I was there with KSP from the early days. Squad was not in the video game business, they were a billboard advertisement company. The lead dev HarvesteR started it as a passion project. It found success with the alpha and full release in 2015.
Then in 2017 Take-Two bought the rights to the game. Squad kept working on the original, but development of the sequel was handed off to Star Theory with Private Division publishing. The game was delayed, then development was moved to a new studio, Intercept Games, which was owned by Take-Two. They also poached a third of Star Theory’s personnel, which resulted in the studio’s death. They fucked around for a few years, released the early access version, then sold Private Division, closed Intercept Games, and abandoned the game.
In short: corporate interests. KSP2’s failure had nothing to do with KSP or its developers.
Same, I am still so mad about the whole ksp2 fiasco that I block all of take twos games on steam, they ain’t getting any money from me. I am so glad I didn’t buy it in EA although it looked promising.
I’m with you. I was excited to learn the other day that some of the KSP developers are working on a game called Kitten Space Agency that might fill the void left by KSP2’s demise.
That’s exactly right. They also had managers/publishers telling them to do shit like make the rockets even wobblier than KSP1 because it made for funny viral videos that would get more PR.
Nobody who actually played the game wanted wobblier rockets than KSP1. Nobody really wanted wobbly rockets at all. Sometimes a bug can actually be a feature, but in this case, it really was just a bug. The people in charge didn’t ever care about the people who actually played the game, they just wanted sales, and they made decisions accordingly. That’s why it looks nice, but plays like shit.
Yup, and honestly even according to that anti-art logic it was a strategic failure. Funny meme gifs were part of how the game gained notoriety, but you don’t maintain a game long term on meme status alone.
Even if “haha funni physics glitches” were still the in thing - I think people got over them fast, like with any comedy style - the longevity of the game came from the deep mechanics and impressive missions people could do, and the community support.
I actually think that sequels to breakout sandbox games are always doomed to fail. Like what if they tried to release Minecraft 2? It would be awful, and I think we all instinctively know it would be, which is kind of a self fullfulling prophecy.
Minecraft doesn’t have a monopoly on the special sauce that makes their game good. It has a decade and a half of support and cultural recognition from a dedicated following. You can’t make that happen a second time. I don’t like what’s been done with the franchise commercially, but they figured out how to milk it without doing a direct sequel, which I think is part of why it’s still relevant.
I honestly haven’t stopped to consider it. The Wind in this game has a lot of detail too it, so i wouldn’t at all be surprised if the clouds were Dynamic. I’ve also noticed that the Sky can be clear sometimes to depending on weather/season. But that could be just a region of the texture or there are a few different textures. if i had to take a guess i’d say it’s dynamic though. Ubisoft cheaps out on a few things, but graphics doesn’t seem to be one of them
I would sub in like maybe Darkest Dungeon 2 over Frostpunk? Less well received but still better than any of the other three. Both were distinct changes of pace, darkest dungeon just sold its soul to the epic games store and lost the bond you formed with characters over a long campaign in exchange for the roguelite shorter runs.
I had a decent time with it and probably would’ve played a 2nd run had the game not failed me because every faction (including the rebelling one) was too happy to pass the final law or whatever. They probably fixed that by now, but it was pretty souring.
C:S2 is likely too ambitious. Doing too many new things at once instead of incremental change.
KSP2 was a management fuck up. Let’s take this IP and give it to a completely seperate studio with no experience in this kind of work while not allowing the original Devs to help despite being part of the organisation.
Let’s take this IP and give it to a completely seperate studio with no experience in this kind of work while not allowing the original Devs to help despite being part of the organisation.
The decision making behind this is incredibly hard for me to understand. Just a very, very nonsensical way to run the project, on paper. I wonder about the circumstances.
You see this a lot in project management. People go to school to learn to manage projects, and they think that all projects are pretty much the same. You define the deliverables, set the schedule, track the progress, and everything should work out fine. When the project is a success, they pat themselves on the back for getting everyone to the finish line, and when the project fails they examine where in the process unexpected things happened.
