Does anyone else feel as if they saw this coming?

[cocoscacao]

8 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

That's when I realize the game was creatively and technologically bankrupt.

This isn't a specific reply to you @PDCWolf. Everyone here mentioned studio change, some comment on performance issues, and yours is on new features. KSP has bigger complexity than an average shooter. There's no game engine optimized for things it wanted to do... Maybe building one is impossible.

The real question is, which company would invest into game like this, when the market for it isn't exactly big.

[attosecond]

5 hours ago, tam_kaur said:

Hello there @Kernel Kraken

It is totally natural to have doubts about the direction of KSP 2, especially with Take-Two's involvement and the departure of the original team. Many in the community shared similar concerns. While recent events may confirm those worries, let's remember to respect the developers' efforts and stay hopeful for the game's future.

.... said the new user making his/her/their 2nd post ever. Possibly a TTI troll attempting to deflect/defuse/obfuscate further? Surely not a seasoned KSP vet...

[PDCWolf]

34 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:

This isn't a specific reply to you @PDCWolf. Everyone here mentioned studio change, some comment on performance issues, and yours is on new features. KSP has bigger complexity than an average shooter. There's no game engine optimized for things it wanted to do... Maybe building one is impossible.

The real question is, which company would invest into game like this, when the market for it isn't exactly big.

Nah. I've played games that push engines further than Kerbal does. Maybe you can't have all features be as in depth, but KSP2 should definitely not be an indication of "what is possible" since whatever we have is built on the hacked together foundations of a prototype assembled with "looked at" code from the prequel and a team literally composed of amateurs.

Also, there's no need to put shooters down. Whilst shooters certainly don't include orbital mechanics, they're projects just as complex to build and execute correctly. Some have features the level of them would put a myriad of other games, even outside the genre, to shame. What shooters do have is the advantage of being a popular genre, and the living proof that competition really needs to be healthy to produce results. In the early days, you could see revolutionary titles raising above each other (and the endless sea of doom clones): Doom trumped Wolfenstein, Quake trumped Doom, Half-Life trumped Quake, Counter-Strike opened a branch into competitive multiplayer whilst Medal of Honor and Call of Duty at first continued battling it out as narrative shooters. Then CoD and Battlefield moved over to big scale battles and battled there, whilst Counter-Strike alternatives opened up the hero shooter genre. And so on and so forth until today we have a shooter for pretty much every single combination of tastes you can imagine.

Meanwhile, in the lego-like rocket building spacesim genre, A single big company bought out the only product that worked, whilst the competition struggles with personality or outright branches into the mobile space to not compete. They failed at creating a worthy sequel and so after 10 years we're left with literally nothing.

If there's anything the gaming industry should teach you, is that the market is always big. People will play literally any type of game and enjoy it so far as it is good:

• Palworld was a janky mess mixing some very classic survival elements with Pokemon-like creature management, it's the fastest sold indie in history and on the ranks for best sold game ever, at over 25 million copies sold.
• Rimworld is a very opinionated colony sim where the graphics are so simplistic the only step down is dwarf fortress with a tile-set. It sold about 4 million copies on Steam alone.
• Kerbal Space Program (1) was an amateur "we'll add as we go" project that vastly outgrew its initial goals. It wasn't made by professionals and didn't see any proper professional until very close to release. The game doesn't even have proper tutorials, but has sold over 5 million copies.
• Battlebit was pretty much an attempt to recreate the fun side of Battlefield type big battle shooters, with graphics that barely matched the lowest quality Roblox games. It sold about 4 million copies on Steam alone.
• Terraria is a 2d demake of the voxel survival concept, but incorporates elements of RNG item farming, and RPG elements too with a rich item progression system. Another best seller at 44+ million copies.

And the list can definitely be made longer, but the point stands. If the game is good, it can have tons of flaws, and it'll still sell like hot cakes. KSP2 didn't fail because the technology isn't there or because it is a "niche product", it failed because it's uninspired, amateur-assembled garbage that only ever sold copies because it had a 4 years long hype campaign. Some people were ready to eat proverbial dirt to give it a chance and failed to even reach that bar except for like 100 people.

