Take Two Interactive (Rockstar, 2K, Private Division) canceling games, ending projects and laying off 5% of its workforce

[Lisias]

14 minutes ago, DoomsdayDuck555 said:

Well, if you look something up you tend to get results that are similar to what you looked up. 

Exactly the reason I looked up for the news about KSP+kerbal - because I wanted to look up about Kerbal Space Program, not to Kentucky State Police!

Spoiler

 

The search results will be trimmed down by google to you, so your results will differ from mine.

On my results, I got news from "Joven Nerd", "Terra" and "Olhar Digital" that are mainstream news on technology and trending (some more than others).

I'm not talking KSP is bigger than the Beatles #oasisFeelings , but - heck - KSP is not insignificant  neither.

  

11 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Star Theory has made some beautiful games with a team of fewer than 20 people. A lot of people they hired for Intercept were seasoned Unity developers and artists with great successes on their resumes. They are quite capable as game developers. If you don't recognize that, you're being angry at clouds.

Then please explain KSP2's launch. They were (are?), obviously, lacking some key abilities somewhere in the pipeline.

It's virtually impossible that a train wreck like that would be published without a huge amount of vanity from someone - because even people blinded by their hubris could see that the game was just not working.

Edited May 15 by Lisias
brute force post merge

[LameLefty]

9 minutes ago, Lisias said:

because even people blinded by their hubris could see that the game was just not working.

It wasn't just "not working" as a cohesive game, it was FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN. A game entirely about space travel could not even reliably predict planned orbits, something KSP got right from the beginning. I mean, it was utterly impossible to return from any outer planet body without massively over-building for dV. It's like everyone was so busy scripting frankly-dumb little juvenile "tutorials" and creating unique (illegible) fonts for the UI that no one actually tried to play the actual game. It took three patches to fix that trajectory bug, and I have a save from that period where the legs STILL just fall off my Duna lander as soon as I load into the scene.  

Again, Nate and crew, if you're lurking - did you or your team actually play the game you pushed out the door and charged $50 for? 

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, LameLefty said:

Again, Nate and crew, if you're lurking - did you or your team actually play the game you pushed out the door and charged $50 for? 

Please note that I addressed the whole Team, not individuals - as a matter of fact, I should be addressing the whole Company. You can have a bunch of incredibly competent professionals, and yet they can deliver krap when working as a team because something on the organization prevents them from doing what they know, the way they know best, together.

For example, the ability they could lack may be the one to impose sound technical decisions over stupid political ones came from Kraken knows what pointed egg head on the organization. You need way more than just technical competence to succeed on big corporations (believe me on this one, I know what I'm saying).

I'm not saying you are wrong - you can be right. But you also can be wrong, we just don't have enough visibility and information to be sure. Hanlon's razor appears to support you, but it's a heuristic, not a rule, law or prediction.

Besides, these guys are trapped inside NDAs, so they can't defend themselves - and this is another reason to avoid addressing them directly (no matter they are responsible or not by the mess). It's plain unfair.

Please don't take this as a criticism on you. I'm not addressing you, only the way you expressed valid criticism. I'm trying to suggest better ways to do it. Again, you may be right. I'm (hopefully) politely trying to remember you that you may be wrong too.

Spoiler

 

 

Edited May 16 by Lisias
Changing the video to the PIL Official one - heck, it's their music, they deserve the views!

[MechBFP]

1 hour ago, LameLefty said:

I mean, it was utterly impossible to return from any outer planet body without massively over-building for dV.

A whole lot of us did the utterly impossible then, lol.

[LameLefty]

13 minutes ago, MechBFP said:

A whole lot of us did the utterly impossible then, lol.

Note my disclaimer: “without massively over-building for dV.” So yeah. I did it too. But only because I had a huge nuclear transfer stage with over 3,100 m/s to make a return from Jool that was SUPPOSED to take like 1,100 m/s or something. But in addition to the excess dV I happened to have available, I also made liberal use of time-warp to get favorable phasing for the corrections I had to make once leaving Jool SOI. For anyone who plays like a real rocket scientist (and one of my oldest friends does exactly this) and tries to min/max mass and dV requirements, playing a real return mission like a real space agency does was just impossible except by luck.

[herbal space program]

8 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Marginally?  What exactly makes KSP1 only marginally better than KSP2?  I agree that KSP1 has its flaws and problems.  But if you think that the buggy dumpster fire that KSP2 was at launch, or continues to be today, is only marginally worse than KSP1, then nothing anybody says here will make any sense to you.