Video games are an art form. Creativity can’t be iterated into existence, and the spark of fun is more than the component parts of a good time. Capitalists believe that they can invest in the creative process and buy the value of the talent of extraordinary people. They have commoditized creation, dissecting each step and then squeezing it into a format that fits into a procedure.
Here’s a Kanban board of game features, pick one and move it to the next phase. Develop, test, evaluate, repeat. What are your blockers? Is this in scope? Do we need to push the deadline?
That can help you make something, but it won’t be art.
As an art appreciator, and someone whose professional duties include project management, I love this comment, especially “[project management] can help you make something, but it won’t be art.”
As a project manager (well sort of, but did IT projects for a while, have multiple friends in the gaming manager): Yes and no.
From my point of view: The problem isn’t the fact that games are art. While games have their creative side they also require good “brick and mortar work” in the back - as many games as went horribly wrong due to a lack of space for creativity went wrong due to a lack of “less than glamorous” brick and mortar work and overcreativity. (Most drastic example would be the reddit dragon MMO story)
This is actually a reason why people who are very invested in the subject matter of the project they manage often are horrible project managers - and vice versa people who have no clue can’t be good PMs either.
Project management has one core component: Knowing when to ask whom. A good PM knows that the dev(or dev team lead) will always know better how long “feature X” will take. Of course I can try to learn how to do things… but that wouldn’t help much as the exact dev or team will still have their individual speeds. But a good PM also will know when to ask someone else who is nore knowledgeable for advice or to confirm things. (I literally had an Dev trying to tell me a small feature would take two weeks. Fair enough. But interestingly enough two other Devs were fairly sure it takes 30min including documentation. Which sounded way more reasonable. Turned out said Dev always tried to pull these stunts with new PMs and his lead being on vacation)
A good PM will also know when to give people space for creativity - and defend this room towards the budget.
Sadly - and this is a problem existing on all sides around PM- in the end it all boils down to a simple thing: Everyone thinks they know better. The PM thinks they know the job of being a Dev(or engineer,etc. etc.) better than the actual people doing the job. And vice versa the Devs think they could do without PMs (they can’t for larger projects it’s impossible, for mid size projects often really inefficient) or know their job better.
I believe the reason it happened, in short, is that Take2 (the publisher) were really obsessed with the release being a surprise, at the cost of far too much.
For one, this meant that basically every job listing for the game never described what the game you’d even work on was. Most of the devs they got were juniors who:
were willing to sign more restrictive contracts without the confidence to push back
did not necessarily know much about the game, or even the genre (supposedly, besides Nate, only 1 dev was an active KSP1 player and another was aware of the game but never really played)
this game was their first sizeable project
For two, it meant that a lot of management roles were taken up by people from Take2 to enforce the secrecy (who also saw KSP as having franchise potential, but that’s a rant for another day). Few of them intimately understood what makes us dorky nerds enthusiastic about KSP.
This is also part of the reason they avoided talking to the KSP1 devs; they were afraid of some of them even hinting that a sequel was in the works. As to why they continued to not talk to them after announcing the game I’m not sure. Perhaps they were afraid they’d tell the uncomfortable truth that the game was making the same development mistakes as KSP1 and more.
Not just making the same mistakes, they were told to scrap years of development and reuse the exact same codebase of KSP1. They had to start over the project with a decade plus of technical debt from a team they weren’t allowed to talk to.
Because remaking the same features from scratch was taking too long. They had already delayed the project due to covid at that point. They ended up with three games: the one they started before intercept was created (and that never saw the light of day), the one based on KSP with the upgrades and new features added (also never seen publicly), a neutered version without the incomplete new features (like multeplayer and improved heat simulation) that was launched as early access. Poor fellows were set up for failure.
