My Patience has run out, now I am just disgusted.

[Scarecrow71]

Just now, SunlitZelkova said:

some saying “look at this other game, development might take long but it will eventually come!”

I never said it will come.  I said I have hope that it might.

[SunlitZelkova]

Just now, Scarecrow71 said:

I never said it will come.  I said I have hope that it might.

Thank you for the correction!

[uglyduckling81]

Guaranteed they made this decision in 2022. 
the way they saw it was they had flushed 5 years of funding down the toilet. 
only thing left to do is push out the pile of garbage they had to recoup some of the development costs before cancelling shortly after. 
I said this is almost certainly what is happening when the game launched in the state it did. 
The only surprising thing is they waited a year to shut it down. Surely most of their sales happened in the first two months. Could have saved 12 months of wages if they shut it down this time last year. 

[Vanamonde]

More personal remarks removed. However upset you are, please don't turn on each other. 

[Mitokandria]

Well...My Friday evening has been thoroughly tainted by this news.

A toast to Dakota. I will miss that epic forum picture and the energy you brought to the team.

A toast to the modders that became official devs through passion, dedication, and skill.

A toast to the devs that wished they could say more but couldn't.

Lastly, a toast to KSP2. It was designed for Tylo, but only managed to just make low Kerbin orbit before running out of DV.

Edited May 4 by Mitokandria

[Cytauri]

Long live KSP 1. 

[Observe]

For me, KSP2 was lost at EA launch. I could see that my hopes and dreams of a worthy KSP1 successor were not going to come to pass. It was obvious then, that the team was over their heads and grasping at straws, while making a half-hearted effort to convince themselves and us, with smoke and mirrors showing a bright future ahead. Since then, I've continued to enjoy KSP1, with KSP2 barely a disappointing memory.

It was a valiant effort, but alas, it was doomed to fail a long time ago.

Edited May 4 by Observe

[Alpha_star]

[redacted]

Edited May 6 by Alpha_star

[KerikBalm]

4 hours ago, BrobDingnag said:

That may be what I'm thinking about.

Their solution was just: "we're going to have a solution"

4 hours ago, AtomicTech said:

Yes, we were promised N-body physics but limited to the planetary scale.

They explicitly said the opposite of I recall.

If we had N-body physics, Rask and Rusk wouldn't need a bespoke solution, N body physics would be the solution 

[Siska]

7 hours ago, Skorj said:

Bit of advice to anyone in the software industry from an old head: it's on you to be financially responsible with the sure and certain knowledge that you will be laid off multiple times in your career.  No, I didn't do that before I was 30 either, but a wise man learns from the mistakes of others.  Yes, it sucks, but it's a well-paying job you get to do indoors with no heavy lifting, and I have no regrets about my career choice.

Exactly. For instance, 2019-2022 period was "Covid sickness" period but not because just of Covid, but also employed people sickness. IT industry was booming at the time, and we had few instances where programmers came to us and wanted more money "or I'll leave" kind of attitude. Of course, we raised wages (you must count that in Europe if you want to give someone 4.500 EUR net salary, that costs you around 7.500 because of mandatory health, social insurance etc..., it goes progressive) and I know that probably is not a lot for USA.

Now, the situation is that you have:

1. Expensive developer (more than you get on market) and no one is interested in lesser monthly salary
2. No one wants to come work back at office when we requested to
3. Also less experienced programmers that have wages well beyond their capabilities

So as employer you are confronted with two options. Renew the team, cut costs and have reserve money for bonuses and future pay rises, or on other hand, people that blackmailed you when there were "golden times" after working for you for years.

We invented a scheme, where we rent programmers for other companies to outsource workforce, so that covers few heads so we didn't have to fire (not that it is profitable, but you kind of keep the people), and hired senior programmers that cost 30% less for same amount of work.

 

You see, KSP 2 was in "the works" during the Covid pandemic, and it probably costed a lot of money. As I see, they had people on payroll that were working on "game launcher" which is bizarre for my opinion.

No man's sky was a team of 15 developers, they managed to pull out the games from black hole in 15 months with upgrades and patches. That is what optimized team is.

Also, everybody complaints about companies making profit. My dear, we live in a profit based economy and no one will do anything of there is not profit involved. Do you think you would have food on your table if farming was not profitable? probable not.

7 hours ago, Skorj said:

I saw several office closures over my career,  Only in one case were the junior devs not doing a good job.  All the rest were either "turns out the product didn't sell well, end of company" or "senior management at a remote office got too arrogant with their demands, and corporate decided it was easier to close the office than put up with them".  In every case senior leadership had make critical mistakes that doomed everyone, but it was rarely an indication of the skill of the junior devs.

Totally agree, as I said, I do not blame the devs but poor management. So if you want to be mad at someone, be mad at poor management of KSP 2 not really making it profitable.

[Codraroll]

10 hours ago, Westinghouse said:

I'm also curious to know how they planned Rask and Ruas to work.

Other things I'd like to know:

How would collisions work with planetary rings of Glumo and the other planets with rings showcased?

What was the list of resources they planned to introduce and their corresponding rocket fuel types?

Would colony buildings be rigid bodies that could collapse like seen in the trailer?

What was the planned narrative? What was the story behind all those monuments?

One thing I'm very curious to know is: is there any indication they had made any meaningful progress on the implementation of the promised features that were not in KSP1?

I mean, KSP2 was sold to us with a trailer showing a bunch of features that would be impossible to have in KSP1: Multiple star systems, interstellar craft, colonies ... those are all features that KSP1's code base simply doesn't support. Those were the big selling points.

And then you look at the developer diaries. Not one of them discusses these new features. They are all about re-creating or polishing features that were in KSP1, or conceptual approaches to game development, community management, making new assets, and so on. Those are great and important things to consider when making a functional game, sure, but they are not the key features of the KSP sequel.

A large portion of the fan base spent this whole pre-release period sitting on the fence, waiting for KSP2 to become something closer to what was announced in the trailer. The developers must have known the importance of delivering these features.  But not only did those features never materialize, they weren't even talked about all that much. Sure, there were concepts floated about, but concepts are cheap and easy. How was the implementation going? Was it going, like, at all? Did they really have a solution pinned down for Rask and Rusk, or were they still on the spitballing-ideas stage? Had they coded something that resembled the colonies in the trailer, or were they just modelling assets without any means of making them work?

I'm half suspecting that the developers spent all this time trying to feature-copy KSP1, picking the lowest fruit as it were, but having no idea how to realize their visions. They had a more capable engine and prettier graphics, but were stuck trying to make it work like the previous game, possibly stumbling right into the same code structure limitations that made those features impossible in KSP1.

In short, I'm wondering whether KSP2, as first announced, ever existed at all. That all they had, and all they could ever make, was a prettier feature copy of KSP1, riddled with bugs they couldn't fix either. If that was the case, I'm not entirely surprised that Take-Two pulled the plug.