Objectively, as a person who has spent countless hours of their precious time on this mortal coil playing both games (well, actually ~3000hr/500hr) , I can say  that  the latest version of KSP2 is no buggier in general terms than just about any version of KSP1 I ever played. It still has super-annoying, why the hell didn't you fix this already "features" all over the place, but as somebody who has at least a basic appreciation of what coding something like this is, those are all things that are easy to fix, like broken windows in a run-down neighborhood. And yes, they surely should have fixed some of those first, like all the stupid map view behavior with maneuver nodes, because those are essential QOL issues for dedicated players, and so generate ire out of all proportion to the difficulty of fixing them. A good product manager would have recognized that immediately and cleared all that sort of low-hanging fruit from the player grievance roster right away. But most of these people clearly hadn't really spent that many hours playing KSP1, so I imagine they were mostly oblivious to all that. 

...And just now I went back and looked at some of my earliest posts here, and here's what I had to say in a thread there about part numbers and performance: 

 

Same story, different game.

Edited May 16 by herbal space program
adding content

[TLTay]

T2 earnings call tomorrow. You can listen in realtime if you want to hear any news. The only people the company actually cares about is the shareholders, we folk are just the livestock. If anybody will get the info, it'll be the shareholders.

[Bej Kerman]

3 hours ago, Lisias said:

Nobody is a hell of an overstatement.

https://www.google.com/search?q=KSP+kerbal&newwindow=1&sca_esv=697ef796fdf142b1&sca_upv=1&tbm=nws&prmd=isvnmbtz&sxsrf=ADLYWIIIH1GZtdFejJF6E0qkmPP2X8jjWw:1715814738088&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjm2Nr_45CGAxU2rZUCHQdTAQsQ0pQJegQILBAK&biw=1309&bih=764&dpr=1

It's funny how googling "KSP kerbal" makes Google show up with things that have either or words in them.

Adding an exclude operator for the number 2 to the search expectedly made results a little more sparse and I only got two results from within the past 5 years - these sources are obscure as well so that doesn’t help. Excluding the word 'intercept' instead seemed to reveal more recent sources, but these still tended to be from more niche outlets and I only had to get to the next page before Google ran out of sources from the last 5 years. Same story again for just taking your original search term and filtering all results from 2009 to 1st Jan 2023.

With all this in mind now, it's obvious to me that newspapers were flocking to report on what the people who own Rockstar were doing shutting a studio down, and KSP 2 was just collateral. It could have been literally anything else and still have made headlines by association with T2. If people were scared of anything, it was probably an impact on GTA VI development

[MechBFP]

1 hour ago, LameLefty said:

Note my disclaimer: “without massively over-building for dV.” So yeah. I did it too. But only because I had a huge nuclear transfer stage with over 3,100 m/s to make a return from Jool that was SUPPOSED to take like 1,100 m/s or something. But in addition to the excess dV I happened to have available, I also made liberal use of time-warp to get favorable phasing for the corrections I had to make once leaving Jool SOI. For anyone who plays like a real rocket scientist (and one of my oldest friends does exactly this) and tries to min/max mass and dV requirements, playing a real return mission like a real space agency does was just impossible except by luck.

Ya we didn’t overbuild at all. 

[Lisias]

39 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

It's funny how googling "KSP kerbal" makes Google show up with things that have either or words in them.

<...>

It's the problem with Google, it will trimm the results to your profile.

This is a list from mine (using the very same link I used above):

• Jovem Nerd
  • Estúdio de Kerbal Space Program 2 será encerrado após demissões
  • 2 weeks ago
• UOL
  • Kerbal Space Program 2 Is Getting Review-Bombed After Take-Two Shut Down Its Developer
  • Dec 22, 2023
• IGN
  • Kerbal Space Program 2 Is Getting Review-Bombed After Take-Two Shut Down Its Developer
  • 2 weeks ago
• UOL
  • Kerbal Space Program 2 Is Getting Review-Bombed After Take-Two Shut Down Its Developer
  • 2 weeks ago
• Game Developer
  • Update: Take-Two confirms Kerbal Space Program 2 is safe despite Seattle layoffs
  • 2 weeks ago
• PC Gamer
  • Kerbal Space Program fans react with anger over Intercept Games closure, and you know what that means: Review ...
  • 2 weeks ago
• Epic Games
  • Our guide to exploring deep space with Kerbal Space Program 2's For Science! Update
  • Feb 6, 2024
• Space.com
  • Kerbal Space Program game director and ULA CEO talk STEM collaboration and companies' futures (exclusive)
  • Feb 23, 2024
• Olhar Digital
  • Jogue como Elon Musk! Kerbal Space Program está por menos de R$ 20 no Steam
  • Jun 9, 2023
• Terra
  • Jogamos: Kerbal Space Program 2 é mais acolhedor que antecessor
  • Feb 24, 2023
• <some others I'm omiiting>
• Yahoo Finance Canada
  • Take-Two is shutting down the studios behind Rollerdrome and Kerbal Space Program 2
  • 2 weeks ago
• TechTudo
  • Kerbal Space Program 2: veja gameplay, história e requisitos mínimos do jogo
  • Feb 25, 2023

And so goes on.

