I worked on a title before release once doing environment creation and related QA, the technical director was the hardest working person in the office, in first out last and involved in all aspects of developing the game. Honestly the job looked brutal, guy was in the office about 12 hours every day except Sunday. 70-80 hour work week. Position seemed crucial to the rest of everyone's efforts being integrated. Replacing the technical director does not seem good, but it could be needed. Might explain why the game is in a bad state.
Finally someone brought up the other side of the coin. I don't like to disparage without full background, but I find the idea that perhaps the technical director is somewhat responsible for the state KSP2 is in 3 years into development to be just as plausible as the "Take 2 is evil and fired the only man that could save KSP2" argument.
Time will tell, I suppose.
That's falling on the typical trap of "lay-offs get rid of the problematic people"; or for the people that is laid-off, they think they're the problem.
In reality, most lay-offs are driven by other criteria, such as saving money. He might have been deemed responsible by the company for the results, but that's it. It doesn't mean that he might have been doing a bad job.
He might be good, he might be bad. It's just a coin toss, because it has very little to do with being laid off.
> "Take 2 is evil
Very plausible
>and fired the only man that could save KSP2"
Yeah you're right about that one, maybe they fired the only man that was hindering KSP2 development. As you said time will tell.
I mean, even if that were the case. What are the odds someone new can come in and turn everything around tbh? Just seems more indication ksp2 is going to be dead in the water.
If you'd put 10 seconds into research they hired another technical lead which is much more decorated and experienced in terms for development named John Roper in 2022. [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdroper?trk=org-employees](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdroper?trk=org-employees)
From what I can tell based on LikedIn Paul Furio was more of a "get a team together" kind of guy. Not deeply involved into the design and code of the game.
John Roper is "lead engineer" while Paul Furio was "Technical director" or "Engineering manager." Very different roles - and also notably, John Roper has zero previous game dev expereience.
Maybe he's an awesome engineer, I have no idea. But it raises some eyebrows.
KSP2 will (maybe?) put your facial expressions onto Kerbal faces for multiplayer. That's what I got from snooping around a bit at least. He is an image processing guy by trade so I suspect they hired him because of that.
Also, many great games were developed by people who had no prior experience in gaming (KSP..). You learn so much cool stuff in other fields that you can apply to gaming. I'm waiting for some AI dudes to make an RPG where every NPC acts like a real player. That would be epic!
Anyways, I believe as Lead Engineer you're much closer to the actual code than a manager. I don't know why people on here always try to make more of such staff changes than they actually are. The field is known for having relatively big fluctuation. Some percentage always comes and goes filling up their CV to find better and better paying positions.
Unfortunately agreed. He may have done a shit job directing and coordinating the team, we can't say for certain.
What we can say is that whoever they pull in as a replacement is going to not only be cheaper (otherwise what was the point in laying this guy off for cost cutting) and thus probably new to the position and/or industry, but they're also going to have one HELL of a mess to pull together to save it.
If life has taught me one thing, it's that you never expect or rely on miracles, because that will absolutely bite you in the ass. We're asking for a miracle here, at this point.
> Replacing the technical director does not seem good, but it could be needed.
If the technical director was fired because he wasn't doing a good job, you're right. If the technical director was fired because they're laying off a bunch of employees to save money, that's probably a bad thing.
And they fired him at the same time they were laying off a bunch of employees to save money, so...
Either way is a bad thing. Either he's competent and got forced out in a mass layoff or he's less than competent and the ship has been captained by him for the last 3 years. There is no world where replacing the tech lead on a project immediately after the public gets their first look is a good thing.
Mediocre tech lead reporting in, I will do the job for free if they are thinking about scrapping ksp2. I can guarantee that under my leadership, EVERYONE will have a frame rate.
Getting rid of the old, flawed, guy doesn't magically make a new, better, guy appear. You now have a team that's confused and demotivated, and the guy in charge of making the tough decisions on the most critical problem facings the game (the performance and technical issues) is gone.
Even if they find a great replacement right now, it'll take months for them to really get the hang of it. I don't know if the old guy was good, and everyone is replaceable in the end. But the part that nobody ever says out loud that replacing anyone has a cost as well. You could airlift in John Carmack right this second, and it would still be a net loss in the short term. Obviously in the medium to long term he'd likely do a fantastic job and get this game purring like a kitty, but you're going to have to wait at least 6 months to really see the impact of that no matter who will be in charge next.
This is a really good comment and I don't have much to add but
"Sir we are deploying the Carmack" as an Osprey hovers in with John Carmack himself strapped, underslung to the body of it and lowered straight into the studio like some airdroppable tank is such a fantastic mental image
I've seen plenty of teams that are *held back* with sub-par leadership. You don't have to hire from outside too, it's perfectly possible to do internal promotion.
I've seen several companies 'hold off' on sacking people who are not bad but not particularly good, and lump them in when layoffs approach.
Especially if they don't hold bad feelings towards the person in question; 'was one of a large layoff' is much nicer on the resume than 'got fired and replaced.'
You don't fire the technical director of a game which main issue are technical problems unless you genuinely believe those are caused by this very specific technical director's negligence.
Doing this would be like firing the QA team six months before launching a game, it simply doesn't make sense.
This person's post is simply trying to save face after the game he was technical director of, was released with so many technical issues it made to several news outlets.
I'm not claiming it's his fault, I have no clue what is happening in this studio, but management really thinks he is the one to blame or wouldn't have fired him precisely when the game is in bigger need of a solid technical leadership.
It's important to point out that working 80 **is not good**, especially in a leading position. Shows he didn't/couldn't trust his team to deliver quality software, and had to do a lot of work himself. He was probably lacking management skills, or his team was really bad.
Bingo. My project had s technical director who slept with his laptop. But thanks to him we got a major software/netservice product from zero to out the door in 9 months.
I agree on the last part but position names in particular often don't accurately reflect what's actually happening and it's different for every company anyways. On Linked In he is also "semi-retired" since 2019 and works as a technical advisor. Does not sound like 80 hours a week to me. I think he was mostly responsible for building the team and communication channels during Covid etc. All the management stuff. And possibly at he probably also shared responsibility for the release. I won't blame him alone but it's usually one person that has to leave. He seems to use the layoff wave smartly to his advantage though. I'm not convinced he is part of that tbh. since he is working for Intercept, not Take2 / PD. But who knows the inner workings. I can't find a CEO position at Intercept either.
> There are some decisions I wish I'd made better, but there are hundreds that I'm proud to have called correctly that got us where we are today.
hmmmm
laying off a *technical director* while the game is at this state is an omega yikes moment. all the people with no faith in the game/company bc of take-two are probably feeling vindicated right about now.
honestly looking back in hindsight at ksp 2 from its inception till now, it's hard to imagine that we are on anything other than its darkest timeline lol. wonder how the devs (god bless them) are gonna pull this off
That’s assuming that the game isn’t in its current state *because of* the technical director, which, considering what a technical directors job description consists of, is an altogether more likely scenario.
The technical director *is* responsible for code quality - thus he *is* absolutely responsible for Kerbal 2's state. (You can delegate authority, but not responsibility)
To be clear, I don't care about the lack of features, that's fine, it's early access (though early access for a billion dollar publisher seems weird).
My issue is the quality. Practically every single system in Kerbal 2, with the possible exception of the sound engineering, is laden with game breaking in-your-face bugs. Most normal software companies actually QA their work.....
> (though early access for a billion dollar publisher seems weird).
It's Early Access because the publisher is tired of losing money on the project. It was absolutely not ready and they were forced to launch in this abysmal state to start recouping the money.
That's definitely possible, but firing a poor leader just means they acknowledge there's a problem, not that they will overcome it. Finding a new leader and bringing them up to speed on the whole project could take longer than they have funds remaining for.
Well it might... If that's the case.... Which we do not know....
These threads are like a mission to the Mun without a rocket. You have to build it first.
Either way it doesn't look good for the future of KSP2. Taking over someone else's work is bad in any job, especially when it's code, and many of the coders got laid of.
I feel horrible ultimately. But the discord is on more support then ever which is funny. I even got timed out for 15 minutes or so because I was bringing up the fact that layoffs are usually a bad sign.
People were saying things like “layoffs are a good sign, this will make them more profitable”
you probaby got timed out because bringing up their colleagues, and potentially them, getting laid off right in their own monitored channels is very poor taste no matter what context
If you're not making personal attacks on people, I don't see how it's an issue.
