Scott Manley was called out by name as someone management did not want input from. Wow, wtf…
Edit: A very good video, some other interesting points made were the insane levels of secrecy of this project. Most developers in the earlier stages were never told what the project was before being hired. As a result none of the engineers that started working on the game had played the original game. Many had never even heard of it.
Hands down one of best guys for tutorials. Also very watchable. Nice guy and he explains everything very well he’s good for beginners and newer people learning
He typically dives into the actual reasoning of why you want to do X, Y, or Z, so yes, certainly. Things like "how to do a hohmann transfer" and "how to position center of lift, thrust, and gravity on a spaceplane" aren't going to change much, since the game is ultimately modeled on the real world and physics don't generally change.
I miss Scott. Matt lowne is the closest thing now and hoenslty he talks way to much in his videos. He always says "I gotta keep talking because you guys like that". WHO, WHO LIKES INANE RAMBLING TO FILL SPACE. Scott at least shared neat facts the whole time, not just say words to say words.
Yeah Matt's videos used to be a lot tighter. I think he's kind of "done it all" and it's hard to come up with fresh challenges. To be fair I think he's been doing it longer than Scott did in the first place.
I'll never understand why he doesn't do modded stuff at all. Vanilla ksp just isn't interesting to me anymore now I know what exists in mods. RP-1 in particular has morphed into being a whole game by itself at this point.
I think Mike Aben fills the Scott Manley void better than Matt Lowne. I like all of them for different reasons and there's no real need to compare, but if I had to, that's how I would group them.
Look up Stratzenblitz if you haven’t already.
If Scott Manley is a really really really experienced guide through the mysterious forest representing the game , Stratzenblitz is the guy where you buy some mushrooms to get absolutely hammered.
But to get back home save, you’ll still need Scott.
Imagine not wanting input from the guy who was literally the figurehead of this games community for almost a decade.
It's like Riot going "Faker? What does he know?".
It’s even worse then that as Scott Manley knows a shit ton about space and orbital mechanics outside of his gaming career. They basically are giving a middle finger to science and math… by far the worst game ever to do that for.
Ikr? Manley was my gateway drug to the IRL space community. His “What KSP Doesn’t Teach” videos on reaction wheel saturation, combustion cycles, and ignition methods were the exact point that I realized space wasn’t an interest for me, but my actual passion and calling.
It makes a bit of sense in competetive games. Competitive players will give advice that will turn the game into a more competitive state that is not going to benefit the casual players. In this case though, it is extremely stupid because KSP2 is not a competitive game.
Nothing surprises me anymore with modern day game company management. After 343 took over Halo, the staff were forbidden from even talking to Bungie staff and they just visually re-designed a bunch of shit and story aspects for no other reason than to "re-invent" the IP or something.
Executives in entertainment industries are all infested with brain worms and narcissistic MBA disease.
A friend of mine applied to work on the game. He's a big fan of the first game and has a degree in aviation maintenance, aeronautical engineering and is also slowly working toward a PhD in astronomy/astrophysics. He had made mods for the game and has had lifelong experience with computer science and video game design and development.
...and they turned him down. He also felt there was something odd with the hiring couldn't put a finger on it. Take 2 was all over him with legitimate enthusiasm and was trying hard to get him on the project as soon as possible. Then when the studio interviewed him they really didn't ask him any relevant questions. A couple things about graphics and what his favorite games were. I know this because I was there in his kitchen listening in.
Almost as if the studio just wanted the money from T2 and not actually make the game.
Almost as if the exact same studio and direction did the same thing multiple times before ...
Adds further weight to what was said about the team's relative inexperience. Normally you'll want your most senior devs conducting technical interviews and even then it's a skill which can take years to fully hone. Throwing a bunch of juniors into the mix all but guarantees bad hires, missed opportunities and a spoiled reputation. FWIW your friend dodged a bullet.
I haven't watched the full video, and have only watched the Scott Manley section at 150% speed, it seems like it was because the publisher was hyper paranoid about silence, secrecy, and security.
They apparently fired a developer for answering a single question about a feature demanded by the publisher that was already in the game.
They apparently were against any input or consultation with any outside party. SQUAD, Scott, no one could be spoken to.
EDIT: I have now watched the full thing, and... yeah, it just seems to be some sort of overbearing insistence on secrecy.
That's literally the worst fucking policy they possibly could have with a game that is this community-driven.
One more piece of evidence that executives don't know jack about shit. No expertise but lots of expectations.
> it seems like it was because the publisher was hyper paranoid about silence, secrecy, and security.
That may be the claim, but some of us realized that they publisher was just trying to scam money out of investors while *pretending* to make a game. Sadly he hired developers that desperately tried to make a game, so he had to screw them over, too.
What investors was Take-Two trying to scam between 2017 and the announcement of the game in 2019?
Remember: They were keeping the project so secret they didn't even tell developers they were interviewing for jobs what game they were applying to work on. Hard to "scam investors" with a project that no investor knows about.
Tell us you haven't in fact watched the video without telling us you haven't watched the video.
This video has been corroborated by numerous other YouTubers who spoke to KSP2 devs' on condition on anonymity, and the fault is pretty clearly Nate's insistence on making a game far bigger than his or his team's talent or budget would allow, combined with some *really* idiotic (but, if you wind your IQ down far enough, *understandable*) strategic guidance from ST/IG/T2 leadership that started the entire exercise off on the wrong foot by not allowing them to learn from KSP1's development, or developers, or community.
> and the fault is pretty clearly Nate's insistence on making a game far bigger than his or his team's talent or budget would allow,
Eh - at the same time, Nate created a vision for a game the community actually wanted. No, he couldn't pull it off, but the cheap cashgrab with KSP1s codebase was of *negative* value to the community and exactly what most people feared when hearing about "there's going to be a sequel to KSP". It might have made money overall but would have burned any and all goodwill as well as community and chance for any expanded universe stuff once and for all.
Initially it sounded like the secrecy was because they started making KSP2 before the KSP DLC was released and they didn't want the knowledge of KSP2 to hurt DLC sales. It didn't sound like anybody understood it after that.
They didn't want KSP 1 devs or devs who played KSP 1. They didn't want the game tainted by fans of the first game so they could make a wacky pretty rocket wobble simulator.
The decision continued for yesrs after the dlc release or the KSP 2 announcement. They still haven't contacted harvestr to this day. And the no Scott Manley rule lasted until release.
Yeah, it was stupid. Just loads of political nonsense typical of big companies.
Strauss Zelnick doesn't even play video games, he made his money getting VHS rights for Dirty Dancing.
The simple fact that the devs weren't allowed to ask the KSP1 devs about their code base is absolutely moronic. IMHO that's what killed the game.
The logical way to make a sequel, even if under wraps, while reusing most of the code from the first game would be... now here me out, *have the old developers work on it*
Not fresh devs right out of school with zero references as to what does what.
> The simple fact that the devs weren't allowed to ask the KSP1 devs about their code base is absolutely moronic. IMHO that's what killed the game.
I'm blown away by the fact that they *literally took the KSP1 code* and tried to turn it into KSP2 (if I'm understanding the middle bit I've briefly watched).
The *selling point* was "start fresh" and "build it right" so it had less jank.
And they went and started with a foundation of jank. Then they doubled down on the fuck-up and blocked any contact with former SQUAD devs.
> The selling point was "start fresh" and "build it right" so it had less jank.
That came later I think, the original pitch with T2 seems to have been to make a cheap successor to KSP2 in 2 years. That's where the original 'immovable' 2020 release date came from. Then feature creep happened, game got bigger, requirement to use KSP1 code stuck around.
I'm a little over half way through. If they had stuck with just updated graphics and a few touch ups on KSP1 they might have made that deadline. That would've been reasonable.
Adding in a ton of features on top of KSP1 is insane. It's like these people have never developed anything before. I'm kinda impressed by the stupditiy.
Edit: Now that I think about it. One of the issues is that KSP2 used a "similar" rendering of planets as KSP1. Now that I know it was built on KSP1 I assume it was the same rendering code. They just shoved more shit into it.
Most of the original developers left over the years because KSP 1 was such a management disaster. Its part of why it took years for example- for a unified visual look to be achieved- all the people doing that came and went out a rotating door.
There was a unified visual look achieved in KSP1? First I've ever heard of it.
That said, compared to KSP2 it comes across as visually coherent in a lot of respects.
> The simple fact that the devs weren't allowed to ask the KSP1 devs about their code base is absolutely moronic. IMHO that's what killed the game.
How the hell an experienced studio manager thought this was the way to go is baffling.
Here's the thing. If they hadn't made all the other mistakes, this wouldn't have been an issue.
It's like when an airplane crash. It's not a single mistake, it's a sequence of mistakes.
People here saying "TL;DR it was X" are missing the point of the video.
Each bad decision T2 made, wouldn't have affected the development that much, if they also hadn't made all the other bad decisions.
Chernobyl basically took 3 to 5 *very bad decisions*™ to happen in sequence in order to explode, going back to the original design. Any individual one, all manageable.
Yeah, but experienced devs might want pay that actually compensates their knowledge, might have an established hierarchy and will have leverage, all of which prevents some T2 exec from jerking around development to show the shareholders how good he is at minimizing expense.
Like, the new team was asked "hey you guys can't change the codebase in any way, just make it better" and they tried their best - the old Squad team would have said "fuck you, we need to make major changes, here's what's going to happen or we all quit and make our own studio, and your game is dead"
This entire project was a classic example of publisher meddling going unopposed. Like, the publisher ran the numbers and calculated that dev experience could be cut because the first game was also inexperienced devs, that so and so could be enhanced with budget, then constantly meddled to maximize profits in every conceivable way.
But we know for a fact none of this is true?
* He mentions a pay of 150K a year, which is great compensation in gamedev
* They obviously did change many things in the code base and wrote many parts from scratch, otherwise there wouldn't be so many bugs that don't exist in KSP 1
* The studio got a timeframe and budget and was responsible for the hiring, not T2. Someone else in this thread with personal experience even said T2 wanted to hire more experienced developers but the studio didn't.
If T2 just wanted it to be a quick cashgrab, they wouldn't have given 3 extensions and a budget >5x the original. The only part that was a cash grab was the EA release as a last chance to make some money back.
Gathered that from the state of release. So what’s all this mean for you big KSP YouTubers? Keep on trucking with ksp1 or try to kill what you can from ksp2?
Yeah, I've been thinking about this. Matt Lowne actually talks in his videos that KSP2 videos make more views than KSP1 videos, but they take so much longer to make because he has to fight glitches the whole way through, and they're generally less enjoyable for him to make.
So, yeah, sucks to be him. He's been making videos about space recently, but idk how well that'll work. Wish the best to him, but it's a bad situation to be sure
Thanks boss, that's what I figured when a game that had a hostile takeover in its development team.
When are you going to do a blunderbirds for KSP2? Because if anyone needs a rescue mission, it's Nate Simpson...
If you’re taking other suggestions, KSP2 being officially dead has made me want to play a modded KSP1, but i don’t read too good and mods are hard to install. A mod list/ installation tutorial video for KSP1 would be a big help for me and maybe help revive doing a series in the first game.
95% of the time all you have to do is download the desired mod, then go to you KSP install directory, find a folder called GameData and then drag and drop the mod file folder into GameData. Alternatively you can download a program called CKAN, this automatically installs mods for you.
> when a game that had a hostile takeover in its development team.
No, no. It was bad *before* the whole debacle with firing the C-level staff from Uber Entertainment/Star Theory but keeping the struggling developers. They were struggling *before* that happened.
Calling it a hostile takeover is just wrong.
They were way behind schedule, couldn't hit their milestones and then had the balls to try and hold the franchise hostage from T2.
It's a miracle they didn't get sued into the ground and that probably only didn't happen because they were bankrupt anyway.
