Everyone seems to love shitting on KSP2, when the same people forget what KSP1 was like in Alpha. No science, shitty graphics, excessively wobbly rockets, inconsistent orbits, (other than graphics) seems familiar?
It took a looooong time for KSP1 to get where it is now, it will also take awhile for KSP2 to be as polished.
KSP1 was made by a bunch of scrappy lovable indie devs making their first game (iirc Squad's team was a marketing company prior to this?) in a LCOL area funded by dreams and whatever $10 early access sales they made on steam, with no-one to tell them what to do.
KSP2 is made by TTWO, who is a publicly traded AAA studio of notable fame and decades of legacy and domain expertise.
If Squad sold KSP1's IP to TTWO and then went and made "KSP2" under a new name with their squad-sale money, that would be a different story. But even with that goodwill, I would still not be believing in the current KSP2 ever being a success story.
> KSP2 is made by TTWO, who is a publicly traded AAA studio of notable fame and decades of legacy and domain expertise.
KSP2 was made by indie devs (Star Theory) hired by T2
They just... failed.. they negotiated budget, failed to deliver, negotiated another bigger one, failed to deliver again, and T2 said "fuck it", took IP from them and created studio to develop it.
ST actually wanted to sell out to KSP2 after that disaster but they basically chose to poach ST developers instead, because why you'd buy a company where management now failed to deliver on promised goals twice.
My guess is ST either bite more than they could chew or purposefuly lowballed T2.
But the people they poached included the management which was perhaps the worst decision that T2 made when they created Intercept Games.
Furthermore, looking at the demos presented in 2019, it's not clear that much progress was made between then and now.
The complete stall since early access release (7 months with just a handful of hotfixes) and lack of feature delivery suggests that IG don't have the competency to deliver.
That, or they moved all their staff to their other "unnamed title" they're hiring for and have KSP2 on the most minimum of developers to pretend they're making progress toward their roadmap.
> But the people they poached included the management which was perhaps the worst decision that T2 made when they created Intercept Games.
Huh, didn't knew that. I only heard that "most" people came over.
But yeah full price EA into absolute shitshow of a game doesn't bode well.
> That, or they moved all their staff to their other "unnamed title" they're hiring for and have KSP2 on the most minimum of developers to pretend they're making progress toward their roadmap.
That would be weird, what makes the Take2 management think they can deliver something else competently ....
Being an original Alpha owner, prior to Steam even, I think many people forget it was ~$10 and that came without any overpromising by the development studio.
The two releases are nothing alike and if KSP 2 intended to use the same release model it should have either been dirt cheap or not released for many years. As it stands now it comes off as a massive grift and deserves the hate.
KSP2 was sold as a way to fix the mistakes and limitations of KSP1. It's a given that people would expect KSP2 to be on a better trajectory rather than repeating the same mistakes, overpromising and overcharging.
We could even just look at reentry heating, which was supposedly almost done, over 6 months later and even just that is nowhere to be seen. If that's taking them so long, how are they ever going to deliver the rest of their promises? Many of which there are serious technical questions about the feasibility of (eg multiplayer).
Except KSP was cheap (I got it for $9 IIRC, which was good value) when still in beta. KSP2 is $50 for the same level of beta, after years of development and drama. Don't chill, don't buy this crap until it gets better.
When KSP 1 shipped its alpha, there wasn’t a perfectly functional KSP 0 it was competing against. From what I’ve heard, they’re using the KSP 1 engine (restricting how much better they can make things) but are somehow shipping with many of the KSP 1 features missing. So it’s kind of a Worst Of Both Worlds situation.
Until KSP 2 achieves feature parity with KSP 1, I don’t see any reason why I should buy it.
Seems like the developers forgot too, since we have 10+ years of lessons learned and here we are starting from the same place making the same mistakes all over again.
KSP1 had (AFAIK) a cheaper dev team with no demanding publisher and a good reputation that brought a steady stream of money during alpha. If they progress at the speed of KSP1 from this point, they are going to get cut.
So you're saying the KSP2 devs had the benefit of being able to look at the past mistakes and issues of their predecessor, and still failed to learn from it?
Stop defending the billion dollar corporations, please.
I don't give a shit about T2, really. I only care about the concept of Kerbal Space Program, the mere fact it is getting attention at all is shocking, let alone from a AAA game studio (for better or for worse there). The heads of some of the best mods of KSP1 are in the dev teams, it seems to be getting the attention it needs to succeed in the long run.
But what's the end game for KSP2, where KSP1 is today?
Speaking form a software development perspective, I don't see it improving beyond that point, or if that's even possible at all. For all KSP2 promised to improve the physic engines of KSP1, it has seemingly came up with a foundation that is significantly worse, not sure what you can do when your underlying engine has severe limitations.
It took a looooong time for KSP1 to get where it is now, it will also take awhile for KSP2 to be as polished.
Chill out.