Sorry, I didn't reply to your original question at all. Here it is:
Give the IP to the Factorio studio. Strong track record of staying compromised with their project, outright love for what they do, and a fair pricing scheme.

Edited June 5 by PDCWolf

[cocoscacao]

55 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Nah. I've played games that push engines further than Kerbal does. Maybe you can't have all features be as in depth, but KSP2 should definitely not be an indication of "what is possible"

Not what KSP 2 is, but what it wanted to be. I still don't see how so many systems could be simulated under TW. Regardless which engine is used. Even if you exclude multiplayer stuff.

[PDCWolf]

27 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:

Not what KSP 2 is, but what it wanted to be. I still don't see how so many systems could be simulated under TW. Regardless which engine is used. Even if you exclude multiplayer stuff.

That might actually be the feature that killed the game. They designed the save serialization and offloaded vessel simulation around thrust under warp. They even designed the game's logical flow around it, so every scene is actually a flight scene (KSP1 did similar, but it could offload vessels so the KSC and VAB don't lag), and then they found out having every part simulated for every vessel at every moment, even when they were under thrust, wasn't a good idea.

Or maybe they didn't even realize, considering Nate wanted colony buildings to have physics.

[dave1904]

When they first delayed it by 2 years after they announced it being 6 months from being released I knew that they had people making calls that had no idea what they wanted. 

People are excellent at lying to themselves. So many people wanted it so much that they ignored the obvious red flags. 

[Scarecrow71]

To directly answer the OP's original question, which is "Did anyone see this mess coming":  Yes, I did.

To be fair, I wasn't really paying attention to much during the original development period.  I didn't know much about what happened with Squad, or Star Theory, or with creating a new studio that poached some of the original ST developers.  I didn't really get on the hype train, or do any deep dives into trailers or news articles or even dev blogs here on the forums.  I was aware that KSP2 was coming, and I was pretty stoked that we were going to get a sequel to a game I love.  But during that lead-up, I kind of just let things fall where they may, knowing that I'd be on-board the day it dropped.

The day it dropped, I picked it up about 2 hours after initial launch.  I wanted to let the internet cool off from everyone buying the game, and I had meetings that morning anyhow.  But I picked it up, and I started playing it...and I was more than a little disappointed.  Poor performance, no heat management, no career mode, no science.  Wobbly rockets, major bugs, and (in my own opinion) horrible graphics/UI.  Sure, I could launch and get into orbit...but not much beyond that.  I had to fight with the controls to keep a rocket on a steady course, for SAS was of no help.  And we were told that this is how it was going to be - rockets would wobble, SAS would no longer correct for you.  We were given a whole sub-forum here to point out bugs and issues, and one of the users (I think it was @linuxgurugamer?) crafted a bug reporting add-on that grabbed up all of the relevant information you needed in order to submit a bug report that was useful.

And then the real problems started.  The bug reports sub-forum was a mess to sift through, the search function wasn't responding as it should, and the amount of bugs in initial launch made it really difficult to play the game.  We got a couple posts from the devs, and an AMA with Nate that left me a bit...underwhelmed, I guess is the right word.  They used Howard Jones' "Things Can Only Get Better" as the backdrop music for that AMA, and it was during his Q&A in this thing that I knew right away that this was not going to get better, and things were only going to get worse.  I tried to keep hope, but something in me said things weren't going well, and that it would either be a really long time before they got better...or they simply weren't going to get better at all.

It took 2+ months from initial launch to get the first patch, and things didn't get better.  It was after that patch that I literally started posting out here that things were bad, that they weren't going to get better, and I started asking what happened to all that development time and money they spent, and where was all the stuff they promised us.  In fact, the roadmap they gave us said they would be giving us updates and patches and stuff quickly, but they were now dragging their feet.  And to top it all off, it seemed like the bug reports subforum wasn't being monitored, the biggest bugs always needed "more research", and all we started to get were pictures of shiny graphics and animations that may or may not make it into the game.  I think it was grid-fins that people thought "Wow!" over, but I literally posted "Quit giving us the shinies; just make the game work".