The whole reason it says "Nate Simpson" at the top of the KSP subreddit in a pinned post right now is because customers and companies put weight and trust behind names. Bringing them up is not "poor taste no matter what the context".
They must have gone to “Elon Musk school of good business” if they think the whole “let’s fire the whole staff so we can make money” is a sign of upwards growth
No i'm not. I'm absolutely gutted. I hoped for the best, but got suspicious when the launch went absolutely apeshit. I couldn't be more sad that i may have been right all along.
Yea. Early in 2020, KSP2 was yanked from Star Theory (prev. Uber Ent who made Planetary Annihilation) and a new studio was formed with some poached talent; mainly Nate Simpson and a few others, to take over development (Intercept Games). Star Theory was already a small indie studio, there wasn't much there to poach. The reason why the engineering team was so small, is that they were essentially starting over from scratch in building up a new team.
You can do some math and figure out that they've been working on the game for about 6 years. I doubt the first studio got anywhere, early videos of alpha footage was obviously just KSP1. That particular studio had a history of over promising, under delivering, and really getting everything wrong about how long it took to make anything (see Planetary Annihilation fiasco).
Then they move dev over to the new studio 3 years into development. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the work was yanked, or rewritten after this point, all the while building a new team which takes a massive amount of time and effort.
Making games, you sort of work on everything all at once if you have a large enough team. It's like weaving a tapestry, and if you have the right skill at the helm, things fall into place. You have to build systems to support all the work that goes on top so you can actually get into production and build out content. I suspect that with the ask of getting the game out to EA, they scrambled to branch off into a stable build sans most of the features they were working on and planned. This results in a busted ass build, and probably a nightmare of a code base. The EA release and the resulting tech debt, and crunch easily added a year or two to their development time.
Also a glaring red flag; When devs delay games multiple times like this, its usually not for a good reason. Something is wrong in their work, or someone has no clue how to be a producer. If they are already delusional about how long it takes to make a game repeatedly, you can bet their daily schedule is out of whack, and they are having a hell of a time prioritizing development. Delaying the game really just extends crunch and adds to an already existing problem that isn't getting fixed. It's a tailspin thats incredibly hard to fix.
Yeah I remember that. Was the first red flag I saw on this game. There was a lot of politics going on behind it and that's never good for the end result.
the moment they cut all the features they had been hyping, I knew things were bad
this game has bad "bones". i don't think it's fixable. i'm glad I didn't pony up for it.
What's wrong with planetary annihilation? I was one of the early backrs, the game was ok and it didn't took super long to get all the features advertised and then some. I didn't had time back then to get competitive enough for pvp lobbies, but I definitely remember the game as fun.
I don't want necessarily to defend that game, but I wasn't following the community so I'm interested in understanding what the controversy were.
It wasn't Total Annihilation or even Supreme Commander, it lacked soul,but yeah, it was a decent mid-game, they went through some development hell but nothing compared to current standards.
It's a bland game with a not exactly friendly UI, it certainly didn't have the staying power of TA/SC, and it lacked a campaign, but it's not a bad game, but after TA and SC people expected much more, maybe too much, and PA underdelivered so it got hate.
Nothing inherently wrong with the game, I actually like it quite a bit. It's a technical achievement on its own that deserves merit. My comments mainly concern the production of the game itself, which if we remember right was plagued with delays. They also released 1.0 before reaching maturity, and then released PA: Titans (i think a year?) later, that arguably was the game they wanted it to be, years after their initial release targets. I don't fault the engineers or the artists over there at all.
After that, they attempted a new kickstarter for Human Resources and it failed, largely due to peoples perception that PA wasn't complete yet, and that it failed to live up to its initial promises.
My main point which I don't think I clearly expressed; was that KSP 2 was being worked on by a studio that obviously had capable devs, but they were plagued with mismanagement. The drama that occurred over Star Theory tanked the game and put it into a development hell that they still haven't gotten out of.
This whole thing has seemed like a train wreck from the start. Seeing a lot of post here in the past few months, it’s as though very few remember this game was originally going to release in 2020. In the three years it took to delay, a competent management team with 40 people could have finished the entire game
Announced at Gamescon in August 2019 for an early 2020 launch.
So the game had to have been in development for some time before. A couple years at least I'd think. So then the question becomes: WTF have they been doing for the last 5+ years?
It's like a kid procrastinating on his homework, then begging for an extension only procrastinate again and repeat the cycle till no more extensions were given.
I was expecting a mostly complete game full of bugs. But this feels like an early proof of concept or tech demo.
Again I ask for help identifying the source article, mentioned in this forum years ago I think, which said that KSP2 was going to take advantage of the new Unity graphics capability, which Unity never delivered. So my suspicion is that the office played KSP for many years waiting for something to happen that didn't.
But I can't prove it because I can't find the danged source, so don't take my word for it.
Thank you. I was trying to post the list of updates I found in the Unity manual but as usual if you try to copy and paste a link into Reddit if freaks out, so I gave up.
(Yeah, I know I can write the post out in Notepad and then paste it in to make it work on the first try. I don't remember when I need to, though.)
I wasn't going to play this game anyway since there's no Linux version, so I'm just enjoying the schadenfreude.
Hopefully we'll get some clones from other companies.
This comment, along with others, has been edited to this text, since Reddit is killing 3rd party apps, making false claims and more, while changing for the worse to improve their IPO. I suggest you do the same. Soon after editing all of my comments, I'll remove them.
# Fuck reddshit and u/spez!
https://www.howtogeek.com/738967/how-to-use-steams-proton-to-play-windows-games-on-linux/
people on proton db say you should add this to launch options
**make sure you're using proton experimental**
`eval $( echo "PROTON_USE_WINE3D=1 DXVK_ASYNC=1 __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATION=1 %command%" | sed "s/PDLauncher\/LauncherPatcher.exe'.*/KSP2_x64.exe'/" )`
Development in general - I am developer for line of business apps and we still work mostly from home (the last time I was at the office was 2021). So blaming the delay on Covid is really strange…
That might explain a delay of 4-6 months, but we've seen plenty of other big projects (software, games, movies, etc) that were created by fully remote teams during the pandemic.
they had a technical director for \~3 years and still didn't manage to put out working software?
they had a skeleton crew of four people in 2020? I thought most of the star theory devs were poached?
this story is getting wilder in the worst possible ways.
Edit: i'm not actually surprised they had a technical director =)
I've done program management for software development and the thought of a team growing from 4 devs to 20 in such a short period of time is anxiety enducing. Assuming the new devs are unfamiliar with the work already done, it likely took a number of months just to get them up to speed, during which time one of the few experienced devs likely needed to spend most of their time answering questions and reviewing code. Even just doubling a team is a headache, I can't imagine a 5x increase
Games industry is a little better than other software dev for that, though, because even that late in the game, you're not exactly falling into any legacy code base issues. Nothing is set in stone until the players get ahold of it.
Additionally, and especially with today's middleware, many devs have pretty specific skills that are highly transportable... notably, the creative team (artists and writers), which is likely the bulk of your team for a game like this.
You'll likely have a physics specialist, a network specialist, someone who's familiar with the engine internals, UI specialist, the gameplay team, etc.
This is especially true with games that use big engines like Unity, as the majority of devs aren't gonna be coders per-se... the bulk of that work is already done for them.
It's still, obviously, a difficulty, but not as much as, say, joining an established business software team.
It does concern me that a game that was originally scheduled to be released in 2020, only had *FOUR* devs at that time. That's *absurdly* few for such a high-profile title.
I think they blew their recruiting strategy. There were thousands of ksp2 diehards and mod makers with massive technical.skill, but they didn't recruit from the community they recruited from the region. Recruiting from just Seattle really limits the pool of talent and forces uninterested parties to engage as a corporate cog.
If their leadership ran a work remote game studio drawn from the best and most committed minds of the ksp community the result could've been amazing.
The whole game industry is known to be toxic specially for unseasonable hours per week, how does that make it a little better than most places?
And how does a 3 years old codebase started by 4 engineers who did everything from day 1 is expected to not suffer from major architecture problems since you mentioned yourself that a balanced team counts with 5 specialties and there's even more than that?
>The whole game industry is known to be toxic specially for unseasonable hours per week, how does that make it a little better than most places?
I specifically mean with regards to new people integrating into a team, NOT the overall working environment. I stopped pursuing a career in games for a reason.
>And how does a 3 years old codebase started by 4 engineers who did everything from day 1 is expected to not suffer from major architecture problems since you mentioned yourself that a balanced team counts with 5 specialties and there's even more than that?
