited March 30 by mattihase

[gluckez]

3 hours ago, mattihase said:

With the promised orbital colonies and supply routes stuff coming up, one might say that getting to a point where you don't have to start every mission on the pad is part of the game's intended progression, and something to be earned via the gameplay investment of setting up that stuff. At least when we get to that point on the roadmap.

I think this is indeed what @kfsone is looking for. I do still enjoy the cinematics of orbiting close to a planet or moon with the sun on the horizon when I do it in game though. The colonies update will eventually lead to the things you are looking for. You can set up automated routes to collect resources, and be able to lift off from your colonies, or start from the OAB. With the addition of the orbital assembly building, you'll probably have the ability to just build your vessel in space, and start from there, or load an already built one. This way you wouldn't have to start from the surface.
You could already build some stuff that make you feel you've reached the next stage. I currently have an interplanetary transfer stage docked to my space station, waiting for an Eve lander that can carry 10 kerbals, but unfortunately, I'm not there yet. When I need to refuel it, I just send up one refueling rocket, and turn on infinite propellant while I refuel it, because I'm too lazy to do it several times even though I know I could.

[kfsone]

A lot of folks will react to the 'a' word with instant cringe/fear - precisely because if you take away launch, there's not much left to do in KSP1, you've eliminated what the game originally really was (a rocket-flight simulator). That's the fear but sometimes you have to assess the rationale behind any given fear, and the sensible-fear-of-auto in KSP1 is because it takes purpose out of the product.

Or does it? One of the responses so far was "you can just use the debug menu to put your vehicle into orbit".  That's not the objection of someone with a valid argument against some kind of tech-tree based launch-assist capability. That sounds like my own inner objections to hearing others discuss auto features, which came from the way mechjeb seemed to be at fault for ruining my original ksp1 experience way back.

I gradually became dependent on mechjeb for more and more of the steps I felt I had mastered and then I finished building my first duna base only to watch it thrown off the surface and eventually crash into the sun when the game unpacked it as I was landing my first kerbals.

The tedium that then resulted wasn't mechjeb's fault as much as it felt like it at the time. Mechjeb had allowed me to find entertainment/fun in the parts of the game - parts I hadn't otherwise played during the earlier parts of my first play thru (base building, resupply, etc) - without having to invest all of the end-to-end time it would otherwise have taken.  Instead I'd gotten my fill of flying launches, of trying to min/max rendezvous' and docking, so I had no interest in taking those roles back out of mj's hands. From reading posts and blogs and watching yt vids, I suspect that's the actual truth for many other post-mj kspers.

Again, I'm not asking for a KSP2 built-in mechjeb. I'm advocating against approaching the matter in KSP2 as it if were KSP1, but advised by KSP1 without the literal fear it introduces in some. Frankly, I'm afraid that KSP2's base building is going to suck and die horribly, because there's no hook(*) for it, and all signs so far are that the engine won't be any better at keeping a billion ton mass stationary on the surface of a planet than KSP1 was. (*evidence)

 

(*hook initially the hook for base building will be going further; but if bases are unreliable and unfun they'll be the sim-equivalent of that one gas station under the overpass with the rank sewage stink and the creepy pedo clerk that sometimes has the cheapest gas prices in town but bumps the price by $2/gallon the moment word gets out, so you do everything you can to avoid going there)

(*evidence: jettison liquid fuel tank+engine during launch so that they impact and explode just as you cross the 2km range from pad, and you'll see the particles/sprites of the explosion cloud appear above you - if you get the timing perfect the icon for the debris will end up stuck above you until you restart the game; this existed in ksp1 you'd most commonly see it as little explosion sprites/puffs appearing ahead of the vehicle during launch. It's caused by an engine feature designed to deal with limitations of the way floating point math in cpus works that a lot of engineers mistakenly think is linear and only a problem at scale, but is a scale-of-intervals problem so, 3.1 - 0.7 + 0.1 != 3.1: https://gcc.godbolt.org/z/KqTjoEdxv and yeah that difference is small, and programmers account for this through a special number called 'epsilon' which is the smallest possible number a computer's float values can represent, but the 'extra' amount we gained here is actually 2x epsilon https://gcc.godbolt.org/z/PdP8h4hKf; and the ratio being a mere off-by-1 isn't because we're using small numbers, which programmers tend to be blissfully ignorant of that because the extra digits usually get trimmed away when the numbers are displayed. You can break all kinds of mathematically correct algorithms with inputs like 0.1 + 0.2:  https://gcc.godbolt.org/z/YjPE8nsn7 . how is that evidence? it's the same factor that suddenly injects massive impulses of force into vehicles/bases that should be perfectly stationary and then nukes them with scale at an origin-centering boundary)

Edited March 31 by kfsone
language clarification

[Lowi_Sace]

Colonies could really help with automatization. It probably start by setting up transport routes for having an always fueled depot were you refuel your ships when you are in low kerbin orbit to later assemble (almost) all of your ships in orbit or low orbit bodies.