So yeah, it was right around that first patch, 0.1.1, where I said "this is going nowhere".  Didn't help that they decided to put the game on sale shortly thereafter.

[Pthigrivi]

Edit, deleting out of courtesy. It doesn’t really matter at this point. 

Edited June 6 by Pthigrivi

[Superfluous J]

I can't speak for the game in general but I knew it would NEVER entice me as much as KSP did. The only way to achieve that is to wipe my memory of playing KSP1 so I could relearn all the steps over again. It'd probably be good to also de-age me a decade or more because I'm not 100% sure I've got the patience these days for learning all this.

I think the fatal flaw of KSP2 is the same fatal flaw of KSP1: Once you know how to do everything, no matter what you do it'll always be a bit of that same-old, same-old.

I was hoping KSP2 would get something KSP1 didn't have before it was canceled. I was hoping that the colonies would give me a reason to do things I've done a thousand times before. But I seriously doubted it would.

And I had those doubts long before KSP2 was even announced - but about new features of KSP1.

Edited June 6 by Superfluous J

[PDCWolf]

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Edit, deleting out of courtesy. It doesn’t really matter at this point. 

It still notified me that this included a quote of my post.

[Siska]

Yes, after EA release i totally saw it comming. Maybe i ranted angry on forum too much.  

I still hoped and waited for patches, but 6 months after release, game had game breaking bugs. At that point i was disappointed and made here that we should all make refund requests.

I was dismissed as being negative  hahah

Somehow, some people are blaiming the community for game failure, because we were not supporting it enough.

[Codraroll]

I can't say I saw it coming, but I certainly wasn't optimistic.

The initial trailer really excited me. It seemed to promise all these cool features I'd been wanting from KSP1 for the longest time. However, I skipped the game at launch, because it frankly looked too unfinished at that stage of development to entice me. I mean, it had nothing to offer that KSP1 didn't, it required a beefier PC, and it was riddled with too many bugs. "Better stick to KSP1 for now, or play something else!", I thought. "It will probably be better once development gets to the juicy bits."

And then development ... did not get to the juicy bits. I didn't follow development that closely, but I got the impression that the game's state as a KSP1 clone with prettier graphics didn't change. It still had debilitating bugs that KSP1 didn't. Development seemed to focus on squashing bugs that KSP1 had solved years ago, adding a few new parts, or making the graphics prettier. But where were the new planets, the interstellar engines, the colonies? Where was all the fancy stuff from the trailer that would elevate the gameplay to a level KSP1 couldn't match? Where were the reasons to buy another KSP game?

Shortly before the news of cancellation dropped, I concluded that the game had a long way to go. Development seemed to be stuck in the "trying to fix the basics" stage, while the new features that would make the game interesting were nowhere to be seen. I had some hopes of seeing at least a preliminary version of that in the colonies update, however. But the cancellation came before that could happen. I wonder how close they really were to deliver a feature that would make this game stand apart from its predecessor. I suspect "nowhere close at all".

[Pthigrivi]

4 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

It still notified me that this included a quote of my post.

Im being nice. Consider my thoughts retracted. 

[PDCWolf]

8 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Im being nice. Consider my thoughts retracted. 

Nah, your thoughts are still there. Go ahead, express yourself. There's no game anymore so there isn't much point to this section of the forum anyways, and I expose my opinions so others might look at them and engage in conversation whether they agree or not. I do not expect everyone to agree or my voice to be taken as the herald of truth, as I know I've been wrong sometimes. Plus, it's not like I don't get a good idea of which parts of my point you might be against.