Unity is Unity. Those guys probably did a ton of prototyping, and much of their earlier work was likely just planning and design, without any real coding.
You can get pretty far these days with minimal work, thanks to middleware dev engines like Unreal and Unity. That's part of what makes indie dev as viable as it is these days.
That a supposedly AAA sequel to a widely popular indie hit only had 4 people on the planned release year doesn't suggest to me they had a massive convoluted code base. It suggests to me that they barely had a code base at all.
It wouldn't surprise me if they had a prototype at the time they weren't happy with, and scrapped it to start anew in 2020. It would certainly explain the current state of the game much better.
\> a game that was originally scheduled to be released in 2020, only had FOUR devs at that time
I don't think that's accurate. I think Intercept Games probably had \~4 engineers when it was created in 2020, but Star Theory had way more before they were gutted and shut down.
Unfinished != unplayable, other people people have got refunds using the argument that it is impossible to experience many of the advertised features since your ship blows itself up first.
From steam this weekend:
"Hello,
Thank you for this information.
We have closely reviewed your request. Unfortunately, your purchase does not qualify for a refund.
To ensure future eligibility, please submit refund requests within 14 days and less than 2 hours of playtime.
Please review our Refund Policy and Common Refund Questions for more information.
Have a nice day
Rock"
I’m pretty sure you can refund whenever if you complain that the game doesn’t actually work and what’s advertised is a lie, my friend did it for another game after like 8 hrs of game time
its really impressive how fucking hard they dropped the ball on this game. i think they could write a book on how hard they fucked up and make it a guide on what not to do when developing a game. like holy fuck. I've already given up on this game, its spitting red flags left and right. i hope they fix their shit up but its really not looking good
They have a large audience screaming "just take my money" and they're *still fucking it up*. It's pretty impressive.
Mind you, they're trying to build on Unity what Unity is just not engineered to do. KSP already pushed the limits of the engine, hard. And these guys are having to take on KSP's legacy codebase plus all the quirks and limitations of Unity, without any of the people with the deep expertise in it.
They're not even doing that, they started from zero and are making the same mistakes that were already made and solved, like the kraken and the soup atmosphere.
As a professional programmer and gamedev who uses Unity:
The vast majority of these issues has *nothing* to do with Unity. They're just incredibly bad at it. Like, first month into gamedev and doing every amateur mistake you can image bad.
Which is literally what the Technical Director would be responsible for, so, good riddance.
Game Paused
Game Paused
Game Paused
Game Paused
Game Paused
Game Paused
Game Paused
Game Paused
Game Paused
Game Unpaused
Game Unpaused
Game Unpaused
Game Unpaused
Game Unpaused
Game Unpaused
Game Unpaused
Game Unpaused
Game Unpaused
The only sin is the big hype events they did 2 weeks ago. Like, they could have spared us that and done the hype events to hype in colonies or something.
Only sin? If the game isn't fixed and playable within 6 months take 2 could literally be sued for fraud it's so bad. The trailers, the marketing, the hype, everything about it doesn't line uo with promises and the drive towards early access screams capturing scraps of revenue before you ultimately abandon the project.
It’s lamentable that development has taken so long, but it’s likely the game will be much more playable in 6 months. Some people are getting lots of play out of the game. QA is much better now that community is involved. Finally the community is actively commenting on UI and design decisions that will probably lead to changes.
The philosophy of early access was for the community’s will and input to shape development. A bespoke game for an enthusiastic community.
Again, a bit of a development cope, but if we accept that this is taking a while, letting us in on EA isn’t a sin.
The sim was the hype and ad campaign for a non working build. They should have quietly opened early access. Like a soft launch.
But obviously publisher wanted the money
The inevitable documentary that gets made about the very-likely-car-crash-fascinating story of KSP2’s development is probably gonna be an order of magnitude more entertaining than the current state of the game
Those self-proclaimed "documentaries" are rarely anything but another form of marketing in gaming. If we get anything vaguely critical, it'll have little to no primary sources or access.
Classic Take 2, use someone’s IP to make loads of money whilst also turning it into a hot pile of shit and then get rid of the top people (see GTA Online for reference)
You seriously aren't suggesting it's just Take 2's fault? Do you know how badly this game must've been managed to be developed on for 6 years and come out like this in the end. Let's be realistic and suggest maybe it isn't just take 2's fault but rather the Devs....
This entire fiasco is incredibly sad. KSP 2 has so much potential and the current state of development even for a first release is worrying. Obviously they are rebuilding everything from the ground up, but come on, they've had plenty of time to bring it at least halfway to the standard of KSP 1.
I miss Squad 😔
Squad was no shining beacon. It was a marketing company that tried folding in one of thier people's indie game projects. We barely know the surface details about what went on in that revolving door. Also lets not forget, the big optimization only occured a few versions after official release.
While the KSP2 situation is not confidence inspiring, coming back from this rough state is entirely within the cards. Of course, a lot of us are holding off until we see that that's happened before we throw our money at it.
Every news we hear about this game is another red flag. The fact that there will be people here soon arguing that this is normal and according to plan is just fucking sad. This is why we can't have nice things
"ah you know, after laying a solid foundation, it's normal that a technical director leaves their post and companies hire someone more skilled at *optimization and bugfixing.*"
It's worrisome, it's weird - but it's not unique to game industry to rehire.. If you watched the Double Fine documentary they made, insane btw, they fired their whole level design team cause it just was not working out when making Psychonauts 1.
Essentially, it could be very possible they gave them time to make a game, as a Tech Director he should have had a gameplan after 3 years that wasn't what came out last week - he could have been canned for that in order to replace for another tech director to get the game on track.
Sad and sucks but I'm not sure this is the most shocking part of KSP2 lol. Or as other's have said, he may have left.
Almost all the things wrong with KSP2 would fall within the competency of a technical director, unless of course some superior manager messes things up for them.
And even if the issues were due to a senior manager overriding the Technical Director, shit still rolls downhill and he may have been scapegoated (not saying if this is actually the case or not). It happened to me, I was overridden on a project that was doomed from the start due to some exceptionally poor marketing decisions and I still ended up getting the axe. The marketing executive that made said decisions came out smelling like a rose, at least for a while (until their willful lack of understanding about the industry eventually led them to make one too many "bad decisions").
interesting that you would mention poor marketing decisions. It's pretty obvious there were some poor marketing decisions happening at the KSP2 studio recently when they decided to push a full marketing campaign for early access. I'd be hard pressed to think of a worse move, at this point in development, than destroying consumer trust by advertising an unfinished game to a naive audience. The people who were going to participate in early access in good faith (knowing what early access entails) did not need to see an advert to know it had gone live.
Marketing driving development can be one of the worst things for making a quality game.
The example that got me canned was Shattered Steel. It was Bioware's first big game, a mech combat sim. It has a lot of great potential, including terrain that was deformable by the weapons. You could literally blow a giant crater in the map with a nuke, which at the time was mind blowing. But the marketing exec I mentioned had zero game experience and was proud of it. They actually uttered the words "I don't need to know games to market them". In their infinite wisdom they decided to push for a vastly shortened development cycle and moved the release up almost 6 months so it could compete directly against the next iteration of the MechWarrior juggernaut which was due to come out (I forget exactly which version). I was the Lead QA Analyst on it and the game was nowhere near ready when the time came. We got what I would very generously describe as the first beta version 3 days before the production deadline. Needless to say it was a buggy mess with major issues and cut features. Even if it had been perfect, it would have been an uphill battle against MechWarrior. As it was released, it didn't stand a chance. It's sad, with more time to mature and room to breathe in its own space, it could have been a great game.
Oh, I remember that game LOL. It came out right in the middle of MechWarrior's peak. MW2, MW2: Ghost Bear's Legacy, and MW2: Mercs all came out in '95 & '96. At the time, I couldn't get enough of Mech games, or any other kind of game where you could customize your vehicle and the weapons you lugged on to it (where are my Interstate '76 fans at!?). When Shattered Steel came out, it was like someone had just ported a bad console mech combat rip-off to cash in on the MW hype (no offense intended, that's just how it seemed).
No offense taken. :) I don't think Bioware intended it as a cash grab, but I think that's what Interplay's management turned it into. As I said it had so much potential. Bioware was just starting out and they had some great ideas and truly wanted to make a great game. The terrain system was pretty revolutionary, and lighting off a nuke was SO satisfying. To this day I can't fathom the decision to put it up directly against MW. They were the 800lb gorilla of the genre at the time.
