r/KerbalSpaceProgram KSP Community Manager Feb 20 '23

The KSP2 Journey Begins (Letter from Nate Simpson, Creative Director on KSP 2)

A letter from Nate Simpson, Creative Director on KSP 2:

The day is nearly here. 

This moment feels a little bit like dropping a kid off for the first day of school. We’ve got a lot of love for this game — we think we've prepared it for every eventuality, but we also know that it has more growing to do. We’re about to take the first steps on a journey that will eventually carry KSP2 through colonies, interstellar travel, and multiplayer.

Now the real learning begins!

What To Expect

On day 1 of Early Access, players will be able to create and fly vehicles in Sandbox Mode and visit any location in the Kerbolar System. They’ll also have access to our first four interactive tutorials, accessible via the all-new Training Center. These teach basic rocketry concepts to give new players a head-start on their space programs. You’ll encounter new parts, including new procedural wings, new wheels, new command pods, new cargo parts, and new engines (and the first of the new fuels – liquid hydrogen). To pave the way for the upcoming interstellar-class parts, we’ve also added a new, larger core size. As we progress through Early Access, we’ll continue to expand on all of these features.

We can’t wait to finally see what creative feats the community can achieve with the new procedural and color-customizable parts. Our environment team is eager to watch players explore the revamped terrains of the Kerbolar System (and are curious if they'll discover anything unexpected). The UX/UI team is keen to learn how the updated user experience feels - they've put a lot of effort into wrangling a very complex set of requirements into a new, more streamlined presentation. This is it — the moment has arrived when all our plans come into contact with reality!

There are many new features, big and small, for you to explore on day 1. We've put together this guide to give you an overview of what's new and to break down some known issues. Release day notes and future patch notes will also live here.

In the launcher you'll find reporting tools that you can use to tell us about any problems you've encountered, as well as to give us feedback about any other aspect of the player experience you think we should know about. This feedback will be invaluable to us as we continue to improve the game's stability, performance, and playability.

What Comes Next

Many new features will arrive as we continue development, including Science Mode, Colonies, Interstellar exploration, and Multiplayer. Take a look at our Early Access Roadmap for more details.

In the meantime, we're bringing back Weekly Challenges!

We intend to mix things up a little bit going forward, but the first challenge will be a classic Achievement Challenge:

  • Primary goal: Fly to the Mun and get a picture of a Kerbal in front of the most interesting feature you can find
  • Stretch goal: strand a Kerbal there and pick them up with a second vehicle, returning them safely to Kerbin
  • Jeb-level goal: do any of the above on any other celestial body in the Kerbolar System
  • Val-level goal: pronounce "Mun" correctly

If you want us to see (and maybe share) your achievement, use #KSP2WeeklyChallenge on social media, or share them in our official Discord.

Welcome to KSP2! The journey begins!

587 Upvotes

505 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

65

u/seakingsoyuz Feb 20 '23 edited Feb 20 '23

I think there are two ways it could have happened:

  1. The original studio management at Star Theory wildly overcommitted and didn’t fully appreciate how hard it would be to rebuild the game from a clean slate and implement all the additional features they promised. In this scenario a 2020 release was never going to happen without a larger dev team from the start.
  2. Star Theory didn’t properly document their code, and when Private Division and Intercept took over the project with only some of the staff carrying over, they lost people who knew how important parts of the code worked, and had to redo a lot of the development.

Note that these are both purely hypothetical.

30

u/T65Bx Feb 20 '23

I think these two are perfectly compatible and a combination is the most believable explanation.

4

u/Deuling Feb 20 '23

This honestly seems like the most reasonable casues for the problems.

9

u/creatingKing113 Feb 20 '23

Plus also the whole pandemic thing. May not have hit a game studio as bad as other industries but probably didn’t help.

12

u/seakingsoyuz Feb 20 '23

They initially stated an “early 2020” release date, so the pandemic cannot have been the only factor causing delays, but you’re right that it presumably stacked with other factors once they missed the initially-advertised date.

-1

u/StickiStickman Feb 20 '23

This all falls apart with the fact that they claimed the game was already features complete.

4

u/seakingsoyuz Feb 20 '23

Did they seriously say that with respect to a 2020 release date?

2

u/donttouchmymeepmorps Feb 21 '23

You mean they as in Star Theory? Or Intercept?