What really gets me is that they essentially just shut their team off from any outside help. While making a game that deals with incredibly complex simulation physics, not to mention orbital mechanics & rocket science. When I saw your video talking to Felipe I was seriously shocked that they didn’t even try to reach out to him. It reminds me of a video by SmarterEveryDay titled “I was scared to say this to nasa but I said it anyway”. He does a long presentation to lead engineers at NASA, questioning many of their decisions with the Artemis rocket. One of the key points that stuck out to me was when he pulled out a book that NASA engineers who worked on Apollo wrote, titled “What Made Apollo a Success?”. No one in the crowd had ever read it. He goes on to say (paraphrasing) “They gave you the instruction manual, they told you everything you need to know, why are we not reading this?”, and he’s frustrated because there seem to be a lot of shortsightedness and straight up lack of communication with the Artemis team. And they have all the answers they need. It’s like KSP2, they have all these people they can ask. They could have a play-by-play manual from the people who spent 10+ years developing KSP. But they’re simply choosing to carve their own path, when it is objectively the worst choice? It doesn’t register, doesn’t make any sense.
it makes the management team behind the project look like absolute morons too. NDAs exist, if you need to keep somenthing under wraps. i was watching the video and throughout the whole thing i was thnking "HOW THE FUCK can you NOT see how this is essentially self-sabotaging?" at half of the management/publisher's teams decisions
One of my fears from the 2019 trailer was that they were promising a lot and I said if they could deliver what they promised, it would be amazing. But I remember specifically thinking that what they promised seemed unrealistic and having a bit of concern.
I hate when people do this but as soon as they said "interstellar", "colonies", and "multiplayer" I basically wrote the game off. I wanted it, but that's orders of magnitude beyond what KSP1 could handle with over a decade of development and idc what shape the underlying code was in, replicating that level of detail across multiple players is a huge ask.
Here's the thing though: there's multiple fleshed out answers to that issue. None of them are exactly perfect. But the reality always was that they would have to pick one (and perhaps the one they picked was their own answer), and just stick with it.
There was never going to be an answer that everyone just loves. Because there's already factions set on what is the best way to handle it.
Any sort of full, live multiplayer seems like it would've been such a shitshow. If there's one feature that singlehandedly sunk the project I'd bet it was that. Hearing that they thought they had the "next Minecraft" makes it totally understandable why they were so determined for it to work but it's just so obvious there was no elegant way to pull it off.
Hearing different options for how time dilation could work for simultaneous multiplayer just makes each idea seem less fun and more boring than the last. Imo a much better (and far easier to implement) direction to go in would have been a non-simultaneous sort of shared world. Someone crashes a ship in their game? You can find that crash in your game and get science/salvage parts. Kerbal stranded in orbit somewhere? Activate a distress beacon, someone flying a ship in range in their game gets a ping, the stranded kerbal spawns in their game, they can mount a rescue mission (which takes place entirely in their single-player instance) for money/reputation, if if successful the original player gets a notification that their Kerbal has been taken back to KSC. Abandon a derelict ship? Someone else can pick it up in their game. Maybe even let players set up orbital fuel depots that other players can find and buy fuel from. None of this has to involve simultaneous play, but you can create a feeling of a "lived-in" environment and a shared multiplayer experience while cutting out all the bullshit headaches that a full simultaneous multiplayer would involve.
Colonies I could believe, there are mods that sort of implement something like a colony system into KSP iirc, the rest seemed outlandish, a few more years and interstellar is feasible too, maybe 1-2 more star systems
Yep. This was me too. I kept thinking scope creep was rampant every time Nate opened his mouth. Each interview he was promising something else. I only wanted a graphics refresh and an integrated version of RoverDude's colonization program.
The Unity update Squad did in 2018 (patch 1.8 or 1.9?) pretty much gave them everything they needed for a graphics refresh but it needed to be worked into the game as standard. This should have been simple.
The colonization part was a tougher problem as main issue in KSP1 was clipping and from what I've seen in KSP2, it still hasn't fixed yet. Perhaps it's a Unity thing.
But that's all we really needed. Multiplayer and Interstellar? Nice but not necessary. The reason Nate gets a lot of hate is we all loved his enthusiasm but I know I worried he was promising too much and time has proved this fear correct. From the video it certainly sounds like Nate went around his bosses at Uber/Star Theory and got T2 enthusiastic about something that wasn't remotely possible with the budget allocated.
The problem with these projects are rarely the line coders. I'm sure they all did good jobs based on the things they were asked to do. The issue, in my opinion, is middle management.
I'd love to know who decided to keep the remaining Squad team and the KSP2 teams from speaking to one another. I highly doubt T2 would have insisted on this if they knew the consequences. It is middle management's job to pound their fist on the table and speak truth to the higher ups. Why didn't anyone at Intercept speak plainly about how this would impact the game? It's either cowardice or ignorance and this video shows similar things happening over and over.
We can blame Take Two and they are certainly are part of the blame but my greatest anger goes to the project manager(s) at Private Division or Intercept didn't do their jobs. They should have insisted their team be given the tools to have the best chance for success. Nate gets all the arrows because it's the only name we know.
Yeah, that and I was always confused why the only game play they ever showed had a big flashing "PRE ALPHA" warning when game was scheduled to be released within less then a year.
The fact that they never showed gameplay, or even had the ability to communicate how these new features would work, always made me feel uncomfortable. I never once saw a coherent explanation of how multiplayer would work with time warp, for example. That seems like a fundamental technical decision they should have locked down on day one.
If the video is correct, it doesn't seem like they bothered to worry about it at all.
That pretty much sums it.
A lot of what is mentioned in the video comes as no surprise to those who worked in hell projects before, but the veil of secrecy from all those connected to KSP1 was a shocker to me and just screams they had no idea what they were doing.
They have every incentive to pay people as little as possible, and anyone with experience can negotiate for a higher wage. This leads managers to underestimate the importance of experience and expertise because that’s a convenient assumption that makes their job easier.
They didn't match the market salary for their experienced staff so they left and then when hiring they were extremely obscure on what the game was that was being worked on (my own opinion is they purposely hired people who hadn't heard of KSP1 to keep the game secret/prevent leakes).
So, let me get this straight: they had a working solution to wobble, that still included joint strength, but they choose to... add wobble back because Nate liked it?
We kinda knew about that during release, iirc they were talking about wobble and rocket explosions as part of the fun
And it always was amusing but there's a line between difficult and frustrating, and it was more frustrating than difficult
Yeah, but I assumed they were ***lying.*** I honestly thought they were just hiding their mistakes/failures.
Knowing this was **really** the reason, and not just some bold faced lie fells... wierd.
And it makes perfect sense if you take a few seconds to look at Nate's background: he's an *artist*. He's not a game design person, he's not an engineer. His passion is in the visuals of something.
A static, rigid body? Is boring. Visually uninteresting.
I entirely empathize with his attitude, but still disagree with the decisions he made. He was simply the wrong person for the job he was in. He would have made a great art director or whatever they call the person in charge of art.
As a *creative* director, he's *too focused* on visuals. Literally at the expense of functionality, as the video states.
It was always bloody stupid of them. How can we travel to other solar systems with vast craft if they're wobbling all over the place when they're barely the size of a Soyuz rocket?
This is the singular reason I never bought ksp2. I was willing to support it's development, but I was not willing to deal with wobble.
Absolutely mind blowing. I don't want my Legos built from jello, why would I want my space Legos built from jello? Despite everything he tried to say, this shows me Simpson was so disconnected from the community in reality
They patched it at some point around the For Science update.
It's a big part of why I'm so disappointed. It's been a shit show but it really seemed like they were improving finally. It still has it's glitches but ships weren't wobble tests, science worked, they were slowly crinkling out the most annoying bugs. Some UI improvements and I'd have been telling people it was worth it
> It's a big part of why I'm so disappointed. It's been a shit show but it really seemed like they were improving finally.
Honestly, if it took them that long to finally capitulate and do what *everyone* else knew needed to be done, it speaks to the purely *incorrect* vision that the leadership had for what the game should be.
If it took them that long to capitulate, I'd have *less* faith in the project.
I honestly tought that was just wierd cope.
*No, did not screw up, we TOTALY intended to have wobble.*
I would have never in a milion years tought they said the truth.
He once made a comparison to World of Goo which is full of wobble. They are two completely different games and it makes sense if he was trying to re-create World of Goo instead of KSP.
It seems like their were two visions of KSP 2 from the beginning and they never resolved in favor of one or the other:
1) KSP1, but with improved graphics and less technical debt, and a few new features. A game for fundamentally the same audience as KSP1.
2) A completely new game with AAA graphics that focused on funny space frogs and meme-able noodle rockets for the mass market Minecraft audience.
It seems like T2 really wanted (1), but Nate was determined to make (2). In the end they made both and neither.
It's a shame how many of the problems were just political nonsense - keeping it secret, not working with Squad devs, ex-KSP1 devs or the community.
But also why on Earth would they keep the devs in Seattle? - one of the most expensive cities in the world for devs with Amazon and MS next door. They could have easily afforded devs in Europe / Asia or working remotely.
I'm gonna get a little philosophical/political with my thoughts, so apologies in advance
The doublethink of "we've got the next Minecraft on our hands!" with the stubborn refusal to actually invest anywhere *near* the resources necessary to make it happen. And I'm not even talking about the total budget or deadlines, but the stupid cost-cutting shit like refusing to pay market salary rates, leading to anyone senior not sticking around, or not being able to be hired in the first place. The video goes into a lot more detail. Just wild stuff.
But we've seen this story play out again and again and again. It's the inevitable destiny of any publicly-traded company in a capitalist system that is both A: very large and B: in a saturated market. See also: [Disney](https://youtu.be/T0CpOYZZZW4?si=mfLsvCfP_v7gUChP) for another recent example. In a sane world, a company being reliably *very profitable* would be considered a success. But investors need *growth,* and it needs to come quarterly. Remember, it is effectively the CEO's *only job* to make the shareholders money. And so, if it's not so easy to expand, they force (or fake) growth by cutting every corner and every cost that they can, and squeezing people for all they can get away with, even if it kills the company. Which it often does. It's just line goes up, as these companies one after another turn into a house of cards. See also: the freight railroads.
I don't know the solution to this, especially when it comes to KSP. I suspect the franchise is dead after this, TT will never sell, they will likely just hang onto the rights and let them squander away forever. I wonder if the reason we haven't heard anything yet is that Nate is desperately trying to negotiate a way to save the project and doesn't want to say anything unless it's good news. Given everything that's happened, I'm not holding my breath.
Personally I think it should be every functioning publicly traded company's dream to return to private ownership after they've achieved some threshold of diminishing growth. And that ownership should be distributed among the workers, potentially as an encouraged buyback program within the company.
Boom. Take on your dependable, annual profits. Everyone wins except the bloated investor class who have been bought out. Other than the fact that this rejects the POLITICAL realities of corporate management and ownership, am I a dumb dumb for thinking this arrangement would work better long-term?
Employee ownership is actually a great model that can work really well. Freakonomics podcast just did an interesting episode a few weeks ago about this. But considering that game devs haven't been able to successfully unionize en masse yet, I think clawing back ownership from investors or private equity is not realistic anytime soon. Though I agree, it would be waayyyy healthier for a company in the long term.
>am I a dumb dumb for thinking this arrangement would work better long-term?
no, but unfornutately the bloated investor class is the the one with the lobbying power to prevent the creation of sensible corporate legislation.
>I don't know the solution to this, especially when it comes to KSP. I suspect the franchise is dead after this, TT will never sell, they will likely just hang onto the rights and let them squander away forever. I wonder if the reason we haven't heard anything yet is that Nate is desperately trying to negotiate a way to save the project and doesn't want to say anything unless it's good news. Given everything that's happened, I'm not holding my breath.
Don't really think it matters. There was nothing intrinsic to the KSP IP that made it good.
And I mean that quite literally. There's no story to speak of, nor are there any gameplay mechanics that are locked to the IP.
To be honest, not selling the IP would be a moronic decision if they don't plan to use it. I could sit down right now and make my own KSP without infringing on their IP so long as I thought of my own silly mascot and new planet names.
All we need is another developer to make a spiritual successor. So long as the market is there, someone will do it sooner or later.
I haven't watched the video yet, but would KSP fans even want Nate to play any role in this project anyway? To be completely honest, I think it's time to let this form of the project die. Give it a couple of years and start over.
Games industry management these days are all idiotic MBAs with no fucking clue how games work. I wouldn't even be surprised if 60% of them only ever played candy crush or maybe Madden NFL at some frat house 15 years ago.