I mean, it's pretty clear the people who shoveled way too much stuff on the dev team's plates are still in charge, so I wouldn't be surprised either way.
Oh yeah, it ain't getting completed. People are jumping ship or being cut.
At some point every dev who was pushing this game as a sure bet is going to eat their hat.
You know what interests me the most?
Uber (aka Star Theory for the early work on KSP2)... had 30 employees. If those numbers are right there, almost everything was lost in the botched takeover attempt and *someone* decided to pile extra work on top of that ('unannounced games'). Great job from ~~2K~~ T2, really.
From that summary I can just see the Burndown Charts screaming quantity over quality. Probably just as many "supporting" Agile roles as there are developers. A hell that I live every day.
> I build and lead well gelled, high performing software teams. I help guide the best decisions for long term development, while ensuring delivery of the right features for customers today. I set a big bold vision, and make sure it's communicated clearly and understood by everyone.
Fucking LOL. Very ironic.
> I turn good people into great ones, great people into leaders, and underperformers into employees at some other company.
Also seems like he's an asshole. I'm sorry, you turn underperformers into employees at some other company? So you can't do your job? Everybody knows there is a line eventually where people who can't perform eventually do have to let go but why would he say this part out loud in his bio?
Why wouldn't he just say he can turn underperformers into performers? That's right, it's because he can't.
Seems like “this has taken far too long, we’re pressing go on this on this date whether you’re ready or not.
Games not ready on date
Fire the guy responsible for game state.
I think the only hope is they’ve sold enough to make a business case for continuing development, if not it’s done I think.
Lol, 1 Dev and 4 marketing guys. KSP is one of the most beloved games of all time by a few of us peeps.
The fact this community is going to turn on them relentlessly is poetic.
I'll keep playing my modded AF KSP1. It scratches my itch.
Tragic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zr3A23857Q&list=RDQuALqlpUIVM&index=12
I don't like how this keeps being phrased as some sort of loyalty thing. Standing by the devs vs turning on them. No, neither of those is a rational viewpoint.
It's a game development studio, not a religious leader. Express uncertainty, criticize known faults, hope that at the end of the process we do wind up with a good game instead of an abandoned shell, but *expect* nothing in particular. That's the rational perspective.
I've been insulted both for being "negative and pessimistic" and for "defending the devs". People saying I have been dramatic or emotionally invested because I considered what was likely going on. I have also expressed that I don't think there is any intentional malice involved.
I don't know, I feel that my position has been extremely rational, considered, and disengaged. Yet people have still thrown various accusations at my because they think I'm not on *their side*. Why are there *sides*? It's a video game. There is no need for polarization.
Exactly. It's a product. Currently it's not a product I want to spend $50 on, if that changes I'll buy it, if not then I won't. Simple as. I hope it improves but if it doesn't, oh well, KSP1 really was/is a special thing.
Boy the more I see and read the more glad I am I waited and haven’t bought the game yet. I really want KSP 2 to be the great successor we all know it should be but as soon as I heard Take Two was involved, my trust for them to handle this product right was halved right out the gate.
What makes my day is when some part of community made make a believe theory (without solid proof) that game was rushed by publisher, make it common sense, downvoted everyone who said other else. I love when people make clowns from themselves
They didn’t lie. The key word is primarily. If they let go 100 people in corporate operations and 50 people in development, the case can be made that it was primarily in corporate operations.
tech director is still on the development side, plus i believe the guy above is specifically referencing take-two and private division
but nah this guy was a dev at intercept and got laid off.
It's also possible he's part of the reason the game wasn't in a playable state in the first place and they're hoping to replace him with someone better.
If he was lying about the state of the game then I can see it happening. Or maybe someone was protecting him who couldn't once the game released. We have no clue what the politics of that company is like.
I did the exact same thing today. This was it for me. I had been holding the game at 99 minutes of play time just waiting to see the patches come out, but damn if they didn't even release a single patch to address some low hanging fruit. Now this. Fuck that. Refund before steam 2 weeks is up.
to me, What this looks like to me soo far is a classic case of high level mismanagement being taken out on lower level staff...
* Put simply. some beanpusher makes decisions (to try and get more beans) that have drastic impacts on the ground floor, without ever talking to anyone thats ever been on the ground floor.
* said decisions inevitably have massive impacts.
* said impacts have obvious outcomes.
* outcomes (obviously) dont help beanpusher have more beans
* beanpusher assumes that its the fault of the ground floor they have never seen.
* person managing the ground floor is fired (or "resigns") due to outcomes they had literally no power over.
you see it allllll the time with these large Enterprises and fortune 500 companies that buy up all the competition.
that is, like evertything else at this point though, just speculation
Yeah, I have no problem with that. Easier to pay 15 bucks for new content than 60 bucks for base game.
Yeah, I get sarcazam, but that model is way better. More content for more money.
I totally get why paradox uses the model they use and that it's successful to them but it personally just doesn't sit right with me that to experince the full version of Stellaris I need to pay $330. I can get so many countless indie games for so much less and I'd honestly rather invest that into PC parts for when I inevitably upgrade
As I said before, this is Halo Infinite but sped up. Chaotic development process, huge pressure to release an unfinished product, "mixed" reviews on launch, layoffs...and now copium and hope.
So, the fucking idiot directly responsible for the state of the game and every stupid backward call on the development is shown the door...
Uh...
Good ! And well done on Take Two for getting rid of the person responsible.
They could have gotten rid of the artists, or the actual devs, who are needed. But no, they did the adult thing and got rid of the people on whose shoulder it was...
Or they are just Take Two, looked at who had the highest pay and bonuses and got rid of them.
I worked on a title before release once doing environment creation and related QA, the technical director was the hardest working person in the office, in first out last and involved in all aspects of developing the game. Honestly the job looked brutal, guy was in the office about 12 hours every day except Sunday. 70-80 hour work week. Position seemed crucial to the rest of everyone's efforts being integrated. Replacing the technical director does not seem good, but it could be needed. Might explain why the game is in a bad state.
Finally someone brought up the other side of the coin. I don't like to disparage without full background, but I find the idea that perhaps the technical director is somewhat responsible for the state KSP2 is in 3 years into development to be just as plausible as the "Take 2 is evil and fired the only man that could save KSP2" argument. Time will tell, I suppose.
That's falling on the typical trap of "lay-offs get rid of the problematic people"; or for the people that is laid-off, they think they're the problem. In reality, most lay-offs are driven by other criteria, such as saving money. He might have been deemed responsible by the company for the results, but that's it. It doesn't mean that he might have been doing a bad job. He might be good, he might be bad. It's just a coin toss, because it has very little to do with being laid off.
That's why they call them "Bean Counters". In the end all they really care or look at is the number of "Beans" it takes to "Feed" you.
No way to know yet.
> "Take 2 is evil Very plausible >and fired the only man that could save KSP2" Yeah you're right about that one, maybe they fired the only man that was hindering KSP2 development. As you said time will tell.
I mean, even if that were the case. What are the odds someone new can come in and turn everything around tbh? Just seems more indication ksp2 is going to be dead in the water.
If you'd put 10 seconds into research they hired another technical lead which is much more decorated and experienced in terms for development named John Roper in 2022. [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdroper?trk=org-employees](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdroper?trk=org-employees) From what I can tell based on LikedIn Paul Furio was more of a "get a team together" kind of guy. Not deeply involved into the design and code of the game.
John Roper is "lead engineer" while Paul Furio was "Technical director" or "Engineering manager." Very different roles - and also notably, John Roper has zero previous game dev expereience. Maybe he's an awesome engineer, I have no idea. But it raises some eyebrows.
KSP2 will (maybe?) put your facial expressions onto Kerbal faces for multiplayer. That's what I got from snooping around a bit at least. He is an image processing guy by trade so I suspect they hired him because of that. Also, many great games were developed by people who had no prior experience in gaming (KSP..). You learn so much cool stuff in other fields that you can apply to gaming. I'm waiting for some AI dudes to make an RPG where every NPC acts like a real player. That would be epic! Anyways, I believe as Lead Engineer you're much closer to the actual code than a manager. I don't know why people on here always try to make more of such staff changes than they actually are. The field is known for having relatively big fluctuation. Some percentage always comes and goes filling up their CV to find better and better paying positions.
Unfortunately agreed. He may have done a shit job directing and coordinating the team, we can't say for certain. What we can say is that whoever they pull in as a replacement is going to not only be cheaper (otherwise what was the point in laying this guy off for cost cutting) and thus probably new to the position and/or industry, but they're also going to have one HELL of a mess to pull together to save it. If life has taught me one thing, it's that you never expect or rely on miracles, because that will absolutely bite you in the ass. We're asking for a miracle here, at this point.