The thing I wonder about, how do the parts get to orbital stations and colonies? Dou you have to assemble them all on location (with raw recources) or fly the manually there? Or maybe an entirely different approach

One approach for automatization which I find cool is that you develop a rocket that can launch stuff for you on background. That would work like this: design a rocked (with fairing for atmosphere bodies), prove you can fly it (with certain mass) to an orbital (or ground) colony and then can just select what you want to launch as long as long as it fits within your mass and fairing size restriction. This would add a great puzzle of how to efficiently divide parts over rockets to get them to orbit and assemble your ship in orbit without having to fly everything by hand (not to much repeating). This system could be also cool for a career mode, were you on background launch stuff for customers (instead of launching all costumer satellites by hand as in KSP1)

[mattihase]

On 3/30/2024 at 8:38 PM, kfsone said:

all signs so far are that the engine won't be any better at keeping a billion ton mass stationary on the surface of a planet than KSP1 was.

I thought ground colonies were going to be a type of semi-static surface feature, not vessels (hence the change of the editor's name from vehicle assembly building to object assembly vehicle). I could absolutely have been reading that wrong but as a dev, and going off how ground colonies have been depicted in promo material so far, and of course the reasons you gave, and the fact they're touted as a feature instead of something identical to making a ground base in KSP 1, it seems to me that it's implausible that they'll be physics objects in the same way vessels are.

[Icegrx]

I play to do things like this…

And this 

 

Edited April 4 by Icegrx

[BechMeister]

Thx @Icegrx for the mention 

I have not read the entire thread... gut I get the gist of it. I think you need to remember that this is mostly an sandbox game - which means you get out of it what you put into it... It gives you tools, but you need to make the content.

If you ask me the game is "too easy" in its mechanics around CommNet, and how long a kerbal can survive without food etc. It makes my game a lot more compelling by imagine that i cannot send rovers to distant planets without a relay network of satelites - and I need to have some sort of habitat on another planet. Since it can take months if not years before the next optimal window arrives.

I dont like to make huge rockets and just launch it all in one go - to me the design challenge of getting things into space, assembling it and shipping it is what keeps it interesting.. and finding synergy between designs. As in.. create vehicle standards etc.

I need to put on to me design constraints before its fun. Fx. I always try design my vehicles with some degree of re-usability. Its a good challenge. I also never use a nuclear engine without a nuclear power plant on my craft etc. 

If I could have it my way.. KSP2 would have a hardcore mode, where you could only see the other bodies as they look through a telescope on Kerbin.. and you would need to build space telescopes and send probes to the other planets to "unlock" their features.. kind of like a fog of war mechanics in RTS games.

I would want Kerbin to have Communication stations scattered around the planet - meaning that you would have signal black outs for probes until you've made a CommSat network. And that you would need to upgrade that network as you go. 

But I digress... Imo - to keep the sandbox fun, give yourself some design constraints, build infrastructure and design missions through that scope.

[Lowi_Sace]

4 hours ago, BechMeister said:

If I could have it my way.. KSP2 would have a hardcore mode, where you could only see the other bodies as they look through a telescope on Kerbin.. and you would need to build space telescopes and send probes to the other planets to "unlock" their features.. kind of like a fog of war mechanics in RTS games.

Would indeed be cool. Having a hardcore mode with some more challanging gameplay as launch restrictions kerbin (maybe also upgrade KFC),  life suport, cummuniction network etc. Things that push players to make some efficient and somewhat realistic (not one kerbal in a command pot to jool) for there misisons

[Flush Foot]

1 hour ago, Lowi_Sace said:

maybe also upgrade KFC

So… secret recipe now has 12 herbs and spices?

[Scarecrow71]

To answer the question posited in the title:  I am currently not playing KSP2.  To me, there simply isn't a reason to play the game until colonies drops.

When FS! dropped, I created a new career game and went through the story (and most of the side) missions.  The game got me to do something I had never done in KSP1 before - fly to Jool.  And not only that, but I landed on both Pol and Tylo.  And as I was flying to Tylo for that mission, I was thinking to myself "This is so cool; I've never done this before; the sequel is going to push me into doing new stuff".  And then I landed - or, rather, lithobraked - on Tylo and drove the rover to the monument...and the game was pretty much over.  No story missions after that.  Just a big "Well, good job for doing that" and some science points.  Nothing else to do at this point in the game other than land 10 Kerbals on Eve and return them to Kerbin.  And I am just flabbergasted over there being nothing left to do.