[Pthigrivi]

42 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Nah, your thoughts are still there. Go ahead, express yourself. There's no game anymore so there isn't much point to this section of the forum anyways, and I expose my opinions so others might look at them and engage in conversation whether they agree or not. I do not expect everyone to agree or my voice to be taken as the herald of truth, as I know I've been wrong sometimes. Plus, it's not like I don't get a good idea of which parts of my point you might be against.

No my criticism was unfair. I believe I called you Denethor haha

[Kernel Kraken]

On 6/5/2024 at 2:39 AM, tam_kaur said:

Hello there @Kernel Kraken

It is totally natural to have doubts about the direction of KSP 2, especially with Take-Two's involvement and the departure of the original team. Many in the community shared similar concerns. While recent events may confirm those worries, let's remember to respect the developers' efforts and stay hopeful for the game's future.

I do respect all of the developers’ work over the years! I mentioned so in the first few lines of my post. Game developers have to be both an engineer and an artist: creating concepts to express their ideas, creating the tools to make those concepts work, and making sure they’ll resonate with an audience. As an independent musician, I can sympathize with the artist half of a developer team’s work- and how it’s often at least somewhat impeded by your publishing company/marketing firm/record label- depending on your chosen profession, of course. Developers have another job, having to create many the tools they need to build the game in the first place. I can’t imagine what life as a musician would be like if in order to get a certain sound I liked, I had to hand-build more equipment for myself (well, I have done that, but it’s much less common than in software .) I’m incredibly grateful that a sequel was in the works in the first place, and grateful for a dev team that was as community interactive as they were! My gripe is with the publisher. I hope to see the IP find a new home someday

[Fizzlebop Smith]

Most the red flags predate my discovery of the franchise. I cannot say as to what signs were in evidence prior to late 2021.

The warning flags that had me concerned from the very begining

1) Marketing - There was not enough Cinematic footage of actually gameplay to support the level of marketing. Wonder what kind of paper Shadow / Matt must have signed to praise such garbage at the demos.

This isn't a red flag outright. KSP1 is still one of the most popular game when you combine various filters like Realistic Space Sim and sold well over 4.5 million copies. I understand a massive marketing campaign. Those that achieve the desired effect are usually related to products that have been tested / been through focus groups.

2) Nate Simpson - People will quickly point out that no individual had sole power over developement as a whole, that there was no Engineering Director to Balance the Creative.

There is a particular kind of danger in those middle manager at the top of their particular hierarchy. Those individuals responsible for communicating the various big decisions / info up the pipeline.

I wonder if there were conversations like "Nah, I got this.  No need for more engineers. Visuals will sell the game!"

Aside from that personal dislike, the disconnect at launch day was glaringly suggestive. Sale were way less than stellar. Responses from "team" regarding Timewarp, Wobble, Maneuver Node, Font, UI made it painfully obvious that community feedback should not impede the "vision"

3) For Science - Was praised. I dislike the majority of this update. It was NOT the bridging of science & career ( I will not go into depth about career being science+ ) The Missions & Tech Tree progression turned a beautiful structured sandbox into a linear orbital simulator. A phrase I stole (w/ permission) from steam "I used to be an adventurer that explored the Cosmos, now I am just a throttle jockie looking for the next killroy was here statue.

The humor I fell in love with was taken to the Mun. What was once quirky and cute got an extra dose of silliness with some campiness tacky glued on top. Want to play with plane parts? Too Bad.

They took a game with no wrong approach & devised a "right way to play" for the rest of us to follow along

4) Lack of Real Substantive Communications - Yep

5) Silencing of Dissent - From launch day until 3 or so months after FS dropped, the majority of my negative commentary was disproportionately denounced. 

Complaining about Tech Tree, Mission Progression or other minor things would result in heated defense of the game. If I spoke out about Deviation from Previosuly Established Features & Gameplay loops the oppositional stance would often end with personal attack of some sort.

Discord, Steam & This forum were all Echo chamber heralding the many amazing aspects I failed to see. I was informed many times "if I only played the game correctly, I would have more fun"

Now many of those same opinions are shared by a decent number of those still active. Many still disagree, but number among group willing to debate instead of repeat "it's so much better than KSP1"

6) Biggest Red Flag Of All - I was not willing to spend the money on it. It never reached a state where I felt the price was justified.