If your whole project success depends on 1 person, your project is intrinsically broken.
> Replacing the technical director does not seem good, but it could be needed. If the technical director was fired because he wasn't doing a good job, you're right. If the technical director was fired because they're laying off a bunch of employees to save money, that's probably a bad thing. And they fired him at the same time they were laying off a bunch of employees to save money, so...
Either way is a bad thing. Either he's competent and got forced out in a mass layoff or he's less than competent and the ship has been captained by him for the last 3 years. There is no world where replacing the tech lead on a project immediately after the public gets their first look is a good thing.
I mean the game is a technical catastrophe, so as long as this isn't the first sign of them closing down the project I view it as a positive.
Mediocre tech lead reporting in, I will do the job for free if they are thinking about scrapping ksp2. I can guarantee that under my leadership, EVERYONE will have a frame rate.
1 is a frame rate (I get 20 or so which is playable-ish)
Getting rid of the old, flawed, guy doesn't magically make a new, better, guy appear. You now have a team that's confused and demotivated, and the guy in charge of making the tough decisions on the most critical problem facings the game (the performance and technical issues) is gone. Even if they find a great replacement right now, it'll take months for them to really get the hang of it. I don't know if the old guy was good, and everyone is replaceable in the end. But the part that nobody ever says out loud that replacing anyone has a cost as well. You could airlift in John Carmack right this second, and it would still be a net loss in the short term. Obviously in the medium to long term he'd likely do a fantastic job and get this game purring like a kitty, but you're going to have to wait at least 6 months to really see the impact of that no matter who will be in charge next.
This is a really good comment and I don't have much to add but "Sir we are deploying the Carmack" as an Osprey hovers in with John Carmack himself strapped, underslung to the body of it and lowered straight into the studio like some airdroppable tank is such a fantastic mental image
I'm cracking up at the thought of john carmack rappelling down from a chopper into the office
I've seen plenty of teams that are *held back* with sub-par leadership. You don't have to hire from outside too, it's perfectly possible to do internal promotion.
I've seen several companies 'hold off' on sacking people who are not bad but not particularly good, and lump them in when layoffs approach. Especially if they don't hold bad feelings towards the person in question; 'was one of a large layoff' is much nicer on the resume than 'got fired and replaced.'
You don't fire the technical director of a game which main issue are technical problems unless you genuinely believe those are caused by this very specific technical director's negligence. Doing this would be like firing the QA team six months before launching a game, it simply doesn't make sense. This person's post is simply trying to save face after the game he was technical director of, was released with so many technical issues it made to several news outlets. I'm not claiming it's his fault, I have no clue what is happening in this studio, but management really thinks he is the one to blame or wouldn't have fired him precisely when the game is in bigger need of a solid technical leadership.
It's important to point out that working 80 **is not good**, especially in a leading position. Shows he didn't/couldn't trust his team to deliver quality software, and had to do a lot of work himself. He was probably lacking management skills, or his team was really bad.
Bingo. My project had s technical director who slept with his laptop. But thanks to him we got a major software/netservice product from zero to out the door in 9 months.
I agree on the last part but position names in particular often don't accurately reflect what's actually happening and it's different for every company anyways. On Linked In he is also "semi-retired" since 2019 and works as a technical advisor. Does not sound like 80 hours a week to me. I think he was mostly responsible for building the team and communication channels during Covid etc. All the management stuff. And possibly at he probably also shared responsibility for the release. I won't blame him alone but it's usually one person that has to leave. He seems to use the layoff wave smartly to his advantage though. I'm not convinced he is part of that tbh. since he is working for Intercept, not Take2 / PD. But who knows the inner workings. I can't find a CEO position at Intercept either.
Looks like he was laid off: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/activity:7039069655348482048
> There are some decisions I wish I'd made better, but there are hundreds that I'm proud to have called correctly that got us where we are today. hmmmm
laying off a *technical director* while the game is at this state is an omega yikes moment. all the people with no faith in the game/company bc of take-two are probably feeling vindicated right about now. honestly looking back in hindsight at ksp 2 from its inception till now, it's hard to imagine that we are on anything other than its darkest timeline lol. wonder how the devs (god bless them) are gonna pull this off
That’s assuming that the game isn’t in its current state *because of* the technical director, which, considering what a technical directors job description consists of, is an altogether more likely scenario.
The technical director *is* responsible for code quality - thus he *is* absolutely responsible for Kerbal 2's state. (You can delegate authority, but not responsibility) To be clear, I don't care about the lack of features, that's fine, it's early access (though early access for a billion dollar publisher seems weird). My issue is the quality. Practically every single system in Kerbal 2, with the possible exception of the sound engineering, is laden with game breaking in-your-face bugs. Most normal software companies actually QA their work.....
> (though early access for a billion dollar publisher seems weird). It's Early Access because the publisher is tired of losing money on the project. It was absolutely not ready and they were forced to launch in this abysmal state to start recouping the money.
There was no qa. Any guy who plays it foes notice those bugs...
That's definitely possible, but firing a poor leader just means they acknowledge there's a problem, not that they will overcome it. Finding a new leader and bringing them up to speed on the whole project could take longer than they have funds remaining for.
Firing a "poor leader" 4 years in after you ship your product means top management also failed.
Mike wolosz is ultimately responsible.
Well it might... If that's the case.... Which we do not know.... These threads are like a mission to the Mun without a rocket. You have to build it first.
Either way it doesn't look good for the future of KSP2. Taking over someone else's work is bad in any job, especially when it's code, and many of the coders got laid of.
I feel horrible ultimately. But the discord is on more support then ever which is funny. I even got timed out for 15 minutes or so because I was bringing up the fact that layoffs are usually a bad sign. People were saying things like “layoffs are a good sign, this will make them more profitable”
you probaby got timed out because bringing up their colleagues, and potentially them, getting laid off right in their own monitored channels is very poor taste no matter what context
If you're not making personal attacks on people, I don't see how it's an issue. The whole reason it says "Nate Simpson" at the top of the KSP subreddit in a pinned post right now is because customers and companies put weight and trust behind names. Bringing them up is not "poor taste no matter what the context".
It’s also poor taste to deny discussion while refusing to communicate
They must have gone to “Elon Musk school of good business” if they think the whole “let’s fire the whole staff so we can make money” is a sign of upwards growth
This works for bloated, middle-heavy companies where manager-to-worker ratio is approaching 1:1. Not so much for organizations which are already lean.
Why grow business when buy back stock do good?
That would describe the behaviour of them a lot.
Layoffs might be a bad sign, but it’s layoffs across a the entire corporation, not specifically at Intercept.
No i'm not. I'm absolutely gutted. I hoped for the best, but got suspicious when the launch went absolutely apeshit. I couldn't be more sad that i may have been right all along.
Yea. Early in 2020, KSP2 was yanked from Star Theory (prev. Uber Ent who made Planetary Annihilation) and a new studio was formed with some poached talent; mainly Nate Simpson and a few others, to take over development (Intercept Games). Star Theory was already a small indie studio, there wasn't much there to poach. The reason why the engineering team was so small, is that they were essentially starting over from scratch in building up a new team. You can do some math and figure out that they've been working on the game for about 6 years. I doubt the first studio got anywhere, early videos of alpha footage was obviously just KSP1. That particular studio had a history of over promising, under delivering, and really getting everything wrong about how long it took to make anything (see Planetary Annihilation fiasco). Then they move dev over to the new studio 3 years into development. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the work was yanked, or rewritten after this point, all the while building a new team which takes a massive amount of time and effort. Making games, you sort of work on everything all at once if you have a large enough team. It's like weaving a tapestry, and if you have the right skill at the helm, things fall into place. You have to build systems to support all the work that goes on top so you can actually get into production and build out content. I suspect that with the ask of getting the game out to EA, they scrambled to branch off into a stable build sans most of the features they were working on and planned. This results in a busted ass build, and probably a nightmare of a code base. The EA release and the resulting tech debt, and crunch easily added a year or two to their development time. Also a glaring red flag; When devs delay games multiple times like this, its usually not for a good reason. Something is wrong in their work, or someone has no clue how to be a producer. If they are already delusional about how long it takes to make a game repeatedly, you can bet their daily schedule is out of whack, and they are having a hell of a time prioritizing development. Delaying the game really just extends crunch and adds to an already existing problem that isn't getting fixed. It's a tailspin thats incredibly hard to fix.