I am one of the few people that actually like the contract system in KSP1.  I don't care about funds or even the science points because, quite frankly, after you hit mid-career, both of those become nearly pointless.  You can farm for all the science points in every biome, and simply a tourist contract or two and you've got enough cash to build anything you want.  But the reason I like the contract system is because it gives me something to do.  Some goal to achieve.  Some planet to fly to for some reason.  Rescue this guy from LKO, or retrieve that part from the Mun, or land on Vall.  Help a scientist do this experiment in this biome on this rock.  Capture this asteroid.  Build a station.  The contract system continually generates things to do in the game.  And if you download one of the contract packs, or if you do RSS/KSRSS, you have a nearly inexhaustible supply of contracts that will pop up.  Heck, with KSRSS (I can't speak for RSS here), you get a logical progression of contracts to simply explore and land on nearly every celestial body alone.

So this is why I'm not currently playing, and why I'm waiting until after 0.3 (Colonies) comes out.  I'm hoping for more story missions, and more side missions.  I need stuff to do other than think to myself "I gotta come up with a reason to be here...I'll go fly to this rock for no other reason than because I can".  That's the most difficult thing for me in KSP2 - no direction.  I know, I'm not the prototypical KSP player here.  I am aware that there is a huge portion of the community that doesn't care for what KSP1's contract system turned out to be.  But to me, it's a reason to play.  It gives me focus; makes me stronger.  I mean, wrong quote there.  But you get the idea.  I like having purpose and direction, and KSP1's contract system does that.  Until KSP2 has something even remotely similar to give playability/replayability a shot, I'll just shelve it.

Edited April 5 by Scarecrow71

[Presto200]

30 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

To answer the question posited in the title:  I am currently not playing KSP2.  To me, there simply isn't a reason to play the game until colonies drops.

When FS! dropped, I created a new career game and went through the story (and most of the side) missions.  The game got me to do something I had never done in KSP1 before - fly to Jool.  And not only that, but I landed on both Pol and Tylo.  And as I was flying to Tylo for that mission, I was thinking to myself "This is so cool; I've never done this before; the sequel is going to push me into doing new stuff".  And then I landed - or, rather, lithobraked - on Tylo and drove the rover to the monument...and the game was pretty much over.  No story missions after that.  Just a big "Well, good job for doing that" and some science points.  Nothing else to do at this point in the game other than land 10 Kerbals on Eve and return them to Kerbin.  And I am just flabbergasted over there being nothing left to do.

I am one of the few people that actually like the contract system in KSP1.  I don't care about funds or even the science points because, quite frankly, after you hit mid-career, both of those become nearly pointless.  You can farm for all the science points in every biome, and simply a tourist contract or two and you've got enough cash to build anything you want.  But the reason I like the contract system is because it gives me something to do.  Some goal to achieve.  Some planet to fly to for some reason.  Rescue this guy from LKO, or retrieve that part from the Mun, or land on Vall.  Help a scientist do this experiment in this biome on this rock.  Capture this asteroid.  Build a station.  The contract system continually generates things to do in the game.  And if you download one of the contract packs, or if you do RSS/KSRSS, you have a nearly exhaustible supply of contracts that will pop up.  Heck, with KSRSS (I can't speak for RSS here), you get a logical progression of contracts to simply explore and land on nearly every celestial body alone.

So this is why I'm not currently playing, and why I'm waiting until after 0.3 (Colonies) comes out.  I'm hoping for more story missions, and more side missions.  I need stuff to do other than think to myself "I gotta come up with a reason to be here...I'll go fly to this rock for no other reason than because I can".  That's the most difficult thing for me in KSP2 - no direction.  I know, I'm not the prototypical KSP player here.  I am aware that there is a huge portion of the community that doesn't care for what KSP1's contract system turned out to be.  But to me, it's a reason to play.  It gives me focus; makes me stronger.  I mean, wrong quote there.  But you get the idea.  I like having purpose and direction, and KSP1's contract system does that.  Until KSP2 has something even remotely similar to give playability/replayability a shot, I'll just shelve it.

