Bit tangential but I'd like to remind everyone that this is the game where the lead designer (?) said that wobbly rockets and physics bugs are adding to the fun of the game, and they are implemented deliberately. This is doomed.
This is the later, that's been obvious from how Take-Two handles things, with the game even changing developers midway through development.
I'll list their sins from my armchair:
- remaking a beloved, established game that has a prodigious base of features and extremely extensive modding support. you have a HUGE hill to climb just to get to your "MVP" - you have to supplant the existing game plus its modding community, and this is already a niche audience of ["people who find orbital mechanics as a primary gameplay loop to be fun"]. They were always going to need to really fucking knock it out of the park on their first at-bat to make this work.
- doing so on a short time-frame
- trying to be all artsy about it too. not that that's a bad thing, but it does position you to take your time rather than going fast. and like I said, they already had a steep hill to climb.
- standard-issue development hell. it happens.
- special-issue development hell where TTWO did some fucky-wucky stuff where they hired away a ton of the staff from the studio they were contracting with, cancelled the contract, and brought it all in-house with the poached team. Hardly an encouraging sign.
- with all the delays adding up, I suspect they were given the ultimatum to either ship their current state into EA and start recouping money, or get scuttled. People have allegedly looked into the code and found extensive additional systems that were basically hastily commented or hacked out so they could ship some vaguely-functional core.
I was really, really looking forward to KSP2. KSP1 but with good graphics, a non-unity engine (it was always a miracle that squad had gotten such good large-scale physics out of unity), and promises of official support for non-kerbin bases and interstellar travel? Yes please, sign me up!
But honestly, my mental model for how this would be successful was "they'll reimplement the existing base game in a new engine. big task but doable for TTWO's money, it's not indie anymore, and they obviously already understand the product. Then, with the base game ported, people will be willing to buy in EA because they see the promise of 'KSP but more!!!'". And that last bit was going to be critical, they'd need people bought-in if they wanted TTWO to keep funding them / them keep funding themselves.
So when they launched this scrap heap into EA, I knew it was doomed. And look at the, what 8ish months between then and now? They've released a few quaint patches that ignored all the huge issues and done basically nothing else.
I fully expect them to now slowly wind the EA down with a skeleton crew and people will just forget it to an ignoble death. I mean, TTWO can hardly be keen on continuing to pour development funding into this EA, right?
All that said, I don't think the game will be left unfinished. All costs are sunk and Take Two has a (reportedly) somewhat functional, nicer looking copy of KSP1 with, presumably, at least base elements of interstellar travel and colony systems in place. It's probably worthwhile trying to get the project over the last few hurdles, as it's a potential goldmine if they can pull it off.
It is also MBA decisions (kicking the game out for full price as an early-access game that was nowhere near close to being ready for that).
The combination of PM and MBA decisions that have screwed it up are definitely enshittification-adjacent, although they may just lack enough competency.
That said, I cannot be sure of that, so I will not buy it until it is actually good.
Those are two very different examples, though. NMS was improved heavily but in many ways never approached the features and qualities that people were expecting. KSP2 feels more like NMS than KSP1 in that regard - people have expectations. They've been sold a specific vision which doesn't look like the game. Further, unless it's great... why not just keep playing KSP1 with extensive modding?
Asking who? From what I've seen, the typical sentiment is that they've gone far past the expectations they set.
For KSP2 I think the main expectations were eventual new content (starting with a good chunk less than KSP1 and adding more later) and better performance. And they sure haven't delivered performance.
I enjoy the game a lot more now, but the original E3 "gameplay" trailer still feels like it overpromises. Comparing the current state to that trailer there are quite a few things that have fallen short:
I've never encountered a planet which was as lush as the one shown initially. You don't find animals packed that closely together. I don't think semi-aquatic animals like the sauropod-looking things in the trailer are supported in the game either. You don't see animals running around in packs like they showed either. The closest thing you see is about five identical animals spawned into the same small area.
The video also shows you being able to fly swiftly above the surface of a planet. I may be misremembering, but I don't think I've ever been able to fly quite that quickly, but the biggest difference is that the game suffers from very noticeable object pop-in (it can even be noticed when moving at low speed).
I think you can fly with wingmen now, but I've not tried it.
This might not sound like much, but the existing game just looks far less interesting than the original trailer even if many rough boxes have been checked since then. Also, I'm not even looking at any other pre-release announcements or videos for reference.
> Asking who? From what I've seen, the typical sentiment is that they've gone far past the expectations they set.
I'll note that anybody still playing the game probably likes it, and anybody who doesn't like it probably stopped playing years ago (except to perhaps check out new updates and continue to feel disappointed).
Some specific things:
- planets feel lifeless and very samey: there's nothing to really explore because the depth of geology, biology, ecology is not there. I suspect that's why they added so much base building, which was never a significant part of the early hype/marketing.
- even features they implemented feel incomplete and shallow, such as player customization and base building, compared to many other games which do those things better.
- the game was described as allowing the player to navigate an actual star system, and instead it's just a skybox densely littered with pirates and asteroids. If I want that, X4 is a hundred times better. For exploring stellar systems, Elite Dangerous or just SpaceEngine show that it's possible to do well.
claiming they did this on purpose is just acknowledging that they are good developers. They aren't and they keep proving it day by day.
Wobbly rockets and physics bugs were fun and interesting in KSP1. What they did in KSP2 is not even close to how those bugs were in the first game. It's inherently worse. You can read a lot of reviews and people will say that even though these bugs existed in KSP1, they weren't as bad as they are in KSP2.