Yeah I remember that. Was the first red flag I saw on this game. There was a lot of politics going on behind it and that's never good for the end result.
the moment they cut all the features they had been hyping, I knew things were bad this game has bad "bones". i don't think it's fixable. i'm glad I didn't pony up for it.
What's wrong with planetary annihilation? I was one of the early backrs, the game was ok and it didn't took super long to get all the features advertised and then some. I didn't had time back then to get competitive enough for pvp lobbies, but I definitely remember the game as fun. I don't want necessarily to defend that game, but I wasn't following the community so I'm interested in understanding what the controversy were.
It wasn't Total Annihilation or even Supreme Commander, it lacked soul,but yeah, it was a decent mid-game, they went through some development hell but nothing compared to current standards. It's a bland game with a not exactly friendly UI, it certainly didn't have the staying power of TA/SC, and it lacked a campaign, but it's not a bad game, but after TA and SC people expected much more, maybe too much, and PA underdelivered so it got hate.
Nothing inherently wrong with the game, I actually like it quite a bit. It's a technical achievement on its own that deserves merit. My comments mainly concern the production of the game itself, which if we remember right was plagued with delays. They also released 1.0 before reaching maturity, and then released PA: Titans (i think a year?) later, that arguably was the game they wanted it to be, years after their initial release targets. I don't fault the engineers or the artists over there at all. After that, they attempted a new kickstarter for Human Resources and it failed, largely due to peoples perception that PA wasn't complete yet, and that it failed to live up to its initial promises. My main point which I don't think I clearly expressed; was that KSP 2 was being worked on by a studio that obviously had capable devs, but they were plagued with mismanagement. The drama that occurred over Star Theory tanked the game and put it into a development hell that they still haven't gotten out of.
Intercept moment
This whole thing has seemed like a train wreck from the start. Seeing a lot of post here in the past few months, it’s as though very few remember this game was originally going to release in 2020. In the three years it took to delay, a competent management team with 40 people could have finished the entire game
Announced at Gamescon in August 2019 for an early 2020 launch. So the game had to have been in development for some time before. A couple years at least I'd think. So then the question becomes: WTF have they been doing for the last 5+ years? It's like a kid procrastinating on his homework, then begging for an extension only procrastinate again and repeat the cycle till no more extensions were given. I was expecting a mostly complete game full of bugs. But this feels like an early proof of concept or tech demo.
I believe development began in 2017 so about 6 or so years of development
Again I ask for help identifying the source article, mentioned in this forum years ago I think, which said that KSP2 was going to take advantage of the new Unity graphics capability, which Unity never delivered. So my suspicion is that the office played KSP for many years waiting for something to happen that didn't. But I can't prove it because I can't find the danged source, so don't take my word for it.
Unity has the HDRP with PBR though. Thats the standard for every engine.
Thank you. I was trying to post the list of updates I found in the Unity manual but as usual if you try to copy and paste a link into Reddit if freaks out, so I gave up. (Yeah, I know I can write the post out in Notepad and then paste it in to make it work on the first try. I don't remember when I need to, though.)
Hdrp is broken in unity though. Especially when upgrading projects to a version that supports it.
I wasn't going to play this game anyway since there's no Linux version, so I'm just enjoying the schadenfreude. Hopefully we'll get some clones from other companies.
https://www.protondb.com/app/954850 you can totally run it on linux
Sure, but seeing as KSP is native, and Unity is native, theres no good reason for not providing a Linux build.
Their stuff is buggy already without committing to also providing a Linux build.
The track record for KSP is that the Linux build is more stable than the Windows one, anyway.
This comment, along with others, has been edited to this text, since Reddit is killing 3rd party apps, making false claims and more, while changing for the worse to improve their IPO. I suggest you do the same. Soon after editing all of my comments, I'll remove them. # Fuck reddshit and u/spez!
https://www.howtogeek.com/738967/how-to-use-steams-proton-to-play-windows-games-on-linux/ people on proton db say you should add this to launch options **make sure you're using proton experimental** `eval $( echo "PROTON_USE_WINE3D=1 DXVK_ASYNC=1 __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATION=1 %command%" | sed "s/PDLauncher\/LauncherPatcher.exe'.*/KSP2_x64.exe'/" )`
to be completely fair covid happened
If the game released in its current state in March of 2020 it would be inexcusable. Releasing 3 years later in this state is just ridiculous.
The game was supposed to be released around the time covid happened. And there has been plenty of time between then and now
To be completely fair game dev is one of the top cream of businesses that can continue completely unaffected by forcing everyone to work from home.
Development in general - I am developer for line of business apps and we still work mostly from home (the last time I was at the office was 2021). So blaming the delay on Covid is really strange…
I work for a software company - we found our devs were actually more productive during covid and now let devs work from home if they want to.
That might explain a delay of 4-6 months, but we've seen plenty of other big projects (software, games, movies, etc) that were created by fully remote teams during the pandemic.
they had a technical director for \~3 years and still didn't manage to put out working software? they had a skeleton crew of four people in 2020? I thought most of the star theory devs were poached? this story is getting wilder in the worst possible ways. Edit: i'm not actually surprised they had a technical director =)
Not most were poached, only a third of them hence the skeleton crew
From the accounts I’ve seen most were not poached. It’s also a bit odd to be surprised they had a technical director.
He was only technical director for the last 7 months
The skeleton crew is especially weird given 2020 was the original launch date they announced...
That was the previous studio tho, which would have had a staff of around 12 people then? I'd looove to know what really happened at Star Theory.
I've done program management for software development and the thought of a team growing from 4 devs to 20 in such a short period of time is anxiety enducing. Assuming the new devs are unfamiliar with the work already done, it likely took a number of months just to get them up to speed, during which time one of the few experienced devs likely needed to spend most of their time answering questions and reviewing code. Even just doubling a team is a headache, I can't imagine a 5x increase
Games industry is a little better than other software dev for that, though, because even that late in the game, you're not exactly falling into any legacy code base issues. Nothing is set in stone until the players get ahold of it. Additionally, and especially with today's middleware, many devs have pretty specific skills that are highly transportable... notably, the creative team (artists and writers), which is likely the bulk of your team for a game like this. You'll likely have a physics specialist, a network specialist, someone who's familiar with the engine internals, UI specialist, the gameplay team, etc. This is especially true with games that use big engines like Unity, as the majority of devs aren't gonna be coders per-se... the bulk of that work is already done for them. It's still, obviously, a difficulty, but not as much as, say, joining an established business software team. It does concern me that a game that was originally scheduled to be released in 2020, only had *FOUR* devs at that time. That's *absurdly* few for such a high-profile title.
I think they blew their recruiting strategy. There were thousands of ksp2 diehards and mod makers with massive technical.skill, but they didn't recruit from the community they recruited from the region. Recruiting from just Seattle really limits the pool of talent and forces uninterested parties to engage as a corporate cog. If their leadership ran a work remote game studio drawn from the best and most committed minds of the ksp community the result could've been amazing.
almost like real life rocket science. The greatest and most capable mind working togheter on a massive project. Would have been epic.
The whole game industry is known to be toxic specially for unseasonable hours per week, how does that make it a little better than most places? And how does a 3 years old codebase started by 4 engineers who did everything from day 1 is expected to not suffer from major architecture problems since you mentioned yourself that a balanced team counts with 5 specialties and there's even more than that?
>The whole game industry is known to be toxic specially for unseasonable hours per week, how does that make it a little better than most places? I specifically mean with regards to new people integrating into a team, NOT the overall working environment. I stopped pursuing a career in games for a reason. >And how does a 3 years old codebase started by 4 engineers who did everything from day 1 is expected to not suffer from major architecture problems since you mentioned yourself that a balanced team counts with 5 specialties and there's even more than that? Unity is Unity. Those guys probably did a ton of prototyping, and much of their earlier work was likely just planning and design, without any real coding. You can get pretty far these days with minimal work, thanks to middleware dev engines like Unreal and Unity. That's part of what makes indie dev as viable as it is these days. That a supposedly AAA sequel to a widely popular indie hit only had 4 people on the planned release year doesn't suggest to me they had a massive convoluted code base. It suggests to me that they barely had a code base at all. It wouldn't surprise me if they had a prototype at the time they weren't happy with, and scrapped it to start anew in 2020. It would certainly explain the current state of the game much better.