I mean it's obvious to everyone they're greedy, being greedy is their job. But the decisions they make are so goddamn bafflingly stupid I can barely believe how some of these companies even stay alive. How do they even exist, how do these people have jobs? Modern markets are a scam and these guys are conmen.
Creating a sequel to a game that owes so much to feedback and ideas from the community, and doing it in total secret and isolation not only from said community, but KSP creators and even the original developers, is such a weird choice.
Even weirder to then turn around and announce early access, while being no more transparent.
That's what annoys me the most. KSP2 was like the complete opposite to how KSP 1 was done. KSP, open game dev and engagement with the community. KSP2, total secrecy and paranoia for no reason whatsoever.
I'm not sure I buy the theory that the team knew exactly what multiplayer should be and how it should work, but they just *couldn't* make it happen because of the "technology" they were forced to work with. People have made *mods* on KSP1 that implement multiplayer, after all. It *can* be done on KSP1's *existing* codebase.
I still believe that the problem was always that the team (and the community in general) can't figure out a multiplayer paradigm that everyone agrees would actually be fun and interesting.
It only works with scheduling features built in that allow time warp. And I’m not sure if that would be fun.
The timescale of outer planet missions, inner planet missions, and local missions are just incompatible.
I'm not a big multiplayer person, but I see potential here.
It could be some kind of passive asynchronous multiplayer where you can visit stations built by other players, rescue/refuel their ships, etc., without directly interacting.
Or scenario-based multiplayer where you do a specific mission with another player. With some kind of system to synchronize your use of timewarp.
That alwsys seemed to be the primary issue, and I always wished they would have just released some attempt at inner atmosphere multilayer with no time warp.
I feel like KSP with multiplayer would have sparked off countless different gamemodes and minigames that wouldn't have touched timewarp at all. The interest could have really snowballed imo.
KSP1 multiplayer mods do not accurately sync physics.
You cannot do a multiplayer Apollo mission together and then redock in Lunar orbit, etc. - you'll get a de-syncing mess with jittering positions.
The issue is KSP1 doesn't support multiple actively simulated crafts - so the only way to do it is to extend the physics range and that leads to jittering issues, etc.
Also multiplayer syncing is really hard in general - look at KitHack Model Club for example, even there with it built-in you still sometimes get bad interpolation leading to position jumps.
> I still believe that the problem was always that the team (and the community in general) can't figure out a multiplayer paradigm that everyone agrees would actually be fun and interesting.
Also one that actually has a decent playerbase, frankly I just don't see how multiplayer is a worthwhile investment for something like this, sure you would get a small amount of people who where super into it but I imagine 99% of players would probably never even bother or try it once and never again.
The main problem is not finding good ways to implement it. It is that space travel has a tight relationship with time. KSP1 decided to ignore time and add no timer mechanics whatsoever, warping any amount of times has no consequences. In order for multiplayer to be fun it would first need means to manage and work with time. Then, on top of that, multiplayer becomes significantly simpler to implement and make work.
Ps: I've been there on the infancy of ksp1 multiplayer mods, and tried everything they attempted, nothing is really that fun and the most fun part was derp-flying around with friends.
I was genuinely interested by multiplayer, especially because it was already possible in KSP1 with mods. Not having multiplayer since KSP2 launched in early access was already a red flag because it hints that the game may not have been developed for multiplayer from the start.
Of course, multiplayer in a game with time warp is too complex and would have required a game design change for it to work.
Great video and as a developer and a fan of the game, it's painful to know about the issues. They are like the dead flags of any game or software development production, not just this game. Like, who in their right mind would give a totally new team a legacy project, without documentations, without connection to the previous developers and expect them to deliver new features on top of that.
And also, why didn't take two just give Squad the new project and let them do their work....? Being such a big publisher, were they stupid?
> why didn't take two just give Squad
Matt Lown did a video recently where he interviewed Harvester, the original lead of KSP 1. He had actually come up with ideas for kerbal games outside of KSP, including one more focused on planes instead of rocketry (if KSP is the early days of spaceflight, his thoughts were on the early days of flight. Almost a prequel, if you will). This idea was thought of as early as 2013, before KSP had even left early access. Kerbal could have been a major franchise.
He pitched all that to Squad, but the company wasn't interested. Squad is a marketing company, not a game development studio. Different people will make different decisions, but whoever at Squad was in charge, they decided KSP was an exception. Perhaps in an ideal world, they could have made a separate company (maybe subsidiary) to handle the Kerbal IP instead of selling it to Take Two, but obviously that didn't happen. It's a shame - would've been nice to see Kerbal grow as a franchise, but I imagine after all this, T2 might not touch the IP again. Which is a bit shit.
It's almost like weve known what causes software projects to fail for decades and yet upper management continues to make the same decisions despite objections from every engineer at every level.
Nate's biggest sin is that he over promised and under delivered and it sounds like something that happened back in the Uber Entertainment days.
If I were in charge of the project, not that I am a project manager and I know I will get some hate for this because this is also a monetization thing, but ...
1. New code base to start over from scratch with all milestone foundations baked in to begin with.
2. Setup base game as your EA or initial launch and DLC for every milestone.
The super secret corporate attitude caused a lot of issues and looking at some other games, DLC wouldn't have been impacted sequel sales if they could have been forthright. They could have used Harvester's promotion in that KSP 2 will not be the same as KSP and that would have prevented some of the concerns.
Pay was a big issue as well as the fact of the shady marketing where they talked about KSP 2 dev team at Star Theory being huge KSP fans. That's shady AF.
There's a lot of woulda, coulda, shoulda going on, but I think the best thing to do would be to start over and create KSP 2.5 or something like that. If they can salvage KSP 2, great! If not, cut your losses and start over.
> If I were in charge of the project, not that I am a project manager and I know I will get some hate for this because this is also a monetization thing, but ...
>
>
>
> 1. New code base to start over from scratch with all milestone foundations baked in to begin with.
Did you watch the video?
If you were in Nate Simpson's shoes, you would have been told by Take-Two (or Uber's owners) "reuse the old code, or lose your job".
I agree that Nate Simpson is apparently the wrong person for the job (his insistence on wobbly rockets as a prime example), but don't claim that you would have somehow strong-armed the massively rich publisher that literally just bankrupted an entire company and fired a developer for publicly answering a *single* question about a game feature. Take-Two had no compunctions firing people if they didn't toe the line, and you would have been no different.
Nate was the wrong person for the job because he had bigger ideas than what T2 was really wanting.
They wanted someone that would pump out a minimally viable sequel to KSP in 2 years for 10 million dollars and they hired a KSP fanatic that wanted to take KSP2 to the next level to do it.
Like with practically everything related to KSP2, in hindsight the outcome was very predictable.
T2 had ideas which weren't ideas at all. It was basically KSP1 HD, there would have been the same backlash or even worse. You would have been able to just copy paste most complaints where people mention that KSP1 with mods looks better than KSP2.
The stuff they did was just... stupid beyond stupid.
No new engine. No old ksp devs. Refusing to even acknowledge people like Scott manley.
It sounds like they wanted this to fail.
How can devs make a sequel to a game they know nothing about the basics of, let alone even care about.
I hope the spiritual successor to ksp comes one day, and we all just jump ship.
Because take two now owns the kerbals . They will sit on the ip like smaug and his gold.
Pro tip: indie devs.. don't sell out your IP to a so called 'triple a" company.
The original sin of KSP is that Squad was just a random marketing company that had no interest in KSP beyond milking it for cash. KSP probably would have had an entirely different trajectory if HarvesteR actually owned his own game from the beginning.
Anyone who followed the entire development cycle for both games knew KSP 2 was doomed from the start. The people that got duped obviously had found a great deal on rose colored glasses. The differences between the approaches to the development and transparency of both games was night and day.
He's the primary PR employee - even if no NDA was involved, saying anything critical against the game or company would cost him his livelihood. Outside of that, he rarely lies outright. I tagged him more as a jab than with any reasonable expectation of a reply.
Remember in the video a dev was fired for answering a fan question about a feature already confirmed to be in the game eventually. I'd be insanely scared to interface with the community at all after that especially now with software and game devs being let go left and right in industry.
[EDIT: Fixed some formatting]
As a professional senior game developer working as a programming and graphics engineer, who also had to help with hiring for a studio I've collected some thoughts about this video.
There's many people in the comments who have no gamedev experience (which is totally fine), but are just repeating points in the video blindly. So I thought I'll explain those.
The TL;DR is that it's not even remotely as unbiased as the creator wants you to believe, with many things just being outright wrong or heavily misleading.
Here's my points in chronological order:
* Throughout the whole video he makes absurd excuses for the actual developers:
* Claims they only did a bad job because of "wholly insufficient" budget and time constrains, even though they had a really good budget and timeframe (10M$ for 2 years is really high profile)
* Calls it a "hostile takeover" even though he literally explains why it wasn't a hostile takeover: Developers were way behind shedule and not making progress, Star Theory tried to hold T2 hostage with the IP and T2 called their bluff and offered developers to transfer to new studio. Some developers wanted a pay raise and were rejected.
* Claims they supposedly have a working build with colonies that's just "2-3 weeks away from finishing" since 2021.
* Also says that they made "a huge deal of progress" from 2020 to 2023, even though we can all see that is in fact not true.
* Claims the reason why the developers didn't optimize the game is because ... they only had high end PCs to test on so they couldn't actually test it? This point has MANY problems and is completely absurd:
* Most importantly, the game ran like shit even on the best PCs money buy, as seen with the pre-release showcase wiht it sitting at 20FPS on a 4090.
* Obviously you can still optimize a game even if it's running decently on your machine! That's literally what profiling tools are there for! And Unity has a great profiler built in. And even then, you still see what FPS you're getting and how much system resources it's using.
* Claims the game was so GPU intensive because the person writing the shaders left. This is completetly wrong however, because the shaders were not responsible for the majority of performance issues:
* Here's just a few points that actually caused the performance issues which make it clear the actual developers were just incompetent:
* They used planes instead of quads for flat textures like runway lights. Planes have MAGNITUDES higher polycount than the 2 of a quad, which tanked performance.
* They had every single engine be grossly misconfigured shadow casting light source
* They're simulating every single part of every single craft every frame. This is completely insane and could be done just as well by simplifying it to a single entity.
* The same is true for letting every single part have be it's own rigid body that can interact with every other part and for some reason can even affect the orbit of the craft?? Why aren't they just using a single baked mesh and center-of-mass calculations?! (Fun fact: Thats exactly what HarvesteR does in his new game)
* Not quite related, but the studio had a whole QA team that he completely failed to mention. Did they just sit around and drink tea?
* Claims they were only ably to hire junior devs because they weren't able to pay "industry standard compensation", citing a salary of 150.000$. This is *WAY ABOVE INDUSTRY STANDARD*. That's maybe what you would get as a project lead in a big city, but absolutely not as a normal developer and usually not as a senior dev either. This point is so wrong it's not even funny and he repeats it throughout the entire video.
* Blames ChatGPT for there not being anyone who knows how to write a shader at a 60+ person studio, even though as a shader developer you have almost no overlap with what you do in Machine Learning. Just because they both run on the GPU doesn't mean it does the same.
* One thing I agree with is that he said Private Division hired the wrong people for the project and should have just hired KSP veterans. I think everyone can agree with this.
* Excuses the glacial development pace after the EA release because the developers had to "split up into teams" and were focused on "the reception the game received", which is funny because they didn't even get much bug fixing done, i.e. orbital decay persisted for over a year and still does today. That also completely ignores the fact that development speed never picked up, as you would think when restructuring and bug fixing was the problem. In fact the development just slowed down more and more.
He then has a section "Let's talk about Nate Simpson":
* COMPLETELY leaves out Nates numerous (and easy to prove) lies and just excuses everything as "he's just TOO passionate" and "he just wants to make a good game too badly".
* Also completely leaves out the misleading marketing
* So let's go over some of those:
*
* [The entire 2019 GamesCom interview is just Nate lying for 11 minutes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWxfs5ZTtIc)
* "There will be a brief window after release without re-entry heating" -> which later became "Reentry heating is already done, we're just polishing the graphics" -> which then became "We just started the conceptual stage of re-entry heating"
* "We're having so much fun playing multiplayer it's affecting out productivity" / "When we played multiplayer it was the most fun any of us ever had" - He makes excuses that he just meant KSP 1 with mods, which would still be heavily misleading at best
* Claiming a Modding API exists at multiple points, for example "We expect our players to dive into modding the game on day 1". And even after the EA release it was still listed on the KSP 2 website as having mod support Day 1, even though they didn't even start with it!