I own a copy of KSP2, but was fortunate to receive it for free. The coworker I share an office with is a good friend. I gifted this person KSP1.

Between the dated graphics and steep learning curve... the liked it, but never really got hooked like me. Enter KSP2 early access and said friend is a staunch fan of the franchise.

 

When I first learned of KSP2, I was excited for the prospect of near future tech and interstellar. I thought there was a real chance of getting orbital shipyards. I wanted to build a 1000 part generation ship & preparing for the slow burn through the void.

I can barely run with a 250 part rocket in KSP2 without excessive lag... much less a 1000 parts. 

[WatchClarkBand]

18 hours ago, Fizzlebop Smith said:

I wonder if there were conversations like "Nah, I got this.  No need for more engineers. Visuals will sell the game!"

I assure you that I was begging for more full time engineers.

[Fizzlebop Smith]

2 hours ago, WatchClarkBand said:

I assure you that I was begging for more full time engineers.

I'm in no doubt that more engineers were needed.. just doubting certain  people's willingness to stress the true importance of that.

The hypothetical conversation I imagine is between Nate and others. 

I say this only bc of my own experience with middle management.

The individual responsible for staffing my department received a bonus proportionate to how much of a budget WAS NOT being spent. 

I know this is not analogous, merely a testament to the power of mismanagement.

When I put in a letter of resignation, my bosses boss conducted the interview. I was informed that he had been assured many times that we did not need extra personnel. Our ability to maintain a level of excellence was a testament to this.

I informed my bosses boss it was due to a couple key individuals disproportionately sharing the extra workload. I learned Via rumor mill / LinkedIn that my bosses boss... fired my boss.

Edited June 9 by Fizzlebop Smith

[TheSaint]

I decided at the outset not to buy the game until they released 1.0. Which was not true of KSP1, I bought KSP1 about 2 hours after I started playing the demo back in 2013. I actually trusted a bunch of amateur yahoos in Mexico City to make a better game than a bunch of corporate professionals in New York City. What does that tell you? And really, the turning point on KSP2 for me was when they announced that there was no money in the game. I kinda said, "Uh, okay. This is never going to be a better game than KSP1 for me." Even though I never use Funds in my games, I'm always in Sandbox mode. It just told me that the developer's view of reality was never going to align with my view of reality. At that point I was 95% certain I was never going to invest one red cent into KSP2. And, well, here we are. YMMV.

[herbal space program]

When it first came out, I was pretty taken aback, but by the end I felt like they were actually fairly close to having a solid foundation upon which to build a new and better Kerbalverse. Maybe the performance issue was ultimately  insurmountable, but outside of that it seemed to me like they were on the right track in a lot of ways. It's really sad we'll probably never know what they might have been able to make of it after another year or two. especially since there's probably quite a bit of artistic content that was just waiting for a more tenable substrate.

[Lisias]

Speaking frankly...

None of the alleged problems was a deal breaker for me, no matter how bad they looked. I'm a seasoned software developer, and more than once I did things similar - delivered alpha versions of the software absolutely terribly looking, but with things done right under the bonnet (at that time, I was still believing they are coding everything from scratch), and then adding the bells and whistles at the last moment on the last beta, when only small visual glitches would be needed to be fixed because the internal mechanics were ironed out already.

The only real red alert was the pricing: this is not how you do Early Access, this is not how you reward your user base for doing free work for you (beta testing and development feedback).

This was the deal breaker for me: if it looks as a scam, smells like a scam and behaves like a scam, it should be a scam - or at least, something pretty near one.

Things slowly and gradually starting to fall in their place as the patches were applied only reassured me I was initially right: the thing was rushed into the wild by a management decision - what hinted the project was risking getting doomed (or already being) by mismanagement.