 

You see, your initial statement:

11 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

No, and I'm certainly not trying to mathematically quantify what counts as a niche through sale figures just to avoid the undeniable fact that nobody in everyday life is talking about KSP.

 

It's a heck of an overstament at best, or just don't hold itself at worst.

 

For the best or for the worst, KSP in on the media.

 

[Bej Kerman]

7 minutes ago, Lisias said:

It's the problem with Google, it will trimm the results to your profile.

If you read the rest of my reply, you'd see I already addressed the reasons I didn't get any results related to T2 shutting down Intercept.

[herbal space program]

2 hours ago, MechBFP said:

A whole lot of us did the utterly impossible then, lol.

Trajectories pre/post SOI change were pretty messed up in the first few versions, but as far as I can tell they had cleaned that all up pretty well by the latest version. The dV readouts were still pretty much a disaster, but there were mods to cover that if you really needed them.

[Lisias]

52 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

If you read the rest of my reply, you'd see I already addressed the reasons I didn't get any results related to T2 shutting down Intercept.

But that wasn't the purpose of the exercise I was proposing - I was debating your statement:

13 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

No, and I'm certainly not trying to mathematically quantify what counts as a niche through sale figures just to avoid the undeniable fact that nobody in everyday life is talking about KSP.

 so I didn't understood that you had changed the subject of the discussion.

You kepting my "Nobody is a hell of an overstatement. " statement on the quoting didn't helped me to detect the change neither.

Well, now I know.

[Bej Kerman]

7 minutes ago, Lisias said:

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

If you read the rest of my reply, you'd see I already addressed the reasons I didn't get any results related to T2 shutting down Intercept.

But that wasn't the purpose of the exercise I was proposing - I was debating your statement:

13 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

No, and I'm certainly not trying to mathematically quantify what counts as a niche through sale figures just to avoid the undeniable fact that nobody in everyday life is talking about KSP.

 so I didn't understood that you had changed the subject of the discussion.

And I haven't. KSP 2 is not the focus of the news here, news outlets only care about the fact Rockstar's owners laid off a bunch of people, and that's why a few simple filters cause all recent mentions of Kerbal Space Program to disappear.

[AVaughan]

1 hour ago, herbal space program said:

I can say  that  the latest version of KSP2 is no buggier in general terms than just about any version of KSP1 I ever played.

Your perspective is very different to mine.  From my point of view ksp 2 has pretty much all the same bugs as ksp 1, plus plenty of new bugs of its own.  (Now many of those new bugs could probably be easily fixed, but we haven't had patch in 3 months, and I'm not sure we will ever get another patch). 

Yesterday I tried to play KSP 2 for the first times since shortly after the Science release.   This time I rage-quit after re-flying the same mission 3 times, because on all three attempts my parachute failed to properly deploy.  (That is the sort of bug that I would have hoped would have been quickly fixed in patch of hot-fix released within a couple of weeks.  Since it is the sort of mission ending bug that can cause players to rage quit, you would think it would have been a priority to push a fix out.  But 3 months later, it still exists.  I have no idea if we will even get another patch, let alone whether it will address that bug). 

The previous time I tried to play it I gave up bothering after Mun/Minmus landers repeatedly left the surface every time I timewarped, loaded the game, or otherwise caused scene changed, or even boarded a kerbal from the surface.  (Yes KSP 1 has also had similar issues, but this seemed worse, and was definitely worse that I would normally experience in a typical modded ksp 1 install).   So as far as I'm concerned ksp 2 has most of ksp 1 bugs, and plenty of new ones of it's own. 

It also seems to be missing a whole bunch of advanced features that KSP 1 has (eg fuel priority).  It is has a UI full of questionable choices that make the UI harder to read at a glance, take up more space than necessary and the whole UI seems full of counter intuitive behaviours.  (Maybe I'm just too used to ksp 1's UI).  Pixelated fonts/graphics when the UI should be crisp and clear for easy reading,  I still don't understand how or why the VAB UI decides to clone a workspace every time I revert and load/edit an existing design.  The whole UI feels like it might have been together for a simple iphone/tablet style games, not for a complex simulation.