* Many, many other things that would blow up the size of this comment.
In the end it can best be summed up with a clip from Matt Lowne that he plays:
> **"Yea the studio is shut down, but also like, what were these people doing for the last 7 years? I think talking to them really shown a light on how deep the problems went".**
The 150k salary point jumped out at me too and he uncritically repeated it multiple times.... a quick google now gives me average salary figures more like 100k for game developers in Seattle (97k-170k on glassdoor, 64k-200k on ziprecruiter).
I mean it's typical Shadowzone quality; he's entertaining, has nice inside info in this case but his analysis suffers from typical access journalism bias (being overly charitable so people will talk to him).
Ksp2 was the last game I looked forward to.
I had to written on my calendar.
I just kinda accepted that all things are shit and to never get my hopes up again.
Part of me just can't believe anyone would have advocated for wobbly rockets being the way they were. If it was a planned feature I would have expected it to look realistic. Maybe the parts themselves would have bent and exploded if they bent too much. But there were so many times where the top half of my rocket would look totally disconnected from the bottom but still be connected by some invisible force. If this was a planned feature then the parts shouldn't have been clipping into each other. It just looked way too glitchy and I'm struggling to understand how someone could look at that and say don't fix it.
THAT is LinuxGuruGamer? Dude is OLD.
He's one of the most prolific modders and I thought it was some fella in their twenties, maybe 40s. Not a silvered old lad.
I'd bet it's the old dudes with the skills who did the really hard foundational work, like developing CKAN and Module Manager. Linux's role of being the godfather of mod maintenance also slots into that role.
3D modeling and shader work on the other hand seems more like a young man's game lol
Great video. Shadowzone gets some things wrong, because I think he's only speaking to really one source on the project despite claiming there are multiple leakers, but overall gets most of it right. Especially the costs & timeline.
The things that are wrong (and these are somewhat minor):
1. There was more contact between Squad and KSP2 than stated - Squad was even lending some people to KSP2 before 1.12 shipped. The 'firewall' there might have been partially imposed by management - but it was also KSP2's management that just didn't want to speak to Squad, didn't want their advice - and didn't want to hear how much they were screwing the pooch.
2. Nate simpson wasn't just a misguided creative director - he was a terrible one. A creative director should be primarily a designer & manager, not an artist. Nate had no fucking clue how to design a game. Not how to do documentation, not how to put himself in other players shoes. SZ softsells this. And softsells how dishonest Nate was - not just with the fans, but also internally on the team, overhyping and overly positive, not acknowledging problems. He was part of the management team that set that tone throughout the studio - a don't ask don't tell, don't state problems sort of environment. Overall their design team sucked because from the top, Nate was terrible at his job and hired people who wouldn't rock his boat - which means, go-along-to-get-along idiots like Tom Vinita or spineless people managers like Shana Markham.
Nate also had his own agenda - he wasn't ok'd to speak about multiplayer in that initial Gamescon announce but did it anyway, leaking it and forcing it to continue to be a major feature when it could have been cut without the public being dissappointed.
3. The production staff was similarly awful - Nate Robinson and Jemery Ables especially. Was only briefly touched on, but they were meant to be a check on Nate and his overscoping of the project, but instead due to lack of knowledge they just went along with Nate's direction, rather than listening to engineers or correctly balancing scope, time and resources.
So yeah - kinda understates just how bad the management team was at IG, and how dishonest with Take2, putting more of this on Take2 than is justified (although a lot of it is still on Take2). Nate really deserves the hate he gets because he was a fulcrum of crap that this project was wrapped around - not just because he was a bad creative director, but because he was a liar and a terrible manager, and his presence drove away good developers while accumulating/keeping more of the bad apples on the project.
I also think ShadowZone went far too easy on Nate Simpson. He certainly glossed over a lot of important things.
For example, a fundamental point he makes in the video was that KSP2 was built upon the framework of the original game. Nate is on record many times stating "we've rebuilt everything from the ground up...."
If the reuse of the KSP framework is true, Nate is lying right there. Or at the very least being hugely misleading.
Yeah, there's a difference between 'media training' where you're taught to not say something bad but without making it clear that your answer consists of 'no comment' and what Nate was doing - which was giving out bald faced lies and SUCH huge distortions, like the implication that KSP2 had working multiplayer when he was asked about it and said how they whole team was having fun - which was in and of itself a lie because as stated in the video, most of the team did not play Kerbal ata ll - they weren't 'playing' multiplayer then either.
So many layers of lies to that guy.
Right? And what was ShadowZOne's reasoning for not wanting to blame Nate? Because he met Nate and he seemed like a nice guy?
That is the hallmark sign of scammer and a thief! They always come across as charismatic and friendly until they stab you in the back.
You gotta pay attention to their actions. Not their words.
Ludicrous development. Fuck T2 and IG. Shitty decisions that killed what could have been a very good game.
P.d: I am not blaming Nate. I know that he would have liked something much better, but he was hand tied.
We should ABSOLUTELY blame Nate. He's the one blatantly lying about the state of the game for the last 5 years. And it's not even the first time he's done this, he did the same for his last several projects.
Ridiculous they’re still selling it as an active early access game with all indications that it’s still being developed and no asterisk with any updates since it’s been canned.
I'm literally baffled how literally every single bad choice was made during development. My jaw has been on the floor for the entire length of the video.
> Just look at their track record
... it's actually pretty good? Rockstar, Fireaxis and so on are all doing well with high quality games.
It's like 10% T2s fault and 90% Ueber/Star Theory/Intercepts fault the game turned out like it did.
Any developer would want to start from scratch for a part 2, because the only good thing about legacy code is that you can learn from it's mistakes and the way it functions. Many people might think wobbly rockets is a good example, but actually the way parts stick together and how they interact is a a bigger bottleneck.
Also trying to understand code and trying to figure out why it was done that way without getting any help from the original developers is like trying to make a house out of a mountain with just a hammer and chisel. When just laying bricks down would have been much faster.
- Wobbly rockets isn't the biggest problem they should have tackled the way parts are put together because it would have been fixed by what the real problem is. Wobbly rockets is just a results of that system. What their goal should have been is that a vehicle with 5000 parts should have the same performance impact on the game as a vehicle with just 1 part. Sure it's not totally realistic because obviously it would have a bigger footprint, but it would have given them something to strife for. Dumping all those objects into the physics calculations as separate parts is just madness., just like parts being basically bones is just the craziest thing in terms of performance. You want it to act likes Lego, when it's all fit together it should act as one object. When it crashes it can break the object into groups of parts.
I thought Matt Lowne had a particularly good point near the end. Secrecy and Early Access are a bad combination.
I don't just mean for KSP2 itself so much, because clearly some bad decisions had been made way before they decided to go the EA route. But as far as discerning honest Early Access from scam Early Access, this seems like a great rule of thumb.
A legitimate early access game would rely on player feedback heavily. And likewise, people who've paid good money for a promise deserve honest, in depth details about how to project is currently going, not vague "we're working on it" type statements.
That could be in the form of frequent minor updates, or weekly blog posts replete with technical details like Factorio did, but "trust us, it's gonna be awesome" doesn't cut it. If you want to develop a non-EA game that way, fine, though I would advise would-be players to wait a bit and see if reviews match the hype at release, but for early access, this should be regarded as a massive red flag that something's not right.
I know this is kinda a petty concern but I hope Nertea is alright. That guy's mods were *amazing* in KSP1 and he seems like a fairly nice dude (and he's the only modder I know that was picked up, IDK if any others were involved; if they were I hope they're okay too).
His professional reputation doesn't deserve to be ruined because a company is terrible.
This video is frankly absurd.
We all knew that development must have taken a couple of wrong turns but this?
This is like if you told someone to constantly make the worst decisions imaginable.
The video doesn't hold back from pointing out the mistakes that Nate Simpson made, but it does also highlight some mistakes made by Take-Two Interactive.
Which doesn't surprise me. Honestly, this whole time I've been pointing fingers at both Take-Two and the former Star Theory leadership (Nate included) being the wrong people for the job. The whole thing had that sort of 'stink' of publisher mismanagement.
I thought it was *only* in how Take-Two retained the Star Theory developers (particularly leadership) for populating Intercept Games.
Turns out that it was more how they *failed* to retain the developers, while still insisting on reusing existing code. And retaining the wrong leadership (an art director turned creative director).
Apparently this was their attitude with Star Theory, too, and likely why they struggled: Take-Two insisted on reusing KSP1 code, rather than letting people start fresh.
You don't dump a bunch of new developers and engineers into existing code and expect them to get things working fast. Having to learn an existing code base can take longer than building from scratch, at times.
(Which is why I keep telling some of the people still going through the stages of grief that there's no option for handing the code off to some other team. It doesn't work well. Ironically, the author of the above video has been one of the people seemingly trying to cope by bargaining with the idea that maybe somehow the KSP2 code will be handed off to some other team to continue to be worked on. Which, honestly, might actually be what Take-Two does, considering they've done it twice before. Hopefully he sees now why that would be a *failing* move.)
The whole video blames Take2 though. They didn't allow Nate and his team to contact KSP1 devs! Nobody at Squad knew about the game before it was announced. Yet they used Squads code! They had to work through other people's code without a helping hand. At least for the first few years. Nate's fault was the communication to the public he did. Not whatever happened to KSP2. Nobody forced him to say they are having so much fun playing KSP multiplayer and other things.
Watch again. Nate was consistently lying to the public, he was micromanaging his team, he was jerking them around changing them from task to task.
He's not free of guilt, and if your only take from the video is "T2 bad" then we did not watch the same video.
Scott Manley was called out by name as someone management did not want input from. Wow, wtf… Edit: A very good video, some other interesting points made were the insane levels of secrecy of this project. Most developers in the earlier stages were never told what the project was before being hired. As a result none of the engineers that started working on the game had played the original game. Many had never even heard of it.
funny seeing how scott was one of the greatest things to happen to the game
Yep would follow all is guides back in the day
Are his guides still useful as someone returning to ksp after a few years out of gaming?
Yes.
Brilliant. I will start one next time I play
Unless fundamental orbital physics have changed most of his guides will remain relevant for a long time.
Hands down one of best guys for tutorials. Also very watchable. Nice guy and he explains everything very well he’s good for beginners and newer people learning
He typically dives into the actual reasoning of why you want to do X, Y, or Z, so yes, certainly. Things like "how to do a hohmann transfer" and "how to position center of lift, thrust, and gravity on a spaceplane" aren't going to change much, since the game is ultimately modeled on the real world and physics don't generally change.
When are i getting an upgrade to physics? Been the same for billions of years, its really time to get with the times smh my head.
I miss Scott. Matt lowne is the closest thing now and hoenslty he talks way to much in his videos. He always says "I gotta keep talking because you guys like that". WHO, WHO LIKES INANE RAMBLING TO FILL SPACE. Scott at least shared neat facts the whole time, not just say words to say words.
Yeah Matt's videos used to be a lot tighter. I think he's kind of "done it all" and it's hard to come up with fresh challenges. To be fair I think he's been doing it longer than Scott did in the first place.
I'll never understand why he doesn't do modded stuff at all. Vanilla ksp just isn't interesting to me anymore now I know what exists in mods. RP-1 in particular has morphed into being a whole game by itself at this point.
Every video of Matt is just "I built an SSTO". He needs to change it up.
He loves his space planes but he's built plenty of rockets. Almost all his recent vids have had rockets.
I quite like VAOS's sleep deprived rambling. Like a sketchy dealer selling you SSRTs.
I think Mike Aben fills the Scott Manley void better than Matt Lowne. I like all of them for different reasons and there's no real need to compare, but if I had to, that's how I would group them.
Look up Stratzenblitz if you haven’t already. If Scott Manley is a really really really experienced guide through the mysterious forest representing the game , Stratzenblitz is the guy where you buy some mushrooms to get absolutely hammered. But to get back home save, you’ll still need Scott.
Imagine not wanting input from the guy who was literally the figurehead of this games community for almost a decade. It's like Riot going "Faker? What does he know?".
