Keep calm and carry on

[Vl3d]

Game development is like war - you make plans, you try to execute, things don't go according to plan, you lose some friends in the process, you grieve, but you keep fighting. You pick yourself up and you never stop fighting.

I believe in @Nate Simpson and his vision.

KSP 2 is a work of art - it's blood, sweat and tears. And it will turn out as one of the greatest games ever made. I have not the slimmest shadow of a doubt.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone who is, was and will be part of the team. The game is starting to shine, so keep calm and carry on!

Edited May 24 by Vl3d

[Meecrob]

44 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

Game development is like war

"War is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing eachother spending $50 for Early Access." - Niko Belic

Lol IG really outdid themselves with their implementation of their "Fog of War" Communication Interruption mechanic

 

OK, all jokes aside, there is a non-zero value in the KSP franchise. The current state of the gaming industry makes me think that the major players pulling the strings are risk-off right now, but this can change in the future.

[Uuky]

2 hours ago, Vl3d said:

Game development is like war -

It is more or less like any office war.

 

[Stevie_D]

2 hours ago, Vl3d said:

And it will turn out as one of the greatest games ever made. I have not the slimmest shadow of a doubt.

 

Great positivity, but reality kicks naive positive thinkers in the nuts, like @Meecrob said. That's why the wisest saying is "to hope for the best but expect the worst."

Believing in Nate is great, but belief doesn't get you anywhere. For all we know, Nate might not even be creative director when we finally get news in 2034. 

[Tony Tony Chopper]

Guys, do yourself a favor:
 

 

[Alpha_star]

I appreciate your faith and an apparently non-aggressive attitude towards the game. It’s pretty rare these days.

[Vl3d]

1 hour ago, Alpha_star said:

I appreciate your faith and an apparently non-aggressive attitude towards the game. It’s pretty rare these days.

The game is very close to being great and innovative. I think a lot of the work for the Colonies update has been completed and that update will bring new life into the IP. I see the current T2 situation as a decision to mend course and continue development with a smaller team over a larger number of years - and as the game picks up speed again, hiring will resume. I do not believe in any way that the game will be canceled - its already fun and has a lot of potential, and a lot of the foundational work has already been completed.

[DeadJohn]

4 hours ago, Vl3d said:

And it will turn out as one of the greatest games ever made. I have not the slimmest shadow of a doubt.

2 hours ago, Alpha_star said:

I appreciate your faith

It could be called "faith", or it could be called "failing to recognize the history of KSP2 development".

[MARL_Mk1]

4 hours ago, Vl3d said:

The game is starting to shine, so keep calm and carry on!

Was*

The game was starting to shine. As in, the current build of version 0.2.2.0, including barebones, basic science, is what we should've gotten Feb 24th 2023.

I will be positively shocked if we see this game progress on the hands of a different studio tackling its current promises. I just don't. And even if it did, I would disengage from it completely until I saw it pop up on my Steam news some day in the future, and only then would I install and try it again.

I have now sadly lost the entirety of the hope and optimism I had shy of just a month ago about Kerbal Space Program 2.

If this radio silence is T2's tactic to undermine the community's reaction to shutting down their studio, they've succeeded. If an announcement came tomorrow mentioning the complete ceasing of KSP2's development and the death of the IP from a development standpoint, I wouldn't react a bit.

I would get a clean KSP1 install, open CKAN, make my ultimate modded install, make a couple of copies of it and forget about forums, Discords and whatnot, and assume the last five years of patiently waiting for the game of my dreams were just that, a dream.  Now I kind of envy those who kept it together and didn't get excited over such a beautiful cinematic trailer back in the day.

[Vl3d]

5 hours ago, MARL_Mk1 said:

I would get a clean KSP1 install, open CKAN, make my ultimate modded install

Make any mod selection you desire, it will not solve the problems that KSP 2 set out to tackle. You will still be blocked by all the repetitive runs you have to make to build a space station or a Mun base that does nothing.

[Infinite Aerospace]

42 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

Make any mod selection you desire, it will not solve the problems that KSP 2 set out to tackle. You will still be blocked by all the repetitive runs you have to make to build a space station or a Mun base that does nothing.

Yeah there's a lot of people that like to glaze over that fact. The codebase of Kerbal Space Program is a mess, it's like when people 'fill in' potholes without really solving the issues that cause them. Sure the modded game looks nice, but it's still like a barely alive zombie of a game.

 

I suppose Shadowzone video kinda highlights the issues here, attempting to cling to this broken codebase essentially slit the games throat before it ever began. I can't believe how much management dug their heels in over rewriting the code, and fix the technical debt that was present. 

[MARL_Mk1]

1 hour ago, Vl3d said:

Make any mod selection you desire, it will not solve the problems that KSP 2 set out to tackle. You will still be blocked by all the repetitive runs you have to make to build a space station or a Mun base that does nothing.

Oh well, I guess it's time to uninstall and play some Juno then (heh, yeah... no.)

Wait, exactly what was KSP2 going to do that would make building surface bases or space stations not repetitive?

Sure, we know about automated trade routes, but the fact that you have to manually build those outposts and stations manually remains the same both in KSP1 and KSP2.

The only difference with the current state of both is that KSP1 just works and performs better.

And yeah, not going out there and claim KSP1 is perfect. We were all excited about KSP2 being a thing so we could get a better KSP1 and then some. But that hasn't and will not happen by the looks of things, so why would I complain about the only thing that we have left and that's been out of active development for... *checks dates*... half a decade now?

