Kerbal Space Program 2 Early Access Is Out Now | Hacker News Reader

Kerbal Space Program 2 Early Access Is Out Now

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49 pointsskibz27 comments

The lack of Linux support really bums me out. I know it's on the roadmap, but c'mon, the most prolific modder for KSP1 literally had "linux" in their name. They're leaving behind a lot of people.

For better or worse, Proton is now so good that I can’t see any companies ever releasing Linux-native versions of their games.

This game does not appear to run well, or sometimes at all, under Proton.

To be fair, it doesn't run well, or sometimes at all, on Windows

Any idea if works running on proton?

It works out of the box for me on Fedora 36 with Sway. I've heard that performance is a few FPS worse than on Windows

The VAB CAD interface is materially worse than KSP 1, it’s basically unusable. It has modes that make no intuitive sense and you can’t break out of the modes. The flight interface is difficult to use - it’s hard to know what altitude you are, which was up at the top of the screen and clear before.

I know it’s early access but it’s disappointing that it’s a UX regression when the UX was so obviously hard.

Edit: There’s no way to establish fuel priority, so celery staging appears impossible. You can’t seem to bring up fuel left by tank. Heat overlay seems to be missing. I’ve yet to figure out maneuver nodes. Yikes. This really is an early access, they’re not even near parity with basic controls.

Edit2: All this said with ksp 1 it was unplayable when it came out. I then picked it up 2 years later and it was great. But just hope they improve the UX.

People should tamper their expectations. This is an early access release, which only means the developer has transitioned to a more open dev phase of production. They will gather feedback from their target audience rather than only QA and focus groups. But the game is still in early-mid production.

It is incorrect to treat it as a finished sequel. Expectations are already usually too high for game sequels - the players do not seem to understand how hit-driven the industry still is and that a hit is not guaranteed to be followed up by an even bigger hit. But that's a separate topic. This game hasn't gone through the full production cycle yet - it should be obvious to anyone who cares, the game didn't have the usual 6 month marketing ramp-up prior to release, and it is still not feature-complete.

It is only a transition to an open dev stage in production. The game is an open alpha. That already might disappoint people who were expecting a finished product in early access. But it will doubly disappoint people who were expecting a finished hit sequel.

While it may be disingenuous to sell it at nearly full price (which makes it equivalent to a pre-order with alpha access, just packaged differently) or advertise the game with trailers of the full product showing features that do not yet exist, that whole trend in the games industry is also a separate topic.

Overall, expectations should be re-adjusted to the reality of the situation: sequels are not guaranteed to be better than originals, and an early access release does not, by a mile, mean the game is finished.

I sort of agree except that the UX regressions are really concerning. I don’t expect it to be finished but I do expect really common happy path stuff is available or partially refined. It makes me very worried they’re going to miss basic UX stuff out of some design philosophy that’s not adapted to flying spaceships.

That could happen. There are plenty of game (UX) designers that claim to know what works better than their players. Ironically, this makes them blind to feedback and improvement, which then makes them really bad at intuiting what works. These people harm some products a lot.

But it’s more likely that the UX will be refined during production as all elements of the game are.

Like I said, it is not reasonable to expect feature or quality parity between a sequel in early production and the completed original. The sequel in this case is built from scratch.

Looks like a strictly inferior version of KSP1.

Unfortunately seems very unlikely that they can deliver on promises of multiplayer interstellar colony building when it's still so feature light after 3 years of delays

It's too early to say. The devs have said they considered extending KSP1 but chose to rebuild the game from scratch to enable things that never would have been possible in KSP1. Namely, acceleration during time warp.

So I think it's fair to expect that KSP2 today will be lower on the y-axis of features than KSP1, but has a greater slope and will pass it and keep going at some time in the future.

It's anyone's guess when that time in the future will be

Except there are mods like KSPIE and PersistentThrust that allow acceleration during time warp in KSP1.

Probably won’t have time to play this until next weekend. would definitely love a round up on what features are missing, relative to KSP1.

It's only sandbox mode at this time; there's not even a career mode. I'm not as skeptical as some about the roadmap, but there's definitely not a full game there yet.

I bought it. I know its an imperfect game. But I'm pledging my money. If they fail its on them. But on my side I did everything I could to help a new version of ksp1 to life.

The most annoying thing right now it's mannouver nodes. I don't see how long it will be burning.

And to be honest I missed starting a game with so many unknowns. Reminds me a lot of when I started to play ksp1. People will have to learn new ways to get things done, and they will. Besides bugs most comments I see is the kind: I used to X and now I can't. Remember that in ksp1 you didn't know that you needed to do X! Let's learn again :)

Respectfully, this type of thinking is harmful to consumers. You are paying money for a product. That product should do as advertised. There is an exchange of value between the person buying and the person selling.

KSP is not being developed by a small studio anymore. The game publisher (and the studio they started by poaching employees of the original developer of KSP2) has a market cap of $17,000,000,000. They don't need "support" as much as they need to understand that they are selling a product that people want to buy, and that they should deliver on the promises they've made.

Your point about the maneuver nodes is spot on and yet another example of why the KSP player (customer) was a mere afterthought in the minds of this company.

You can see who is getting paid to shill it. Watching Scott Manley say “it’s running at a stable 20 fps, that’s enough” is hilarious

I also saw this and was disappointed about it. He said it multiple times, "20fps, it's not a problem" when it clearly is a problem

Ksp1 occupied me for three times the played hours as elden ring if that says anything.

I've been excited for this for a long time and have it downloading now, but a large part of what i enjoyed was the community around their own forum. I did a huge write up on one of my journeys and people commented on it for years. I have no doubt in 2023 even if they run such a thing, most players will choose reddit or discord with a very different experience.

Well done on the trailer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STTTp9nDFOE

The problem is that none of that stuff is in the game. The price sets the expectation and they are asking $50 for what is essentially a tech demo with performance issues.

It's really shocking seeing 15-20fps at times, with an incredibly simple ship, when I'm rendering at only 1920x1080 with an RTX 4080 and a Ryzen 9 7950X. I know it's early access, but it's really concerning that they thought it appropriate to launch it in this state, and at full price. Delayed 3 years, and still looks like it's at least another 3 years away from any of the features that I was excitedly waiting many years already for.

that's sad to hear.

I thought performance was a big reason for the remake, or at least what seemed important to me.

KSP2 was developed after a powerplay consisting of very dirty pool.

At that point, it was already tainted.

The original KSP was a labor of love and that came out in the product.

KSP2 was a money grab by self-important game designers and product managers.

It's early access not final.

That would be a fair statement were it not for the AAA final price they are asking. If the game was in a running state and had a major feature (like multiplayer) then one can overlook the price. Right now, there are no major features. KSP2 is just a slimmer version of KSP1 with a re-imagined UI, terrible frame rates & unfinished art.

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