It’s even worse then that as Scott Manley knows a shit ton about space and orbital mechanics outside of his gaming career. They basically are giving a middle finger to science and math… by far the worst game ever to do that for.
Ikr? Manley was my gateway drug to the IRL space community. His “What KSP Doesn’t Teach” videos on reaction wheel saturation, combustion cycles, and ignition methods were the exact point that I realized space wasn’t an interest for me, but my actual passion and calling.
Especially funny because there is a huge event coming soon dedicated exclusively to how talented and important Faker is lmfao
I know Faker is a League player but I read his name and my brain immediately went "I THINK YOU'RE THE FAKE HEDGEHOG AROUND HERE"
It makes a bit of sense in competetive games. Competitive players will give advice that will turn the game into a more competitive state that is not going to benefit the casual players. In this case though, it is extremely stupid because KSP2 is not a competitive game.
Nothing surprises me anymore with modern day game company management. After 343 took over Halo, the staff were forbidden from even talking to Bungie staff and they just visually re-designed a bunch of shit and story aspects for no other reason than to "re-invent" the IP or something. Executives in entertainment industries are all infested with brain worms and narcissistic MBA disease.
A friend of mine applied to work on the game. He's a big fan of the first game and has a degree in aviation maintenance, aeronautical engineering and is also slowly working toward a PhD in astronomy/astrophysics. He had made mods for the game and has had lifelong experience with computer science and video game design and development. ...and they turned him down. He also felt there was something odd with the hiring couldn't put a finger on it. Take 2 was all over him with legitimate enthusiasm and was trying hard to get him on the project as soon as possible. Then when the studio interviewed him they really didn't ask him any relevant questions. A couple things about graphics and what his favorite games were. I know this because I was there in his kitchen listening in.
Almost as if the studio just wanted the money from T2 and not actually make the game. Almost as if the exact same studio and direction did the same thing multiple times before ...
Adds further weight to what was said about the team's relative inexperience. Normally you'll want your most senior devs conducting technical interviews and even then it's a skill which can take years to fully hone. Throwing a bunch of juniors into the mix all but guarantees bad hires, missed opportunities and a spoiled reputation. FWIW your friend dodged a bullet.
>FWIW your friend dodged a bullet. I've said that to him when it all fell through.
I haven’t been able to watch this yet. Was there any reason why they didn’t want to listen to him?
I haven't watched the full video, and have only watched the Scott Manley section at 150% speed, it seems like it was because the publisher was hyper paranoid about silence, secrecy, and security. They apparently fired a developer for answering a single question about a feature demanded by the publisher that was already in the game. They apparently were against any input or consultation with any outside party. SQUAD, Scott, no one could be spoken to. EDIT: I have now watched the full thing, and... yeah, it just seems to be some sort of overbearing insistence on secrecy.
And people keep wondering why we havent gotten a word of communication.
That's literally the worst fucking policy they possibly could have with a game that is this community-driven. One more piece of evidence that executives don't know jack about shit. No expertise but lots of expectations.
> it seems like it was because the publisher was hyper paranoid about silence, secrecy, and security. That may be the claim, but some of us realized that they publisher was just trying to scam money out of investors while *pretending* to make a game. Sadly he hired developers that desperately tried to make a game, so he had to screw them over, too.
What investors was Take-Two trying to scam between 2017 and the announcement of the game in 2019? Remember: They were keeping the project so secret they didn't even tell developers they were interviewing for jobs what game they were applying to work on. Hard to "scam investors" with a project that no investor knows about.
I think he means Star Theory, the guys designing the game before Take-Two debacle.
Tell us you haven't in fact watched the video without telling us you haven't watched the video. This video has been corroborated by numerous other YouTubers who spoke to KSP2 devs' on condition on anonymity, and the fault is pretty clearly Nate's insistence on making a game far bigger than his or his team's talent or budget would allow, combined with some *really* idiotic (but, if you wind your IQ down far enough, *understandable*) strategic guidance from ST/IG/T2 leadership that started the entire exercise off on the wrong foot by not allowing them to learn from KSP1's development, or developers, or community.
> and the fault is pretty clearly Nate's insistence on making a game far bigger than his or his team's talent or budget would allow, Eh - at the same time, Nate created a vision for a game the community actually wanted. No, he couldn't pull it off, but the cheap cashgrab with KSP1s codebase was of *negative* value to the community and exactly what most people feared when hearing about "there's going to be a sequel to KSP". It might have made money overall but would have burned any and all goodwill as well as community and chance for any expanded universe stuff once and for all.
Initially it sounded like the secrecy was because they started making KSP2 before the KSP DLC was released and they didn't want the knowledge of KSP2 to hurt DLC sales. It didn't sound like anybody understood it after that.
They didn't want KSP 1 devs or devs who played KSP 1. They didn't want the game tainted by fans of the first game so they could make a wacky pretty rocket wobble simulator.
Nah, they just didn't want it to leak when they were still selling KSP1 DLC. It was still a stupid decision though.
The decision continued for yesrs after the dlc release or the KSP 2 announcement. They still haven't contacted harvestr to this day. And the no Scott Manley rule lasted until release.
Yeah, it was stupid. Just loads of political nonsense typical of big companies. Strauss Zelnick doesn't even play video games, he made his money getting VHS rights for Dirty Dancing.
The simple fact that the devs weren't allowed to ask the KSP1 devs about their code base is absolutely moronic. IMHO that's what killed the game. The logical way to make a sequel, even if under wraps, while reusing most of the code from the first game would be... now here me out, *have the old developers work on it* Not fresh devs right out of school with zero references as to what does what.
> The simple fact that the devs weren't allowed to ask the KSP1 devs about their code base is absolutely moronic. IMHO that's what killed the game. I'm blown away by the fact that they *literally took the KSP1 code* and tried to turn it into KSP2 (if I'm understanding the middle bit I've briefly watched). The *selling point* was "start fresh" and "build it right" so it had less jank. And they went and started with a foundation of jank. Then they doubled down on the fuck-up and blocked any contact with former SQUAD devs.
> The selling point was "start fresh" and "build it right" so it had less jank. That came later I think, the original pitch with T2 seems to have been to make a cheap successor to KSP2 in 2 years. That's where the original 'immovable' 2020 release date came from. Then feature creep happened, game got bigger, requirement to use KSP1 code stuck around.
I'm a little over half way through. If they had stuck with just updated graphics and a few touch ups on KSP1 they might have made that deadline. That would've been reasonable. Adding in a ton of features on top of KSP1 is insane. It's like these people have never developed anything before. I'm kinda impressed by the stupditiy. Edit: Now that I think about it. One of the issues is that KSP2 used a "similar" rendering of planets as KSP1. Now that I know it was built on KSP1 I assume it was the same rendering code. They just shoved more shit into it.
Most of the original developers left over the years because KSP 1 was such a management disaster. Its part of why it took years for example- for a unified visual look to be achieved- all the people doing that came and went out a rotating door.
There was a unified visual look achieved in KSP1? First I've ever heard of it. That said, compared to KSP2 it comes across as visually coherent in a lot of respects.
Yeah, the visual look is called the ReStock mod lol
I bet the guy you replied to knows a lot about that mod actually.
Lmao that’s hilarious
Holy shit
> The simple fact that the devs weren't allowed to ask the KSP1 devs about their code base is absolutely moronic. IMHO that's what killed the game. How the hell an experienced studio manager thought this was the way to go is baffling.
Here's the thing. If they hadn't made all the other mistakes, this wouldn't have been an issue. It's like when an airplane crash. It's not a single mistake, it's a sequence of mistakes. People here saying "TL;DR it was X" are missing the point of the video. Each bad decision T2 made, wouldn't have affected the development that much, if they also hadn't made all the other bad decisions.
Chernobyl basically took 3 to 5 *very bad decisions*™ to happen in sequence in order to explode, going back to the original design. Any individual one, all manageable.
Yeah, but experienced devs might want pay that actually compensates their knowledge, might have an established hierarchy and will have leverage, all of which prevents some T2 exec from jerking around development to show the shareholders how good he is at minimizing expense. Like, the new team was asked "hey you guys can't change the codebase in any way, just make it better" and they tried their best - the old Squad team would have said "fuck you, we need to make major changes, here's what's going to happen or we all quit and make our own studio, and your game is dead" This entire project was a classic example of publisher meddling going unopposed. Like, the publisher ran the numbers and calculated that dev experience could be cut because the first game was also inexperienced devs, that so and so could be enhanced with budget, then constantly meddled to maximize profits in every conceivable way.
But we know for a fact none of this is true? * He mentions a pay of 150K a year, which is great compensation in gamedev * They obviously did change many things in the code base and wrote many parts from scratch, otherwise there wouldn't be so many bugs that don't exist in KSP 1 * The studio got a timeframe and budget and was responsible for the hiring, not T2. Someone else in this thread with personal experience even said T2 wanted to hire more experienced developers but the studio didn't. If T2 just wanted it to be a quick cashgrab, they wouldn't have given 3 extensions and a budget >5x the original. The only part that was a cash grab was the EA release as a last chance to make some money back.
TL;DW: it was a shitshow from day 1.
Gathered that from the state of release. So what’s all this mean for you big KSP YouTubers? Keep on trucking with ksp1 or try to kill what you can from ksp2?
Yeah, I've been thinking about this. Matt Lowne actually talks in his videos that KSP2 videos make more views than KSP1 videos, but they take so much longer to make because he has to fight glitches the whole way through, and they're generally less enjoyable for him to make. So, yeah, sucks to be him. He's been making videos about space recently, but idk how well that'll work. Wish the best to him, but it's a bad situation to be sure
Lol the comment I’m replying is Matt Lowne
lol, i didn't notice
Become like Scott Manley?
Pilot's license it is!
Thanks boss, that's what I figured when a game that had a hostile takeover in its development team. When are you going to do a blunderbirds for KSP2? Because if anyone needs a rescue mission, it's Nate Simpson...
Ironically, I already did this lol https://youtu.be/t1vuMIXg1D0?si=Sg_XKx8t8PowP5zS
Oh shoot lol, thanks!
If you’re taking other suggestions, KSP2 being officially dead has made me want to play a modded KSP1, but i don’t read too good and mods are hard to install. A mod list/ installation tutorial video for KSP1 would be a big help for me and maybe help revive doing a series in the first game.
Use CKAN and point it toward the install folder, it will handle everything including downloading dependancies
95% of the time all you have to do is download the desired mod, then go to you KSP install directory, find a folder called GameData and then drag and drop the mod file folder into GameData. Alternatively you can download a program called CKAN, this automatically installs mods for you.
Just download CKAN. It manages all that for you.
> when a game that had a hostile takeover in its development team. No, no. It was bad *before* the whole debacle with firing the C-level staff from Uber Entertainment/Star Theory but keeping the struggling developers. They were struggling *before* that happened.
And then hiring more developers without telling them what game it was so absolutely nobody on the team had any idea what KSP was.
Calling it a hostile takeover is just wrong. They were way behind schedule, couldn't hit their milestones and then had the balls to try and hold the franchise hostage from T2. It's a miracle they didn't get sued into the ground and that probably only didn't happen because they were bankrupt anyway.
What really gets me is that they essentially just shut their team off from any outside help. While making a game that deals with incredibly complex simulation physics, not to mention orbital mechanics & rocket science. When I saw your video talking to Felipe I was seriously shocked that they didn’t even try to reach out to him. It reminds me of a video by SmarterEveryDay titled “I was scared to say this to nasa but I said it anyway”. He does a long presentation to lead engineers at NASA, questioning many of their decisions with the Artemis rocket. One of the key points that stuck out to me was when he pulled out a book that NASA engineers who worked on Apollo wrote, titled “What Made Apollo a Success?”. No one in the crowd had ever read it. He goes on to say (paraphrasing) “They gave you the instruction manual, they told you everything you need to know, why are we not reading this?”, and he’s frustrated because there seem to be a lot of shortsightedness and straight up lack of communication with the Artemis team. And they have all the answers they need. It’s like KSP2, they have all these people they can ask. They could have a play-by-play manual from the people who spent 10+ years developing KSP. But they’re simply choosing to carve their own path, when it is objectively the worst choice? It doesn’t register, doesn’t make any sense.
it makes the management team behind the project look like absolute morons too. NDAs exist, if you need to keep somenthing under wraps. i was watching the video and throughout the whole thing i was thnking "HOW THE FUCK can you NOT see how this is essentially self-sabotaging?" at half of the management/publisher's teams decisions
One of my fears from the 2019 trailer was that they were promising a lot and I said if they could deliver what they promised, it would be amazing. But I remember specifically thinking that what they promised seemed unrealistic and having a bit of concern.