I like this explanation, I would enjoy some procedurally-generated missions in the game also to give the space agency purpose after the story. I think one of the issues with KSP2 missions is that you get side missions only once you complete main story missions (if I'm remembering that correctly), this makes there be a feel that those missions are going to stop coming even before you complete the main story mission. I think  better system for this might be to have the player do the game like this until the Mun Arch, but after that have the director tell you "Wow after that feat our space agency got so big we're getting requests from all over" and then have it so there are always 5-or-so side missions in the mission control as well as the main missions. This would keep players from feeling like each mission is just closer to running out of things to do and it would make them always look forward to the next thing. and then these missions could go on forever after the main story. Thoughts?

[Flush Foot]

26 minutes ago, Presto200 said:

until the Mun Arch, but after that have the director tell you "Wow after that feat our space agency got so big we're getting requests from all over"

I might move the milestone back 1-2 bodies, but otherwise I agree! Maybe the Minmus-landing mission could be that point where everyone reaches out to KASA, or perhaps it could be landing on Duna.

[Presto200]

1 hour ago, Flush Foot said:

I might move the milestone back 1-2 bodies, but otherwise I agree! Maybe the Minmus-landing mission could be that point where everyone reaches out to KASA, or perhaps it could be landing on Duna.

That's true, the point of the new mission system is to encourage interplanetary travel. Good Point!

[Scarecrow71]

On 3/28/2024 at 11:33 PM, kfsone said:

Flimsy-Tree:

One of the purposes of tech-trees is player-teaching. "Try this engine", "you've tried a solid engine, now try a liquid engine", "and here's a parachute".

KSPs tech tree is one of the worst in the industry. Near random gluts of stuff, sometimes with no obvious relation. And the way they're mixed makes it real hard to forge your own path, and the jumps in sc-cost tends to lead people to completion-spend. Which means they never experiment with those science-spends.

There need to be way more nodes, more layers and more options. Infact, maybe we, as players, don't need to see the tree at all. You could visualize various different vehicles and highlight the parts that scientists are currently "experimenting" with as a way of showing what's currently available to research.

IMHO almost every single upgrade - except variants - should be individually selectable.

But won't that require a lot more science?

The developers need to take a serious look at the Community Tech Tree and the Unkerballed mod from KSP1.  Heck, Nertea helped design both of those.  When I started playing KSP1, I used the stock tech tree, and I realized even in my space-faring infancy that the tree wasn't all it could be.  Then I started using mods, and the day I downloaded Unkerballed was probably the happiest day of my KSP career.  It gave a reason to have sounding rockets.  It put probes before manned missions.  It all but forced you to plan out missions and go through some kind of logical progression instead of "Well, I've got the first node unlocked, think I'll head for Duna now".

Don't get me wrong here - the tech tree in KSP1, even with Unkerballed, is not perfect.  I still fail to see why planes and rockets are mixed in together, or why you can go into space without ever having flown a plane.  I get that the game is called Kerbal Space Program, but spaceplanes are a thing here.  Or, rather, they should be.  And for a game that has a pretty hefty plane component to it, the lack of aircraft training and building, as well as making some of the plane parts come after rocketry, makes me googly.  And not in a good way.  So yes, the tree in KSP1 isn't perfect.  But the devs could at least look at and learn from it here.  Maybe?

[kfsone]

Some seriously interesting points by @BechMeister, @Scarecrow71, @Flush Foot, @Presto200. Scale up system and give Kerbin a hazy atmosphere, and you have a basis for them to be unaware of much beyond the Mun. I've just been flying around Kerbin in a jet and enjoying the scenery, but I had two annoying thoughts itching to ask themselves: how come all the kerbals live at ksc?; why would someone else come here? Well, hopefully you can practice your base building on Kerbal for the scenic sunrises and views and etc. But if the game added aircraft missions at the moment that would quickly irritate me because the flight controls are still wip (I hope).

KSP2 has a very strong competitor to face off against: Kerbal Space Program. Seeing the game in it's current state, if I were working at Intercept my ass would clench every time they called an All Hands. There has to be some main-stream appeal to offset against KSP1 to keep investors gree erh happy. Base building is, uhm, cool, but cool and fun are not the same thing. Cool is watching someone win a tense Starcraft match during lockdown, cool is watching your guild first an epic boss after getting online too late to be part of the raid. I think a lot of people will find building bases "cool" if they don't have a potential to provide a reasonable amount of return on construction-investment.

I think this is important to raise because fundamentally KSP1 was about visiting, while bases are about staying. 

I don't see Scott Manley or Matt Lowne switching their streams to KSP decorating tips. So who is base building targeting?