The game being dumbed down was a show stopper for me for sure, but it didn't meant that the game would be a failure - it only meant I would not buy it.

There're good things on KSP2, there're real improvements over the sequel - they could had succeed under a saner environment (even if by delivering a game I would not like - I would not be their only customer, after all).

Edited June 9 by Lisias
Yeah, tyops...

[GluttonyReaper]

19 hours ago, Lisias said:

The game being dumbed down was a show stopper for me for sure, but it didn't meant that the game would be a failure - it only meant I would not buy it.

There're good things on KSP2, there're real improvements over the sequel - they could had succeed under a saner environment (even if by delivering a game I would not like - I would not be their only customer, after all).

Right, in truth the bar was pretty low - all they really had to do was make a game that felt like a substantial improvement over KSP1, which given how ramshackle the first game was could have been entirely achievable. I do genuinely think that "KSP1 but better-looking and more coherent" with a few new toys to play with genuinely could have been pretty successful: one thing that I don't think anyone was really criticising was how more accessible KSP2 was, through tutorials and such, which I imagine would have been quite attractive to people who struggled to get into the very sandbox-y first game.

In truth the alarm bells for me only really went off when Early Access hit... going from a projected 2020 full release to a 2023 (very) Early Accesss release clearly meant something had gone wrong. But it was actually Nertea's blog post that really pushed me to "oh, this is in real bad shape", although not for the reasons some did (I actually really liked what he was talking about there!). What was specifically concerning was that they were still doing lots of 'big picture' planning, and that clearly no-one knew how big features like colonies or even heating were actually going to work practically for the longest time. I still don't know much about game development, so I don't know how typical that it is at that stage of development, but even then it felt like a full 1.0 release was still multiple years out.

Edited June 10 by GluttonyReaper

[Lisias]

6 hours ago, GluttonyReaper said:

In truth the alarm bells for me only really went off when Early Access hit... going from a projected 2020 full release to a 2023 (very) Early Accesss release clearly meant something had gone wrong.

Not unheard on this Industry - or any other. Sometimes Real Life© just run over us. Perhaps on wishful thinking, I wondered that perhaps they got themselves on a dead end on the code, decided to throw the whole crapload into the trash bin and restart from scratch (I did it once on a big budget project - the manager wanted to kill me, but the rest of the team concluded I was right and backed me... Interesting times... ).

And then the Pandemonium happened, and everything got belly up for months. I take a month or two away from TweakScale, and not rarely I need to toy with the thing for a week or two to remember why and how I did some things (did I implemented that feature already? Funny things happens when I didn't but assume I did), what to say on a huge project like that?

 

6 hours ago, GluttonyReaper said:

But it was actually Nertea's blog post that really pushed me to "oh, this is in real bad shape", although not for the reasons some did (I actually really liked what he was talking about there!). What was specifically concerning was that they were still doing lots of 'big picture' planning, and that clearly no-one knew how big features like colonies or even heating were actually going to work practically for the longest time.

The "Game Over" for me was when I (as usual) got a argument with someone that looked like a developer, and knew enough from the code to make plausible they was a KSP2 dev.

It was when I learnt that the whole heat system on KSP2 was based on the stunt implemented on the KSP¹'s ISRU in parallel with the CoreHeat (is this the real name?) that implements Convection, Conduction and Radiation. I got liquided by learning it, because this dumbed down the most interesting and challenging problems on space faring... But, whatever, as I said before, they just had lost me as a customer - what probably would make some people around here pretty happy. (like Val, that would not be barbecued again!)

However, what worried me is that the dude didn't knew about the CoreHeat, so they didn't knew how parts behaved on reentry, while getting heated by atmosphere friction, you name it!!! And with this happening late 2023, at least a month after the For Science! update, this would mean that they could dumbed down the game into a corner because they just didn't planed how to implement some very significant challenges on a space simulator. And by now, it's too late to another rewrite if they really got themselves on that corner.

Edited June 10 by Lisias
Entertaining grammars made slightely less entertaining...