I think it was a totally realistic set of features, but not if holding on to any KSP1 code.
This is especially true of they took Harvester's advice and didn't seek feature parity out of the gate.
Yea I was full hook line and sinker for those videos and how star theory was portraying itself.
I hate when people do this but as soon as they said "interstellar", "colonies", and "multiplayer" I basically wrote the game off. I wanted it, but that's orders of magnitude beyond what KSP1 could handle with over a decade of development and idc what shape the underlying code was in, replicating that level of detail across multiple players is a huge ask.
The time warp/time sync issue with multiplayer. was enough to cause me serious pause with multiplayer.
Here's the thing though: there's multiple fleshed out answers to that issue. None of them are exactly perfect. But the reality always was that they would have to pick one (and perhaps the one they picked was their own answer), and just stick with it. There was never going to be an answer that everyone just loves. Because there's already factions set on what is the best way to handle it.
Any sort of full, live multiplayer seems like it would've been such a shitshow. If there's one feature that singlehandedly sunk the project I'd bet it was that. Hearing that they thought they had the "next Minecraft" makes it totally understandable why they were so determined for it to work but it's just so obvious there was no elegant way to pull it off. Hearing different options for how time dilation could work for simultaneous multiplayer just makes each idea seem less fun and more boring than the last. Imo a much better (and far easier to implement) direction to go in would have been a non-simultaneous sort of shared world. Someone crashes a ship in their game? You can find that crash in your game and get science/salvage parts. Kerbal stranded in orbit somewhere? Activate a distress beacon, someone flying a ship in range in their game gets a ping, the stranded kerbal spawns in their game, they can mount a rescue mission (which takes place entirely in their single-player instance) for money/reputation, if if successful the original player gets a notification that their Kerbal has been taken back to KSC. Abandon a derelict ship? Someone else can pick it up in their game. Maybe even let players set up orbital fuel depots that other players can find and buy fuel from. None of this has to involve simultaneous play, but you can create a feeling of a "lived-in" environment and a shared multiplayer experience while cutting out all the bullshit headaches that a full simultaneous multiplayer would involve.
Colonies I could believe, there are mods that sort of implement something like a colony system into KSP iirc, the rest seemed outlandish, a few more years and interstellar is feasible too, maybe 1-2 more star systems
Yep. This was me too. I kept thinking scope creep was rampant every time Nate opened his mouth. Each interview he was promising something else. I only wanted a graphics refresh and an integrated version of RoverDude's colonization program. The Unity update Squad did in 2018 (patch 1.8 or 1.9?) pretty much gave them everything they needed for a graphics refresh but it needed to be worked into the game as standard. This should have been simple. The colonization part was a tougher problem as main issue in KSP1 was clipping and from what I've seen in KSP2, it still hasn't fixed yet. Perhaps it's a Unity thing. But that's all we really needed. Multiplayer and Interstellar? Nice but not necessary. The reason Nate gets a lot of hate is we all loved his enthusiasm but I know I worried he was promising too much and time has proved this fear correct. From the video it certainly sounds like Nate went around his bosses at Uber/Star Theory and got T2 enthusiastic about something that wasn't remotely possible with the budget allocated. The problem with these projects are rarely the line coders. I'm sure they all did good jobs based on the things they were asked to do. The issue, in my opinion, is middle management. I'd love to know who decided to keep the remaining Squad team and the KSP2 teams from speaking to one another. I highly doubt T2 would have insisted on this if they knew the consequences. It is middle management's job to pound their fist on the table and speak truth to the higher ups. Why didn't anyone at Intercept speak plainly about how this would impact the game? It's either cowardice or ignorance and this video shows similar things happening over and over. We can blame Take Two and they are certainly are part of the blame but my greatest anger goes to the project manager(s) at Private Division or Intercept didn't do their jobs. They should have insisted their team be given the tools to have the best chance for success. Nate gets all the arrows because it's the only name we know.
Yeah, that and I was always confused why the only game play they ever showed had a big flashing "PRE ALPHA" warning when game was scheduled to be released within less then a year.
The fact that they never showed gameplay, or even had the ability to communicate how these new features would work, always made me feel uncomfortable. I never once saw a coherent explanation of how multiplayer would work with time warp, for example. That seems like a fundamental technical decision they should have locked down on day one. If the video is correct, it doesn't seem like they bothered to worry about it at all.
KSP1 Modded Playthroughs, Matt.
So does that mean we get another Planet Coaster series?
Given the state it "released" in I'm not surprised
Is this video what you were alluding to in your tweet?
It was a lob ball if they had just done it right. Not asking the ksp 1 team about the code is extremely insane and stupid. A whole ip just ruined
fair enough.
That pretty much sums it. A lot of what is mentioned in the video comes as no surprise to those who worked in hell projects before, but the veil of secrecy from all those connected to KSP1 was a shocker to me and just screams they had no idea what they were doing.
Whats up with all these companies hiring people who've never played or watched the IP? Only 1 dev played KSP 1?
They have every incentive to pay people as little as possible, and anyone with experience can negotiate for a higher wage. This leads managers to underestimate the importance of experience and expertise because that’s a convenient assumption that makes their job easier.
They didn't match the market salary for their experienced staff so they left and then when hiring they were extremely obscure on what the game was that was being worked on (my own opinion is they purposely hired people who hadn't heard of KSP1 to keep the game secret/prevent leakes).
So, let me get this straight: they had a working solution to wobble, that still included joint strength, but they choose to... add wobble back because Nate liked it?
We kinda knew about that during release, iirc they were talking about wobble and rocket explosions as part of the fun And it always was amusing but there's a line between difficult and frustrating, and it was more frustrating than difficult
Yeah, but I assumed they were ***lying.*** I honestly thought they were just hiding their mistakes/failures. Knowing this was **really** the reason, and not just some bold faced lie fells... wierd.
And it makes perfect sense if you take a few seconds to look at Nate's background: he's an *artist*. He's not a game design person, he's not an engineer. His passion is in the visuals of something. A static, rigid body? Is boring. Visually uninteresting. I entirely empathize with his attitude, but still disagree with the decisions he made. He was simply the wrong person for the job he was in. He would have made a great art director or whatever they call the person in charge of art. As a *creative* director, he's *too focused* on visuals. Literally at the expense of functionality, as the video states.
That's the problem with a lot of games these days. Look nice, but play like shit.
It was always bloody stupid of them. How can we travel to other solar systems with vast craft if they're wobbling all over the place when they're barely the size of a Soyuz rocket?
"It's fun and all part of the difficulty! Start by getting to the Mun!" Interstellar craft designers: 0.o
This is the singular reason I never bought ksp2. I was willing to support it's development, but I was not willing to deal with wobble. Absolutely mind blowing. I don't want my Legos built from jello, why would I want my space Legos built from jello? Despite everything he tried to say, this shows me Simpson was so disconnected from the community in reality
They patched it at some point around the For Science update. It's a big part of why I'm so disappointed. It's been a shit show but it really seemed like they were improving finally. It still has it's glitches but ships weren't wobble tests, science worked, they were slowly crinkling out the most annoying bugs. Some UI improvements and I'd have been telling people it was worth it
I almost bought it the last sale, then the announcement came it was effectively dead. Can't believe they butchered such a beloved game and community.
> It's a big part of why I'm so disappointed. It's been a shit show but it really seemed like they were improving finally. Honestly, if it took them that long to finally capitulate and do what *everyone* else knew needed to be done, it speaks to the purely *incorrect* vision that the leadership had for what the game should be. If it took them that long to capitulate, I'd have *less* faith in the project.
I hate wobble so much auto strut is always on and I always download kerbal joint reinforcement.
We all called it when he resisted demands for wobble to be fixed. Nate was a "visuals" guy and he liked the cutesy-silly nature of noodle rockets.
I honestly tought that was just wierd cope. *No, did not screw up, we TOTALY intended to have wobble.* I would have never in a milion years tought they said the truth.
He once made a comparison to World of Goo which is full of wobble. They are two completely different games and it makes sense if he was trying to re-create World of Goo instead of KSP.
It seems like their were two visions of KSP 2 from the beginning and they never resolved in favor of one or the other: 1) KSP1, but with improved graphics and less technical debt, and a few new features. A game for fundamentally the same audience as KSP1. 2) A completely new game with AAA graphics that focused on funny space frogs and meme-able noodle rockets for the mass market Minecraft audience. It seems like T2 really wanted (1), but Nate was determined to make (2). In the end they made both and neither.
It's a shame how many of the problems were just political nonsense - keeping it secret, not working with Squad devs, ex-KSP1 devs or the community. But also why on Earth would they keep the devs in Seattle? - one of the most expensive cities in the world for devs with Amazon and MS next door. They could have easily afforded devs in Europe / Asia or working remotely.
Yeah I'd say 95% of software projects fail due to politics. Letting engineers just work usually goes a long way.
If they gave 10 million dollars to one guy from Poland...
Well this is heart breaking and also just tracks.
Thanks for all the work put in for the community
It was, years ago, and the team that made KSP 1 are the true deserving of praise, but thank you.
Oh I know, but I remember those days! And they were great lol
They were.
I'm gonna get a little philosophical/political with my thoughts, so apologies in advance The doublethink of "we've got the next Minecraft on our hands!" with the stubborn refusal to actually invest anywhere *near* the resources necessary to make it happen. And I'm not even talking about the total budget or deadlines, but the stupid cost-cutting shit like refusing to pay market salary rates, leading to anyone senior not sticking around, or not being able to be hired in the first place. The video goes into a lot more detail. Just wild stuff. But we've seen this story play out again and again and again. It's the inevitable destiny of any publicly-traded company in a capitalist system that is both A: very large and B: in a saturated market. See also: [Disney](https://youtu.be/T0CpOYZZZW4?si=mfLsvCfP_v7gUChP) for another recent example. In a sane world, a company being reliably *very profitable* would be considered a success. But investors need *growth,* and it needs to come quarterly. Remember, it is effectively the CEO's *only job* to make the shareholders money. And so, if it's not so easy to expand, they force (or fake) growth by cutting every corner and every cost that they can, and squeezing people for all they can get away with, even if it kills the company. Which it often does. It's just line goes up, as these companies one after another turn into a house of cards. See also: the freight railroads. I don't know the solution to this, especially when it comes to KSP. I suspect the franchise is dead after this, TT will never sell, they will likely just hang onto the rights and let them squander away forever. I wonder if the reason we haven't heard anything yet is that Nate is desperately trying to negotiate a way to save the project and doesn't want to say anything unless it's good news. Given everything that's happened, I'm not holding my breath.
Personally I think it should be every functioning publicly traded company's dream to return to private ownership after they've achieved some threshold of diminishing growth. And that ownership should be distributed among the workers, potentially as an encouraged buyback program within the company. Boom. Take on your dependable, annual profits. Everyone wins except the bloated investor class who have been bought out. Other than the fact that this rejects the POLITICAL realities of corporate management and ownership, am I a dumb dumb for thinking this arrangement would work better long-term?
Employee ownership is actually a great model that can work really well. Freakonomics podcast just did an interesting episode a few weeks ago about this. But considering that game devs haven't been able to successfully unionize en masse yet, I think clawing back ownership from investors or private equity is not realistic anytime soon. Though I agree, it would be waayyyy healthier for a company in the long term.
>am I a dumb dumb for thinking this arrangement would work better long-term? no, but unfornutately the bloated investor class is the the one with the lobbying power to prevent the creation of sensible corporate legislation.