I'm certainly not suggesting that they intentionally eliminate launch from KSP for anyone; but we already get options to turn off heating, unbreakable joints, science-me-out-the-wazoo mode. I think a difficulty setting that enables "assisted flight" is gonna be a critical must for the folks who want to build more than they want to fly. I realize they could use K2-D2 or whatever mods emerge in the future, and in my mind that's the kind of audience that probably isn't nearly as unwilling to use 3rd party tools etc (*cough*), but the developers typically have to give them some kind of tieback into the rest of the game: plenty of MMOs tanked themselves by going all in on a big push to add player housing to the game as opposed to building player housing into the game. 

[Fizzlebop Smith]

On 4/5/2024 at 6:39 AM, Scarecrow71 said:

To answer the question posited in the title:  I am currently not playing KSP2.  To me, there simply isn't a reason to play the game until colonies drops.

When FS! dropped, I created a new career game and went through the story (and most of the side) missions.  The game got me to do something I had never done in KSP1 before - fly to Jool.  And not only that, but I landed on both Pol and Tylo.  And as I was flying to Tylo for that mission, I was thinking to myself "This is so cool; I've never done this before; the sequel is going to push me into doing new stuff".  And then I landed - or, rather, lithobraked - on Tylo and drove the rover to the monument...and the game was pretty much over.  No story missions after that.  Just a big "Well, good job for doing that" and some science points.  Nothing else to do at this point in the game other than land 10 Kerbals on Eve and return them to Kerbin.  And I am just flabbergasted over there being nothing left to do.

I am one of the few people that actually like the contract system in KSP1.  I don't care about funds or even the science points because, quite frankly, after you hit mid-career, both of those become nearly pointless.  You can farm for all the science points in every biome, and simply a tourist contract or two and you've got enough cash to build anything you want.  But the reason I like the contract system is because it gives me something to do.  Some goal to achieve.  Some planet to fly to for some reason.  Rescue this guy from LKO, or retrieve that part from the Mun, or land on Vall.  Help a scientist do this experiment in this biome on this rock.  Capture this asteroid.  Build a station.  The contract system continually generates things to do in the game.  And if you download one of the contract packs, or if you do RSS/KSRSS, you have a nearly inexhaustible supply of contracts that will pop up.  Heck, with KSRSS (I can't speak for RSS here), you get a logical progression of contracts to simply explore and land on nearly every celestial body alone.

So this is why I'm not currently playing, and why I'm waiting until after 0.3 (Colonies) comes out.  I'm hoping for more story missions, and more side missions.  I need stuff to do other than think to myself "I gotta come up with a reason to be here...I'll go fly to this rock for no other reason than because I can".  That's the most difficult thing for me in KSP2 - no direction.  I know, I'm not the prototypical KSP player here.  I am aware that there is a huge portion of the community that doesn't care for what KSP1's contract system turned out to be.  But to me, it's a reason to play.  It gives me focus; makes me stronger.  I mean, wrong quote there.  But you get the idea.  I like having purpose and direction, and KSP1's contract system does that.  Until KSP2 has something even remotely similar to give playability/replayability a shot, I'll just shelve it.

I completely agree and have been saying this from the beginning.  The game IS currently a giant sandbox, and much of my problem with it. After the missions i played for 1800 hours in KSP1... i was expecting that to be the ground work for science.

Every time i brought this up in the beginning i would catch such flack about how they were too repetitive, too simple, or (NOT Core KSP1 Vanilla).


I know for myself and about 7 or 8 people i have started other dialogues with... Procedural Missions would have shut us all up from the beginning.  We would be too busy enjoying the gameplay look and chunking away little pieces of science for 6 months or more.

I am glad that I am not alone in wishing these missions would return. I understand there were some issue with the procedural missions loops. 

Lets work toward refining that with subsequent hotfixes and refinements instead of abandoning them all together. I thought Exploration was supposed to bridge science and career. Thats the kind of stuff EA feed back is great about generating.

Edited April 6 by Fizzlebop Smith

[mattihase]

On 4/6/2024 at 10:23 PM, kfsone said:

 (*cough*)

I don't think I've seen a github readme file collapse into a pile of code before now. They must have dropped support for something in the last 9 years or so.

On 4/6/2024 at 10:23 PM, kfsone said:

I've just been flying around Kerbin in a jet and enjoying the scenery, but I had two annoying thoughts itching to ask themselves: how come all the kerbals live at ksc?; why would someone else come here? Well, hopefully you can practice your base building on Kerbal for the scenic sunrises and views and etc. But if the game added aircraft missions at the moment that would quickly irritate me because the flight controls are still wip (I hope).

Definitely I can imagine a little side mission chain dedicated to setting up a prototype base somewhere on kerbin and set up a supply route to it could be both a good way to integrate setting up more stuff on kerbin to the game and make non-space-planes actually be relevant for a moment rather than completely just being beautiful looking bridge-flyer-underers.