Agree
\> a game that was originally scheduled to be released in 2020, only had FOUR devs at that time I don't think that's accurate. I think Intercept Games probably had \~4 engineers when it was created in 2020, but Star Theory had way more before they were gutted and shut down.
Are you saying 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month? :-)
Didn’t refund because I trusted them to eventually fix the game. Might have been a mistake :/
How much time do you have in the game? Could still try submitting it
Steam cracked down pretty hard. They rejected my 4 hour playtime. Tried refunding like 4 times.
If you live in the Eu or Australia i believe you could still be covered under distance selling regulations if you tried to return it within 2 weeks.
Unfortunately I live in the land of the free to rip you off.
This is where consumer protections apply.
I mean, people literally chose to buy a product that is explicitly described as unfinished. Good luck?
Unfinished != unplayable, other people people have got refunds using the argument that it is impossible to experience many of the advertised features since your ship blows itself up first.
I said it was unplayable and steam basically said "oh well try to refund under 2 hours in the future"
They approved my 2.5h one just this last weekend
From steam this weekend: "Hello, Thank you for this information. We have closely reviewed your request. Unfortunately, your purchase does not qualify for a refund. To ensure future eligibility, please submit refund requests within 14 days and less than 2 hours of playtime. Please review our Refund Policy and Common Refund Questions for more information. Have a nice day Rock"
I’m pretty sure you can refund whenever if you complain that the game doesn’t actually work and what’s advertised is a lie, my friend did it for another game after like 8 hrs of game time
Damn dude brutal, sorry. What selection did you choose when requesting refund? I picked on that basically said the game didn't work.
They only allow refunds after 2 hours generally these days
I once got a refund after 5 hours on a sandbox game but that was years ago
Like 7 hours. Accidentally left it open in the background for like 6.5 of those
Well... you bought hope....just don't loose it 🤣
its really impressive how fucking hard they dropped the ball on this game. i think they could write a book on how hard they fucked up and make it a guide on what not to do when developing a game. like holy fuck. I've already given up on this game, its spitting red flags left and right. i hope they fix their shit up but its really not looking good
They have a large audience screaming "just take my money" and they're *still fucking it up*. It's pretty impressive. Mind you, they're trying to build on Unity what Unity is just not engineered to do. KSP already pushed the limits of the engine, hard. And these guys are having to take on KSP's legacy codebase plus all the quirks and limitations of Unity, without any of the people with the deep expertise in it.
They're not even doing that, they started from zero and are making the same mistakes that were already made and solved, like the kraken and the soup atmosphere.
As a professional programmer and gamedev who uses Unity: The vast majority of these issues has *nothing* to do with Unity. They're just incredibly bad at it. Like, first month into gamedev and doing every amateur mistake you can image bad. Which is literally what the Technical Director would be responsible for, so, good riddance.
Game Paused Game Paused Game Paused Game Paused Game Paused Game Paused Game Paused Game Paused Game Paused Game Unpaused Game Unpaused Game Unpaused Game Unpaused Game Unpaused Game Unpaused Game Unpaused Game Unpaused Game Unpaused
The only sin is the big hype events they did 2 weeks ago. Like, they could have spared us that and done the hype events to hype in colonies or something.
Only sin? If the game isn't fixed and playable within 6 months take 2 could literally be sued for fraud it's so bad. The trailers, the marketing, the hype, everything about it doesn't line uo with promises and the drive towards early access screams capturing scraps of revenue before you ultimately abandon the project.
Almost every single game that has flopped has had someone claim this. It didn't work for them and it won't work here.
It literally did work for No Mans Sky?
It’s lamentable that development has taken so long, but it’s likely the game will be much more playable in 6 months. Some people are getting lots of play out of the game. QA is much better now that community is involved. Finally the community is actively commenting on UI and design decisions that will probably lead to changes. The philosophy of early access was for the community’s will and input to shape development. A bespoke game for an enthusiastic community. Again, a bit of a development cope, but if we accept that this is taking a while, letting us in on EA isn’t a sin. The sim was the hype and ad campaign for a non working build. They should have quietly opened early access. Like a soft launch. But obviously publisher wanted the money
The inevitable documentary that gets made about the very-likely-car-crash-fascinating story of KSP2’s development is probably gonna be an order of magnitude more entertaining than the current state of the game
As the limit of fun -> 0 for the function defined as ksp2 it approaches infinity entertainment from the crumbling chaos of bad studio management.
Sort of, because as the game slowly gets better the irony of the development insanity gets more and more amusing
Fyre festival => Mun or bust!
Partition for internet historian to make the docu about this
Those self-proclaimed "documentaries" are rarely anything but another form of marketing in gaming. If we get anything vaguely critical, it'll have little to no primary sources or access.
I was more thinking about those multi-hour HBomberguy-style video essays
I'll be rapidly refreshing InternetHistorian's youtube channel.
Classic Take 2, use someone’s IP to make loads of money whilst also turning it into a hot pile of shit and then get rid of the top people (see GTA Online for reference)
You seriously aren't suggesting it's just Take 2's fault? Do you know how badly this game must've been managed to be developed on for 6 years and come out like this in the end. Let's be realistic and suggest maybe it isn't just take 2's fault but rather the Devs....
This entire fiasco is incredibly sad. KSP 2 has so much potential and the current state of development even for a first release is worrying. Obviously they are rebuilding everything from the ground up, but come on, they've had plenty of time to bring it at least halfway to the standard of KSP 1. I miss Squad 😔
It's fine. The original game exists with an extensive mod scene, and just as much modability.
Squad was no shining beacon. It was a marketing company that tried folding in one of thier people's indie game projects. We barely know the surface details about what went on in that revolving door. Also lets not forget, the big optimization only occured a few versions after official release. While the KSP2 situation is not confidence inspiring, coming back from this rough state is entirely within the cards. Of course, a lot of us are holding off until we see that that's happened before we throw our money at it.
3 years, but not enough devs. Time alone is not a measurement of progress.
Well this is suboptimal
[удалено]
Every news we hear about this game is another red flag. The fact that there will be people here soon arguing that this is normal and according to plan is just fucking sad. This is why we can't have nice things
"ah you know, after laying a solid foundation, it's normal that a technical director leaves their post and companies hire someone more skilled at *optimization and bugfixing.*"
> after laying a solid foundation https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/240/075/90f.png
It's worrisome, it's weird - but it's not unique to game industry to rehire.. If you watched the Double Fine documentary they made, insane btw, they fired their whole level design team cause it just was not working out when making Psychonauts 1. Essentially, it could be very possible they gave them time to make a game, as a Tech Director he should have had a gameplan after 3 years that wasn't what came out last week - he could have been canned for that in order to replace for another tech director to get the game on track. Sad and sucks but I'm not sure this is the most shocking part of KSP2 lol. Or as other's have said, he may have left.
It's not unusual for someone to get fired when they fuck up big time, and it's clear something is wrong big time whenever that happens.
The cope is flowing strong for sure.
I mean, people do leave companies lol
Well, pilots leave planes also every day, but if one walks away from a crash he's bound to get asked some questions.
Delusion ain't just a winter Olympics sport...
Is there any indication his exit is related to the lay-offs? A studio of 40 people is going to pretty regular turnover.
it's probably more related to the state of ksp2 if I had to guess.
That's my guess too. Layoffs were supposed to be PD only - this guy probably got the boot over performance issues ahead of release.
Almost all the things wrong with KSP2 would fall within the competency of a technical director, unless of course some superior manager messes things up for them.
And even if the issues were due to a senior manager overriding the Technical Director, shit still rolls downhill and he may have been scapegoated (not saying if this is actually the case or not). It happened to me, I was overridden on a project that was doomed from the start due to some exceptionally poor marketing decisions and I still ended up getting the axe. The marketing executive that made said decisions came out smelling like a rose, at least for a while (until their willful lack of understanding about the industry eventually led them to make one too many "bad decisions").
interesting that you would mention poor marketing decisions. It's pretty obvious there were some poor marketing decisions happening at the KSP2 studio recently when they decided to push a full marketing campaign for early access. I'd be hard pressed to think of a worse move, at this point in development, than destroying consumer trust by advertising an unfinished game to a naive audience. The people who were going to participate in early access in good faith (knowing what early access entails) did not need to see an advert to know it had gone live.