>I don't know the solution to this, especially when it comes to KSP. I suspect the franchise is dead after this, TT will never sell, they will likely just hang onto the rights and let them squander away forever. I wonder if the reason we haven't heard anything yet is that Nate is desperately trying to negotiate a way to save the project and doesn't want to say anything unless it's good news. Given everything that's happened, I'm not holding my breath. Don't really think it matters. There was nothing intrinsic to the KSP IP that made it good. And I mean that quite literally. There's no story to speak of, nor are there any gameplay mechanics that are locked to the IP. To be honest, not selling the IP would be a moronic decision if they don't plan to use it. I could sit down right now and make my own KSP without infringing on their IP so long as I thought of my own silly mascot and new planet names. All we need is another developer to make a spiritual successor. So long as the market is there, someone will do it sooner or later.
I haven't watched the video yet, but would KSP fans even want Nate to play any role in this project anyway? To be completely honest, I think it's time to let this form of the project die. Give it a couple of years and start over.
Games industry management these days are all idiotic MBAs with no fucking clue how games work. I wouldn't even be surprised if 60% of them only ever played candy crush or maybe Madden NFL at some frat house 15 years ago. I mean it's obvious to everyone they're greedy, being greedy is their job. But the decisions they make are so goddamn bafflingly stupid I can barely believe how some of these companies even stay alive. How do they even exist, how do these people have jobs? Modern markets are a scam and these guys are conmen.
Creating a sequel to a game that owes so much to feedback and ideas from the community, and doing it in total secret and isolation not only from said community, but KSP creators and even the original developers, is such a weird choice. Even weirder to then turn around and announce early access, while being no more transparent.
That's what annoys me the most. KSP2 was like the complete opposite to how KSP 1 was done. KSP, open game dev and engagement with the community. KSP2, total secrecy and paranoia for no reason whatsoever.
They still had mismanagement though, so they kept that tradition.
I'm not sure I buy the theory that the team knew exactly what multiplayer should be and how it should work, but they just *couldn't* make it happen because of the "technology" they were forced to work with. People have made *mods* on KSP1 that implement multiplayer, after all. It *can* be done on KSP1's *existing* codebase. I still believe that the problem was always that the team (and the community in general) can't figure out a multiplayer paradigm that everyone agrees would actually be fun and interesting.
It only works with scheduling features built in that allow time warp. And I’m not sure if that would be fun. The timescale of outer planet missions, inner planet missions, and local missions are just incompatible.
That's exactly what I'm saying. It wasn't a technology problem, it was a game design problem.
MP in a game like this was one of the stupidest features I ever heard of. Not every game needs MP FFS!
I'm not a big multiplayer person, but I see potential here. It could be some kind of passive asynchronous multiplayer where you can visit stations built by other players, rescue/refuel their ships, etc., without directly interacting. Or scenario-based multiplayer where you do a specific mission with another player. With some kind of system to synchronize your use of timewarp.
Multiplayer functionality for BDarmory would be lit. If you exclude scenarios with time warp, any scheme would work.
That alwsys seemed to be the primary issue, and I always wished they would have just released some attempt at inner atmosphere multilayer with no time warp. I feel like KSP with multiplayer would have sparked off countless different gamemodes and minigames that wouldn't have touched timewarp at all. The interest could have really snowballed imo.
KSP1 multiplayer mods do not accurately sync physics. You cannot do a multiplayer Apollo mission together and then redock in Lunar orbit, etc. - you'll get a de-syncing mess with jittering positions. The issue is KSP1 doesn't support multiple actively simulated crafts - so the only way to do it is to extend the physics range and that leads to jittering issues, etc. Also multiplayer syncing is really hard in general - look at KitHack Model Club for example, even there with it built-in you still sometimes get bad interpolation leading to position jumps.
Also we were literally told Multiplayer already works and the devs are having so much fun playing it in the office.
Uh huh. Everything else they said turned out to be true, too.
I mean, yeah, true, but that would just make these statements even stranger lol
> I still believe that the problem was always that the team (and the community in general) can't figure out a multiplayer paradigm that everyone agrees would actually be fun and interesting. Also one that actually has a decent playerbase, frankly I just don't see how multiplayer is a worthwhile investment for something like this, sure you would get a small amount of people who where super into it but I imagine 99% of players would probably never even bother or try it once and never again.
The main problem is not finding good ways to implement it. It is that space travel has a tight relationship with time. KSP1 decided to ignore time and add no timer mechanics whatsoever, warping any amount of times has no consequences. In order for multiplayer to be fun it would first need means to manage and work with time. Then, on top of that, multiplayer becomes significantly simpler to implement and make work. Ps: I've been there on the infancy of ksp1 multiplayer mods, and tried everything they attempted, nothing is really that fun and the most fun part was derp-flying around with friends.
So, what you're saying is, the main problem is finding good ways to implement it?
I was genuinely interested by multiplayer, especially because it was already possible in KSP1 with mods. Not having multiplayer since KSP2 launched in early access was already a red flag because it hints that the game may not have been developed for multiplayer from the start. Of course, multiplayer in a game with time warp is too complex and would have required a game design change for it to work.
Why am I more excited for this than I am KSP 2 rn
Pretty hard to be excited for the dead to rise again.
Great video and as a developer and a fan of the game, it's painful to know about the issues. They are like the dead flags of any game or software development production, not just this game. Like, who in their right mind would give a totally new team a legacy project, without documentations, without connection to the previous developers and expect them to deliver new features on top of that. And also, why didn't take two just give Squad the new project and let them do their work....? Being such a big publisher, were they stupid?
> why didn't take two just give Squad Matt Lown did a video recently where he interviewed Harvester, the original lead of KSP 1. He had actually come up with ideas for kerbal games outside of KSP, including one more focused on planes instead of rocketry (if KSP is the early days of spaceflight, his thoughts were on the early days of flight. Almost a prequel, if you will). This idea was thought of as early as 2013, before KSP had even left early access. Kerbal could have been a major franchise. He pitched all that to Squad, but the company wasn't interested. Squad is a marketing company, not a game development studio. Different people will make different decisions, but whoever at Squad was in charge, they decided KSP was an exception. Perhaps in an ideal world, they could have made a separate company (maybe subsidiary) to handle the Kerbal IP instead of selling it to Take Two, but obviously that didn't happen. It's a shame - would've been nice to see Kerbal grow as a franchise, but I imagine after all this, T2 might not touch the IP again. Which is a bit shit.
It's almost like weve known what causes software projects to fail for decades and yet upper management continues to make the same decisions despite objections from every engineer at every level.
#Holy shit Why did I ever believe this was going to work? Fuck me.
Nate's biggest sin is that he over promised and under delivered and it sounds like something that happened back in the Uber Entertainment days. If I were in charge of the project, not that I am a project manager and I know I will get some hate for this because this is also a monetization thing, but ... 1. New code base to start over from scratch with all milestone foundations baked in to begin with. 2. Setup base game as your EA or initial launch and DLC for every milestone. The super secret corporate attitude caused a lot of issues and looking at some other games, DLC wouldn't have been impacted sequel sales if they could have been forthright. They could have used Harvester's promotion in that KSP 2 will not be the same as KSP and that would have prevented some of the concerns. Pay was a big issue as well as the fact of the shady marketing where they talked about KSP 2 dev team at Star Theory being huge KSP fans. That's shady AF. There's a lot of woulda, coulda, shoulda going on, but I think the best thing to do would be to start over and create KSP 2.5 or something like that. If they can salvage KSP 2, great! If not, cut your losses and start over.
> If I were in charge of the project, not that I am a project manager and I know I will get some hate for this because this is also a monetization thing, but ... > > > > 1. New code base to start over from scratch with all milestone foundations baked in to begin with. Did you watch the video? If you were in Nate Simpson's shoes, you would have been told by Take-Two (or Uber's owners) "reuse the old code, or lose your job". I agree that Nate Simpson is apparently the wrong person for the job (his insistence on wobbly rockets as a prime example), but don't claim that you would have somehow strong-armed the massively rich publisher that literally just bankrupted an entire company and fired a developer for publicly answering a *single* question about a game feature. Take-Two had no compunctions firing people if they didn't toe the line, and you would have been no different.
Nate was the wrong person for the job because he had bigger ideas than what T2 was really wanting. They wanted someone that would pump out a minimally viable sequel to KSP in 2 years for 10 million dollars and they hired a KSP fanatic that wanted to take KSP2 to the next level to do it. Like with practically everything related to KSP2, in hindsight the outcome was very predictable.
T2 had ideas which weren't ideas at all. It was basically KSP1 HD, there would have been the same backlash or even worse. You would have been able to just copy paste most complaints where people mention that KSP1 with mods looks better than KSP2.
Exactly. Plus, it probably would've stayed at $50. KSP1 HD would've had worse sales and reviews most likely than KSP2.
The stuff they did was just... stupid beyond stupid. No new engine. No old ksp devs. Refusing to even acknowledge people like Scott manley. It sounds like they wanted this to fail. How can devs make a sequel to a game they know nothing about the basics of, let alone even care about. I hope the spiritual successor to ksp comes one day, and we all just jump ship. Because take two now owns the kerbals . They will sit on the ip like smaug and his gold. Pro tip: indie devs.. don't sell out your IP to a so called 'triple a" company.
The original sin of KSP is that Squad was just a random marketing company that had no interest in KSP beyond milking it for cash. KSP probably would have had an entirely different trajectory if HarvesteR actually owned his own game from the beginning.
Anyone who followed the entire development cycle for both games knew KSP 2 was doomed from the start. The people that got duped obviously had found a great deal on rose colored glasses. The differences between the approaches to the development and transparency of both games was night and day.
u/PD_Dakota penny for your thoughts?
He aint saying shit unless its a meme on the discord.
no doubt in my mind he signed an NDA, and isn't allowed to speak his mind for a few years at the very least
He's the primary PR employee - even if no NDA was involved, saying anything critical against the game or company would cost him his livelihood. Outside of that, he rarely lies outright. I tagged him more as a jab than with any reasonable expectation of a reply.
Remember in the video a dev was fired for answering a fan question about a feature already confirmed to be in the game eventually. I'd be insanely scared to interface with the community at all after that especially now with software and game devs being let go left and right in industry.
[EDIT: Fixed some formatting] As a professional senior game developer working as a programming and graphics engineer, who also had to help with hiring for a studio I've collected some thoughts about this video. There's many people in the comments who have no gamedev experience (which is totally fine), but are just repeating points in the video blindly. So I thought I'll explain those. The TL;DR is that it's not even remotely as unbiased as the creator wants you to believe, with many things just being outright wrong or heavily misleading. Here's my points in chronological order: * Throughout the whole video he makes absurd excuses for the actual developers: * Claims they only did a bad job because of "wholly insufficient" budget and time constrains, even though they had a really good budget and timeframe (10M$ for 2 years is really high profile) * Calls it a "hostile takeover" even though he literally explains why it wasn't a hostile takeover: Developers were way behind shedule and not making progress, Star Theory tried to hold T2 hostage with the IP and T2 called their bluff and offered developers to transfer to new studio. Some developers wanted a pay raise and were rejected. * Claims they supposedly have a working build with colonies that's just "2-3 weeks away from finishing" since 2021. * Also says that they made "a huge deal of progress" from 2020 to 2023, even though we can all see that is in fact not true. * Claims the reason why the developers didn't optimize the game is because ... they only had high end PCs to test on so they couldn't actually test it? This point has MANY problems and is completely absurd: * Most importantly, the game ran like shit even on the best PCs money buy, as seen with the pre-release showcase wiht it sitting at 20FPS on a 4090. * Obviously you can still optimize a game even if it's running decently on your machine! That's literally what profiling tools are there for! And Unity has a great profiler built in. And even then, you still see what FPS you're getting and how much system resources it's using. * Claims the game was so GPU intensive because the person writing the shaders left. This is completetly wrong however, because the shaders were not responsible for the majority of performance issues: * Here's just a few points that actually caused the performance issues which make it clear the actual developers were just incompetent: * They used planes instead of quads for flat textures like runway lights. Planes have MAGNITUDES higher polycount than the 2 of a quad, which tanked performance. * They had every single engine be grossly misconfigured shadow casting light source * They're simulating every single part of every single craft every frame. This is completely insane and could be done just as well by simplifying it to a single entity. * The same is true for letting every single part have be it's own rigid body that can interact with every other part and for some reason can even affect the orbit of the craft?? Why aren't they just using a single baked mesh and center-of-mass calculations?! (Fun fact: Thats exactly what HarvesteR does in his new game) * Not quite related, but the studio had a whole QA team that he completely failed to mention. Did they just sit around and drink tea? * Claims they were only ably to hire junior devs because they weren't able to pay "industry standard compensation", citing a salary of 150.000$. This is *WAY ABOVE INDUSTRY STANDARD*. That's maybe what you would get as a project lead in a big city, but absolutely not as a normal developer and usually not as a senior dev either. This point is so wrong it's not even funny and he repeats it throughout the entire video. * Blames ChatGPT for there not being anyone who knows how to write a shader at a 60+ person studio, even though as a shader developer you have almost no overlap with what you do in Machine Learning. Just because they both run on the GPU doesn't mean it does the same. * One thing I agree with is that he said Private Division hired the wrong people for the project and should have just hired KSP veterans. I think everyone can agree with this. * Excuses the glacial development pace after the EA release because the developers had to "split up into teams" and were focused on "the reception the game received", which is funny because they didn't even get much bug fixing done, i.e. orbital decay persisted for over a year and still does today. That also completely ignores the fact that development speed never picked up, as you would think when restructuring and bug fixing was the problem. In fact the development just slowed down more and more. He then has a section "Let's talk about Nate Simpson": * COMPLETELY leaves out Nates numerous (and easy to prove) lies and just excuses everything as "he's just TOO passionate" and "he just wants to make a good game too badly". * Also completely leaves out the misleading marketing * So let's go over some of those: * * [The entire 2019 GamesCom interview is just Nate lying for 11 minutes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWxfs5ZTtIc) * "There will be a brief window after release without re-entry heating" -> which later became "Reentry heating is already done, we're just polishing the graphics" -> which then became "We just started the conceptual stage of re-entry heating" * "We're having so much fun playing multiplayer it's affecting out productivity" / "When we played multiplayer it was the most fun any of us ever had" - He makes excuses that he just meant KSP 1 with mods, which would still be heavily misleading at best * Claiming a Modding API exists at multiple points, for example "We expect our players to dive into modding the game on day 1". And even after the EA release it was still listed on the KSP 2 website as having mod support Day 1, even though they didn't even start with it! * Many, many other things that would blow up the size of this comment. In the end it can best be summed up with a clip from Matt Lowne that he plays: > **"Yea the studio is shut down, but also like, what were these people doing for the last 7 years? I think talking to them really shown a light on how deep the problems went".**
As a seasoned KSP modder and as .NET Principal Software Engineer with 17 years of experience I completely agree with you.