Other design choices make me think that Nate (or maybe his bosses at TT/PD) wanted to make a simple cartoony ksp 1 style game where things constantly break in a cartoon manner.  (Witness the trailers and their wobbly rockets.  Witness Nate wanting wobbly rockets even after has was told by a squad employee that wouldn't go down well with the existing ksp1 fan base.  Witness advanced UI options like toggleable auto-structs and fuel priorities being removed.  Witness how simple the science parts are).  That vision is at odds with the more complex simulation I want, and the complex missions I like to do, where if something breaks unexpectedly, often I either have to reload or fail the mission. 

 

[BrobDingnag]

On 5/12/2024 at 10:26 PM, Minmus Taster said:

Found this on the discord:

I sure do love the destruction of information through forced ephemerality...

[Fizzlebop Smith]

14 minutes ago, BrobDingnag said:

I sure do love the destruction of information through forced ephemerality...

Seems the link is broken or unavailable. What was the message?

[BrobDingnag]

52 minutes ago, Fizzlebop Smith said:

Seems the link is broken or unavailable. What was the message?

That's what I mean. Discord deletes content after an arbitrary amount of time, so any links to media hosted there eventually kill themselves and we're left with dead links going nowhere. As Discord rises in popularity (editor's note: ... loveing why), I've noticed these dead links more and more, even for stuff less than a week old.

[NexusHelium]

14 hours ago, LameLefty said:

A game entirely about space travel could not even reliably predict planned orbits, something KSP got right from the beginning

Ummm might want to check your sources because... no it didn't. KSP at the beginning was not a great game.

[Bej Kerman]

On 5/13/2024 at 3:26 AM, Minmus Taster said:

Found this on the discord:

Discord was a mistake.

[MechBFP]

1 minute ago, NexusHelium said:

Ummm might want to check your sources because... no it didn't. KSP at the beginning was not a great game.

It didn’t even have orbits, much less planning them haha. 

[Fizzlebop Smith]

5 minutes ago, BrobDingnag said:

That's what I mean. Discord deletes content after an arbitrary amount of time, so any links to media hosted there eventually kill themselves and we're left with dead links going nowhere. As Discord rises in popularity (editor's note: ... loveing why), I've noticed these dead links more and more, even for stuff less than a week old.

Oh, now I see your point... it's one many of us agreed with. There are numerous requests for more communication on the "official" forum.

 

Discord has seemed to be their primary means of interacting with the  community. I understand the need tobkeep apprised of the pulse of the industry.. and sometime change accordingly.

To me it is part of that shift of focusing on the visuals to help the game sell. Discord is where the newest generation of gamers exist. Most probably do not know what IRC or BBS means.

It is that transitory nature of communique & shear bulk / unorganized manner in which everything is parsed.

This Last Part is merely my opinion, but I sincerely feel that trying so hard to appeal to a much wider demographic has alienated many that made the first such a success.

 

[Lisias]

11 hours ago, AVaughan said:

Your perspective is very different to mine.  From my point of view ksp 2 has pretty much all the same bugs as ksp 1, plus plenty of new bugs of its own.  (Now many of those new bugs could probably be easily fixed, but we haven't had patch in 3 months, and I'm not sure we will ever get another patch).

There's a difference between a bug, a design flaw and a design consequence.

Bugs are fixable, design flaws usually demands a huge refactoring. A design consequence is not fixable, it's mitigable.

For example, take the air inflated rubber tires in your car. They have this pesky habit of getting flat when punctured by nails. This is bug, a design flaw or a design consequence?

Well, a design consequence. You can't prevent a tire from being punctured, but you can mitigate the problem by making it more resistant to small nails, and to fail graciously when a bigger one happens - but you can't "fix" the fact that they will get flat every time they are punctured by nails, and you can't prevent that they may get punctured eventually when a big enough nail gets in their way.

Some of what people says are "bugs" on KSP¹ are essentially design consequences that the Dev Team failed to mitigate. You can't have the cake and eat it too!

 

11 hours ago, AVaughan said:

Yesterday I tried to play KSP 2 for the first times since shortly after the Science release.   This time I rage-quit after re-flying the same mission 3 times, because on all three attempts my parachute failed to properly deploy.   <...>

THIS is a bug, no doubt!

 

11 hours ago, AVaughan said:

The previous time I tried to play it I gave up bothering after Mun/Minmus landers repeatedly left the surface every time I timewarped, loaded the game, or otherwise caused scene changed, or even boarded a kerbal from the surface.  (Yes KSP 1 has also had similar issues, but this seemed worse, and was definitely worse that I would normally experience in a typical modded ksp 1 install).   So as far as I'm concerned ksp 2 has most of ksp 1 bugs, and plenty of new ones of it's own.