Edited May 24 by MARL_Mk1

[mc04]

2 hours ago, Vl3d said:

Make any mod selection you desire, it will not solve the problems that KSP 2 set out to tackle. You will still be blocked by all the repetitive runs you have to make to build a space station or a Mun base that does nothing.

ksp2 never solved the problems ksp2 supposedly set out to tackle.

if you need to grind missions you don't want to do in ksp, you've configured the difficulty settings wrong. yes, the defaults are bad. but it's a decade+ old game that hasn't been updated for a couple years now. none of this is new, or some arcane knowledge; it's literally built in settings that can be configured on the fly in an ongoing campaign.

[Vl3d]

2 hours ago, Infinite Aerospace said:

The codebase of Kerbal Space Program is a mess, it's like when people 'fill in' potholes without really solving the issues that cause them. Sure the modded game looks nice, but it's still like a barely alive zombie of a game.

No doubt. Right now people are on the emotional roller coaster again, but things will calm down. Everyone needs to understand that these are business decisions, and the direction the game is going has to be fine-tuned to its real audience. We can hope for mass appeal and getting all the kids to play the game, but that will happen naturally out of scientific magnetism and tech curiosity. The remaining / new core KSP 2 team has to trust the vision.

It's really hard for the people that lose their jobs, but they have a lot to be proud of and the work and passion they put in will land them good new jobs.

As for KSP2 - yeah, it probably did not bring the right money in yet, so they cut expenses. But that doesn't mean the project is cancelled or abandoned. KSP 1 had a 8-10 man core team right? So we have a good foundation now, we'll get colonies (basically already done), and all the rest will come slower but it's all gonna grow and expand.

This is not the lowest point for KSP2 - this is a new beginning. And the game is almost up, it just needs to grow up and find it's spirit.

 

Edited May 25 by Vl3d

[Infinite Aerospace]

7 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

No doubt. Right now people are on the emotional roller coaster again, but things will calm down. Everyone needs to understand that these are business decisions, and the direction the game is going has to be fine-tuned to its real audience. We can hope for mass appeal and getting all the kids to play the game, but that will happen naturally out of scientific magnetism and tech curiosity. The remaining / new core KSP 2 team has to trust the vision.

It's really hard for the people that lose their jobs, but they have a lot to be proud of and the work and passion they put in will land them good new jobs.

As for KSP2 - yeah, it probably did not bring the right money in yet, so they cut expenses. But that doesn't mean the project is cancelled or abandoned. KSP 1 had a 8-10 man core team right? So we have a good foundation now, we'll get colonies (basically already done), and all the rest will come slower but it's all gonna grow and expand.

This is not the lowest point for KSP2 - this is a new beginning. And the game is almost up, it just needs to grow up and find it's spirit.

 

I think with what KSP2 is right now, it could grow with a much smaller team with the damned corporate shackles undone. That said, I'm very shall we say, grounded as to whether the game will continue or just fade into obscurity.

[Alpha_star]

1 hour ago, Vl3d said:

No doubt. Right now people are on the emotional roller coaster again, but things will calm down.

It's just very like the good ol' days of summer last year, when everything related to the game is bad news, even the good ones are said to be fake or "corporatiative speak", and small ones get exaggurated to infinity (e.g. Nerdy_Mike gets laid off but will stay until late June, the first gets mentioned a lot while the second part gets ignored).

[herbal space program]

I am not going to lose hope either,  but the tale stitched together by @ShadowZone paints a pretty bleak picture of both the magnitude of the sunk costs  required to get to where we are now and the prospects for pulling the game out of the ditch it's currently in without sinking a bunch more costs.  Nonetheless, I still believe that in the long run, a KSP2 that performs adequately and meets all the milestones of Nate's roadmap would make those costs back and more.  But perusing TT's current earnings statement makes it pretty clear that they badly need to cut costs, especially on projects that are not going to be in the black anytime soon, so I don't expect they'll devote anything close to the level of effort they've put into it until now for the foreseeable future. Still, I think they are closer to having  a truly viable title than many of the biggest pessimists here assert, and that eventually they will pick it up again and try to make another go of it. I just hope I will not have succumbed to senile dementia by then.

Edited May 28 by herbal space program

[Bej Kerman]

On 5/24/2024 at 4:08 PM, Vl3d said:

The game is very close to being great and innovative. I think a lot of the work for the Colonies update has been completed and that update will bring new life into the IP. I see the current T2 situation as a decision to mend course and continue development with a smaller team over a larger number of years - and as the game picks up speed again, hiring will resume. I do not believe in any way that the game will be canceled - its already fun and has a lot of potential, and a lot of the foundational work has already been completed.

It's not impossible for T2 to get another studio to maintain the game so they can pass it off as 'not cancelled', but I wouldn't place any bets on the game being revolutionary. Right now, the game's code sits on years of poor decisions and issues, and it's a bit out there to expect that it can just be polished off. It'd be like Squad coming back to KSP 1 so it can dredge onwards for another half decade. I'd expect colonies at most given that work has been shown off for the update and that there's evidence of maintenance being done on branches of the game.

[Scarecrow71]

On 5/24/2024 at 8:08 AM, Vl3d said:

The game is very close to being great and innovative. I think a lot of the work for the Colonies update has been completed and that update will bring new life into the IP. I see the current T2 situation as a decision to mend course and continue development with a smaller team over a larger number of years - and as the game picks up speed again, hiring will resume. I do not believe in any way that the game will be canceled - its already fun and has a lot of potential, and a lot of the foundational work has already been completed.

I think you've got a better chance of seeing God walk by in a skirt.

[dprostock]

On 5/24/2024 at 12:08 PM, Vl3d said:

The game is very close to being great and innovative. I think a lot of the work for the Colonies update has been completed and that update will bring new life into the IP. I see the current T2 situation as a decision to mend course and continue development with a smaller team over a larger number of years - and as the game picks up speed again, hiring will resume. I do not believe in any way that the game will be canceled - its already fun and has a lot of potential, and a lot of the foundational work has already been completed.