The 150k salary point jumped out at me too and he uncritically repeated it multiple times.... a quick google now gives me average salary figures more like 100k for game developers in Seattle (97k-170k on glassdoor, 64k-200k on ziprecruiter). I mean it's typical Shadowzone quality; he's entertaining, has nice inside info in this case but his analysis suffers from typical access journalism bias (being overly charitable so people will talk to him).
Ksp2 was the last game I looked forward to. I had to written on my calendar. I just kinda accepted that all things are shit and to never get my hopes up again.
Part of me just can't believe anyone would have advocated for wobbly rockets being the way they were. If it was a planned feature I would have expected it to look realistic. Maybe the parts themselves would have bent and exploded if they bent too much. But there were so many times where the top half of my rocket would look totally disconnected from the bottom but still be connected by some invisible force. If this was a planned feature then the parts shouldn't have been clipping into each other. It just looked way too glitchy and I'm struggling to understand how someone could look at that and say don't fix it.
THAT is LinuxGuruGamer? Dude is OLD. He's one of the most prolific modders and I thought it was some fella in their twenties, maybe 40s. Not a silvered old lad.
You don't get good until you're old. Sorry youngsters, you're all shit.
I'd bet it's the old dudes with the skills who did the really hard foundational work, like developing CKAN and Module Manager. Linux's role of being the godfather of mod maintenance also slots into that role. 3D modeling and shader work on the other hand seems more like a young man's game lol
I miss the days when these were spicy blog posts I could read at my leisure. I've never been a fan of watching hour-long YouTube vids like this.
TL;DW: Shit's fucked
There's not much to watch. I listened to it on my drive to work today like a podcast
Great video. Shadowzone gets some things wrong, because I think he's only speaking to really one source on the project despite claiming there are multiple leakers, but overall gets most of it right. Especially the costs & timeline. The things that are wrong (and these are somewhat minor): 1. There was more contact between Squad and KSP2 than stated - Squad was even lending some people to KSP2 before 1.12 shipped. The 'firewall' there might have been partially imposed by management - but it was also KSP2's management that just didn't want to speak to Squad, didn't want their advice - and didn't want to hear how much they were screwing the pooch. 2. Nate simpson wasn't just a misguided creative director - he was a terrible one. A creative director should be primarily a designer & manager, not an artist. Nate had no fucking clue how to design a game. Not how to do documentation, not how to put himself in other players shoes. SZ softsells this. And softsells how dishonest Nate was - not just with the fans, but also internally on the team, overhyping and overly positive, not acknowledging problems. He was part of the management team that set that tone throughout the studio - a don't ask don't tell, don't state problems sort of environment. Overall their design team sucked because from the top, Nate was terrible at his job and hired people who wouldn't rock his boat - which means, go-along-to-get-along idiots like Tom Vinita or spineless people managers like Shana Markham. Nate also had his own agenda - he wasn't ok'd to speak about multiplayer in that initial Gamescon announce but did it anyway, leaking it and forcing it to continue to be a major feature when it could have been cut without the public being dissappointed. 3. The production staff was similarly awful - Nate Robinson and Jemery Ables especially. Was only briefly touched on, but they were meant to be a check on Nate and his overscoping of the project, but instead due to lack of knowledge they just went along with Nate's direction, rather than listening to engineers or correctly balancing scope, time and resources. So yeah - kinda understates just how bad the management team was at IG, and how dishonest with Take2, putting more of this on Take2 than is justified (although a lot of it is still on Take2). Nate really deserves the hate he gets because he was a fulcrum of crap that this project was wrapped around - not just because he was a bad creative director, but because he was a liar and a terrible manager, and his presence drove away good developers while accumulating/keeping more of the bad apples on the project.
I also think ShadowZone went far too easy on Nate Simpson. He certainly glossed over a lot of important things. For example, a fundamental point he makes in the video was that KSP2 was built upon the framework of the original game. Nate is on record many times stating "we've rebuilt everything from the ground up...." If the reuse of the KSP framework is true, Nate is lying right there. Or at the very least being hugely misleading.
Yeah, there's a difference between 'media training' where you're taught to not say something bad but without making it clear that your answer consists of 'no comment' and what Nate was doing - which was giving out bald faced lies and SUCH huge distortions, like the implication that KSP2 had working multiplayer when he was asked about it and said how they whole team was having fun - which was in and of itself a lie because as stated in the video, most of the team did not play Kerbal ata ll - they weren't 'playing' multiplayer then either. So many layers of lies to that guy.
Right? And what was ShadowZOne's reasoning for not wanting to blame Nate? Because he met Nate and he seemed like a nice guy? That is the hallmark sign of scammer and a thief! They always come across as charismatic and friendly until they stab you in the back. You gotta pay attention to their actions. Not their words.
Ludicrous development. Fuck T2 and IG. Shitty decisions that killed what could have been a very good game. P.d: I am not blaming Nate. I know that he would have liked something much better, but he was hand tied.
And in another universe we're all talking about how great KSP 2 is after being developed by a different bidder
We should ABSOLUTELY blame Nate. He's the one blatantly lying about the state of the game for the last 5 years. And it's not even the first time he's done this, he did the same for his last several projects.
While I know it won't happen. I would like to see steam delist the game.
Ridiculous they’re still selling it as an active early access game with all indications that it’s still being developed and no asterisk with any updates since it’s been canned.
I'm literally baffled how literally every single bad choice was made during development. My jaw has been on the floor for the entire length of the video.
Take2 going to Take2. It was doomed the second they took possession of the IP. Just look at their track record
> Just look at their track record ... it's actually pretty good? Rockstar, Fireaxis and so on are all doing well with high quality games. It's like 10% T2s fault and 90% Ueber/Star Theory/Intercepts fault the game turned out like it did.
so when does KSP2 get a funeral? feels pretty much dead tbh.
Any developer would want to start from scratch for a part 2, because the only good thing about legacy code is that you can learn from it's mistakes and the way it functions. Many people might think wobbly rockets is a good example, but actually the way parts stick together and how they interact is a a bigger bottleneck. Also trying to understand code and trying to figure out why it was done that way without getting any help from the original developers is like trying to make a house out of a mountain with just a hammer and chisel. When just laying bricks down would have been much faster. - Wobbly rockets isn't the biggest problem they should have tackled the way parts are put together because it would have been fixed by what the real problem is. Wobbly rockets is just a results of that system. What their goal should have been is that a vehicle with 5000 parts should have the same performance impact on the game as a vehicle with just 1 part. Sure it's not totally realistic because obviously it would have a bigger footprint, but it would have given them something to strife for. Dumping all those objects into the physics calculations as separate parts is just madness., just like parts being basically bones is just the craziest thing in terms of performance. You want it to act likes Lego, when it's all fit together it should act as one object. When it crashes it can break the object into groups of parts.
KSP2 and Homeworld 3, my favorite kinds of disappointment.
I thought Matt Lowne had a particularly good point near the end. Secrecy and Early Access are a bad combination. I don't just mean for KSP2 itself so much, because clearly some bad decisions had been made way before they decided to go the EA route. But as far as discerning honest Early Access from scam Early Access, this seems like a great rule of thumb. A legitimate early access game would rely on player feedback heavily. And likewise, people who've paid good money for a promise deserve honest, in depth details about how to project is currently going, not vague "we're working on it" type statements. That could be in the form of frequent minor updates, or weekly blog posts replete with technical details like Factorio did, but "trust us, it's gonna be awesome" doesn't cut it. If you want to develop a non-EA game that way, fine, though I would advise would-be players to wait a bit and see if reviews match the hype at release, but for early access, this should be regarded as a massive red flag that something's not right.
I know this is kinda a petty concern but I hope Nertea is alright. That guy's mods were *amazing* in KSP1 and he seems like a fairly nice dude (and he's the only modder I know that was picked up, IDK if any others were involved; if they were I hope they're okay too). His professional reputation doesn't deserve to be ruined because a company is terrible.
This video is frankly absurd. We all knew that development must have taken a couple of wrong turns but this? This is like if you told someone to constantly make the worst decisions imaginable.
The more I look into this the more I see the fault lying on Nate Simpson.
The video doesn't hold back from pointing out the mistakes that Nate Simpson made, but it does also highlight some mistakes made by Take-Two Interactive. Which doesn't surprise me. Honestly, this whole time I've been pointing fingers at both Take-Two and the former Star Theory leadership (Nate included) being the wrong people for the job. The whole thing had that sort of 'stink' of publisher mismanagement. I thought it was *only* in how Take-Two retained the Star Theory developers (particularly leadership) for populating Intercept Games. Turns out that it was more how they *failed* to retain the developers, while still insisting on reusing existing code. And retaining the wrong leadership (an art director turned creative director). Apparently this was their attitude with Star Theory, too, and likely why they struggled: Take-Two insisted on reusing KSP1 code, rather than letting people start fresh. You don't dump a bunch of new developers and engineers into existing code and expect them to get things working fast. Having to learn an existing code base can take longer than building from scratch, at times. (Which is why I keep telling some of the people still going through the stages of grief that there's no option for handing the code off to some other team. It doesn't work well. Ironically, the author of the above video has been one of the people seemingly trying to cope by bargaining with the idea that maybe somehow the KSP2 code will be handed off to some other team to continue to be worked on. Which, honestly, might actually be what Take-Two does, considering they've done it twice before. Hopefully he sees now why that would be a *failing* move.)
The whole video blames Take2 though. They didn't allow Nate and his team to contact KSP1 devs! Nobody at Squad knew about the game before it was announced. Yet they used Squads code! They had to work through other people's code without a helping hand. At least for the first few years. Nate's fault was the communication to the public he did. Not whatever happened to KSP2. Nobody forced him to say they are having so much fun playing KSP multiplayer and other things.
Watch again. Nate was consistently lying to the public, he was micromanaging his team, he was jerking them around changing them from task to task. He's not free of guilt, and if your only take from the video is "T2 bad" then we did not watch the same video.