This may be a design flaw that is being badly worked around.

You see, the whole Unity thingy makes heavy use of floats to do computing. But precision computing needs to be done on doubles - and when you are timewarping, precision starts to get critical pretty fast.

One of the problems on the lack of precision of floats is when handling colliders on distant objects that are still on the Physics range (or just getting into it). A tinny little imprecision to the wrong side, and you have a part being clipped into the ground collider and....

Spoiler

BADA BOOM!!!!!

So, or we have a design flaw on timewarp that is failing to cope with this problem, or there's no other way to implement timewarp and then the mitigations being used are not working as they should.

The mitigation process used by KSP¹ is to instantiate the objects slightly above the near colliders and then graciously "land" them, avoiding having one of the parts spawning inside a ground collider (triggering the badaboom). Obviously, this can lead to some undesired collateral effects, what suggests that the mitigation may need some more thinking (or some more working, or both).

On KSP2, the damned mitigation appears to be just broken or half-baked. You got this problem when boarding Kerbals because Kerbals are, in essence, just single part vessels with fancy animations and are subject to the same problems. By "unspawning" the Kerbal, they probably triggered this mitigation process for all crafts in the current physics range "by default", instead of running the current state into a decision process what would decide what crafts would need or not this collider mitigation process.

 

11 hours ago, AVaughan said:

It also seems to be missing a whole bunch of advanced features that KSP 1 has (eg fuel priority).  It is has a UI full of questionable choices that make the UI harder to read at a glance, take up more space than necessary and the whole UI seems full of counter intuitive behaviours.  (Maybe I'm just too used to ksp 1's UI).  Pixelated fonts/graphics when the UI should be crisp and clear for easy reading,  I still don't understand how or why the VAB UI decides to clone a workspace every time I revert and load/edit an existing design.  The whole UI feels like it might have been together for a simple iphone/tablet style games, not for a complex simulation.

The Fuel Priority may be just a Feature not Implemented Yet™. But the rest is, indeed, some really bad decisions on the design. I instantly rejected the new UI for being way less easier to read on a glance.

Look on an old aircraft cockpit - you have instruments scattered over the panel. But they are clustered by need - instruments needed for landing are clustered together, instruments used for navigation too. Some instruments are replicated not only for backup purposes, but also to have a copy available when needed on more that one "cluster".

On KSP¹, the most important instrument is the Altimeter, as it's what keeps you from getting RUD'ed by a UGC (Unplanned Ground Contact) most of the time. It's the reason it's on a privileged position on the screen.

The navball et all are secondary instruments used when flying and landing - interesting enough, the NavBall is less important on landing than one may think, because or you are landing an airplane, and so you are more or less parallel to the ground already (otherwise you would be in an uncontrolled fall, an unconfortable situation in which you are not exactly worried about anything else but how much time until UGC), or you are on a suicidal burn - another situation in which you already know the craft's attitude, and the only thing that matters are the altitude above the ground, the vertical speed and how much fuel do you still have.

Except by the fuel remaining, the current instrumentation is adequate on its current position.

 

11 hours ago, AVaughan said:

Other design choices make me think that Nate (or maybe his bosses at TT/PD) wanted to make a simple cartoony ksp 1 style game where things constantly break in a cartoon manner.  (Witness the trailers and their wobbly rockets.  Witness Nate wanting wobbly rockets even after has was told by a squad employee that wouldn't go down well with the existing ksp1 fan base.  Witness advanced UI options like toggleable auto-structs and fuel priorities being removed.  Witness how simple the science parts are).  That vision is at odds with the more complex simulation I want, and the complex missions I like to do, where if something breaks unexpectedly, often I either have to reload or fail the mission.

Apparently I'm the only one that understood the meaning of the wobbling.

In real life, unsound projects would just break apart in flight. This makes diagnosing extremely difficult, because you would need to infer the point of rupture by analyzing whatever you find from the leftovers of the craft and doing a lot of calculations and simulations.

Wobbling crafts would be the alternative to plain RUDs when unsound crafts are launched.

IMHO they failed to balance what's should be considered a sounding project for the physics engine.

 

2 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Discord was a mistake.

I fully and unconditionally agree with you on this one.

Edited May 16 by Lisias
Entertaining grammars made slightely less entertaining...

[AtomicTech]

10 minutes ago, Fizzlebop Smith said:

Discord has seemed to be their primary means of interacting with the  community.

It bothers me. It'd be nice if while we still had CMs, that they'd spent time on the forums.

[NexusHelium]

17 minutes ago, AtomicTech said:

It'd be nice if while we still had CMs,

Well. We have them, just until June (and we might get another new one after that)