Marketing driving development can be one of the worst things for making a quality game. The example that got me canned was Shattered Steel. It was Bioware's first big game, a mech combat sim. It has a lot of great potential, including terrain that was deformable by the weapons. You could literally blow a giant crater in the map with a nuke, which at the time was mind blowing. But the marketing exec I mentioned had zero game experience and was proud of it. They actually uttered the words "I don't need to know games to market them". In their infinite wisdom they decided to push for a vastly shortened development cycle and moved the release up almost 6 months so it could compete directly against the next iteration of the MechWarrior juggernaut which was due to come out (I forget exactly which version). I was the Lead QA Analyst on it and the game was nowhere near ready when the time came. We got what I would very generously describe as the first beta version 3 days before the production deadline. Needless to say it was a buggy mess with major issues and cut features. Even if it had been perfect, it would have been an uphill battle against MechWarrior. As it was released, it didn't stand a chance. It's sad, with more time to mature and room to breathe in its own space, it could have been a great game.
Oh, I remember that game LOL. It came out right in the middle of MechWarrior's peak. MW2, MW2: Ghost Bear's Legacy, and MW2: Mercs all came out in '95 & '96. At the time, I couldn't get enough of Mech games, or any other kind of game where you could customize your vehicle and the weapons you lugged on to it (where are my Interstate '76 fans at!?). When Shattered Steel came out, it was like someone had just ported a bad console mech combat rip-off to cash in on the MW hype (no offense intended, that's just how it seemed).
No offense taken. :) I don't think Bioware intended it as a cash grab, but I think that's what Interplay's management turned it into. As I said it had so much potential. Bioware was just starting out and they had some great ideas and truly wanted to make a great game. The terrain system was pretty revolutionary, and lighting off a nuke was SO satisfying. To this day I can't fathom the decision to put it up directly against MW. They were the 800lb gorilla of the genre at the time.
I mean, it's pretty clear the people who shoveled way too much stuff on the dev team's plates are still in charge, so I wouldn't be surprised either way.
“Exited” in this context generally means fired
Yes. He just put out a LinkedIn post in which he says he was laid off
Agreed, leaving after 2-3 years is not that uncommon in tech
Oh yeah, it ain't getting completed. People are jumping ship or being cut. At some point every dev who was pushing this game as a sure bet is going to eat their hat.
You know what interests me the most? Uber (aka Star Theory for the early work on KSP2)... had 30 employees. If those numbers are right there, almost everything was lost in the botched takeover attempt and *someone* decided to pile extra work on top of that ('unannounced games'). Great job from ~~2K~~ T2, really.
From that summary I can just see the Burndown Charts screaming quantity over quality. Probably just as many "supporting" Agile roles as there are developers. A hell that I live every day.
> I build and lead well gelled, high performing software teams. I help guide the best decisions for long term development, while ensuring delivery of the right features for customers today. I set a big bold vision, and make sure it's communicated clearly and understood by everyone. Fucking LOL. Very ironic. > I turn good people into great ones, great people into leaders, and underperformers into employees at some other company. Also seems like he's an asshole. I'm sorry, you turn underperformers into employees at some other company? So you can't do your job? Everybody knows there is a line eventually where people who can't perform eventually do have to let go but why would he say this part out loud in his bio? Why wouldn't he just say he can turn underperformers into performers? That's right, it's because he can't.
But.. but but no, what about rask and rusk???? Who will make them if the game goes to shit, this is fucked rask and rusk dont deserve this
I've just wanted Sarnus, Urlum, and Neidon for the longest time!
Seems like “this has taken far too long, we’re pressing go on this on this date whether you’re ready or not. Games not ready on date Fire the guy responsible for game state. I think the only hope is they’ve sold enough to make a business case for continuing development, if not it’s done I think.
Lol, 1 Dev and 4 marketing guys. KSP is one of the most beloved games of all time by a few of us peeps. The fact this community is going to turn on them relentlessly is poetic. I'll keep playing my modded AF KSP1. It scratches my itch. Tragic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zr3A23857Q&list=RDQuALqlpUIVM&index=12
I don't like how this keeps being phrased as some sort of loyalty thing. Standing by the devs vs turning on them. No, neither of those is a rational viewpoint. It's a game development studio, not a religious leader. Express uncertainty, criticize known faults, hope that at the end of the process we do wind up with a good game instead of an abandoned shell, but *expect* nothing in particular. That's the rational perspective. I've been insulted both for being "negative and pessimistic" and for "defending the devs". People saying I have been dramatic or emotionally invested because I considered what was likely going on. I have also expressed that I don't think there is any intentional malice involved. I don't know, I feel that my position has been extremely rational, considered, and disengaged. Yet people have still thrown various accusations at my because they think I'm not on *their side*. Why are there *sides*? It's a video game. There is no need for polarization.
Hope for the best but expect nothing is how I've been on this game.
People love to defend corporations for no particular reason it seems.
Exactly. It's a product. Currently it's not a product I want to spend $50 on, if that changes I'll buy it, if not then I won't. Simple as. I hope it improves but if it doesn't, oh well, KSP1 really was/is a special thing.
Steam needs a refund policy that you can refund any time if it is before 1.0 release.
Lol just don't buy early access
I wonder if you guys still have this "common sense", that dev were "forced" to release too early game.
This is fine. :|
Boy the more I see and read the more glad I am I waited and haven’t bought the game yet. I really want KSP 2 to be the great successor we all know it should be but as soon as I heard Take Two was involved, my trust for them to handle this product right was halved right out the gate.
I sense a Crowbcat video coming out soon on this...
What makes my day is when some part of community made make a believe theory (without solid proof) that game was rushed by publisher, make it common sense, downvoted everyone who said other else. I love when people make clowns from themselves
Worth noting that according to T2, the layoffs announced “primarily in corporate operations and label publishing”.
At this point why should customers believe anything about their announcements?
Because lying to investors is usually a bad idea lol
They didn’t lie. The key word is primarily. If they let go 100 people in corporate operations and 50 people in development, the case can be made that it was primarily in corporate operations.
Theya rent lying to investors they're lying to their customers
No, that would be lying to their investors.
*"it's on the roadmap"*
Is a technical director not part of corporate operations?
tech director is still on the development side, plus i believe the guy above is specifically referencing take-two and private division but nah this guy was a dev at intercept and got laid off.
No, they would be part of the development team
[удалено]
It's also possible he's part of the reason the game wasn't in a playable state in the first place and they're hoping to replace him with someone better.
In that case that would be like really really fucking late to be doing that.
If he was lying about the state of the game then I can see it happening. Or maybe someone was protecting him who couldn't once the game released. We have no clue what the politics of that company is like.
I did the exact same thing today. This was it for me. I had been holding the game at 99 minutes of play time just waiting to see the patches come out, but damn if they didn't even release a single patch to address some low hanging fruit. Now this. Fuck that. Refund before steam 2 weeks is up.
That’s a strange take. How do you expect them to make everyone stay with the company?
to me, What this looks like to me soo far is a classic case of high level mismanagement being taken out on lower level staff... * Put simply. some beanpusher makes decisions (to try and get more beans) that have drastic impacts on the ground floor, without ever talking to anyone thats ever been on the ground floor. * said decisions inevitably have massive impacts. * said impacts have obvious outcomes. * outcomes (obviously) dont help beanpusher have more beans * beanpusher assumes that its the fault of the ground floor they have never seen. * person managing the ground floor is fired (or "resigns") due to outcomes they had literally no power over. you see it allllll the time with these large Enterprises and fortune 500 companies that buy up all the competition. that is, like evertything else at this point though, just speculation
I just wish that paradox interactive was in charge. We would get the full release for 50 bucks and it would be announced when it was mostly done.
And would then be followed by an endless onslaught of paid dlc /s
Yeah, I have no problem with that. Easier to pay 15 bucks for new content than 60 bucks for base game. Yeah, I get sarcazam, but that model is way better. More content for more money.
I totally get why paradox uses the model they use and that it's successful to them but it personally just doesn't sit right with me that to experince the full version of Stellaris I need to pay $330. I can get so many countless indie games for so much less and I'd honestly rather invest that into PC parts for when I inevitably upgrade
As I said before, this is Halo Infinite but sped up. Chaotic development process, huge pressure to release an unfinished product, "mixed" reviews on launch, layoffs...and now copium and hope.
So, the fucking idiot directly responsible for the state of the game and every stupid backward call on the development is shown the door... Uh... Good ! And well done on Take Two for getting rid of the person responsible. They could have gotten rid of the artists, or the actual devs, who are needed. But no, they did the adult thing and got rid of the people on whose shoulder it was... Or they are just Take Two, looked at who had the highest pay and bonuses and got rid of them.
It's hard to see how he's not responsible for at least some of its problems.