The decision making behind this is incredibly hard for me to understand. Just a very, very nonsensical way to run the project, on paper. I wonder about the circumstances.
The rights were aquired by Take-Two Interactive in 2017, and they wanted a sequel to be released in 2020.
The dev studio shut down in 2023 and current status is unkown.
I never played cs1 on release, only played after it was nearly 10 years old, but my understanding is it vastly improved over updates and dlc (which unfortunately did cost more but did at least add meaningful changes for the most part).
Im curious to see where CS2 stands in 3-5 years when mods have really taken off and the devs had made most of their major tweaks.
I had it from release and honestly, even day 1 it smoked the competition in the city sim genre, releasing with features and scale than Sim City ever had.
The DLC often introduced more systems, but they did feel ‘extra’, the game was perfectly functional before parks or tourism or natural disasters etc.
The reason CS:2 felt so necessary is because the first was bloated and had underlying issues in it’s simulation logic, like unrealistically inefficient driving, or a large expansion to residential areas causing all the new residents to die of old age at the same time, crippling the city. Every part of the GUI and logic just felt clunky compared to modern, polished games.
I’d argue the DLCs did more than you imply. The extra modes of transit gave more options to move people, painting a custom park area made cities feel more realistic than premade square parks, universities could be a great centerpiece for a neighborhood. Its not like vanilla was unplayable, but the DLC defintely added more creativity for me.
Oh, the fucks up are massive. They hired a new studio, but also, they pulled the funding then the project without warning. Then they poached the devs, forcing the studio to close and sending them to a newly funded studio. But then, they forced the devs to scrap years of work from scratch, and start over the project with the old codebase and only a year as a deadline. Finally, when it became obvious it wasn’t a massive success, they cut their funding too without warning, and sold the IP without telling the studio about it.
KSP was mishandled so wildly that it should be a case study of how profit oriented management kills creativity and destroys IPs. They killed two studios and a massive IP with their shenanigans. This is why you never let the MBAs run anything.
I mean for ksp2 saying it failed cause they had “no experience with this kind of work” is kind of weird, since neither did the ksp1 devs when they started that. And they didn’t fuck it up either, let alone this badly. Remember that it was a passion project of harvester, working at a PR firm that just happened to let him do it under their roof and employment. The company did not even have any basic experience in game development, arguably even software development in general.
Institutional knowledge is a real thing and also like you said, the first KSP started as a passion project. There’s a huge difference in terms of pressure and expectation between developing your own passion project compared to developing a sequel of a highly regarded game.
Looks like it’s just the brand it’s sold under in that market.
I was more just pointing out that they are the same thing, since it wasn’t clear if you knew that or not and I think it’s important that people know what the drugs they’re taking actually are. Tends to be safer that way.
Hopefully, you’re either taking it as prescribed or having fun responsibly. Benzos can be fun, but they’re also some of the most addictive substances on the planet.
Also, these articles you’re posting are some quality writing.
Bethesda Game Studios has been on the decades-long trend of watering down all their proper RPG elements. Morrowind is significantly more jank in combat and movement than Oblicion. Oblivion significantly more jank than Skyrim.
However, Skyrim is over simplified compared to Oblivion in all of its RPG mechanics, and has removed a number of gameplay features that were previously present (e.g. Spell crafting). In turn Oblivion is itself more mechanically shallow than Morrowind, significantly lacking in such things as speech options.
The Oblivion Remaster is so more a reminder of something we’ll never get anymore; an open world RPG that isn’t as weighed down as Morrowind and not as over-simplified as Skyrim (though honestly complex NPC interactions need to come back from Morrowind).
TES VI will likely have better combat than Skyrim, but still incredibly dated compared to other games, and mechanics that can barely be called “RPG” anymore.
If anything this has raised my bar for TES 6. I didn’t play 4 just as you did and sunk an ungodly amount of time into 5. I also played fallout 3 at the time of launch so I feel like I’m fairly versed in Bethesdas formula.
The progress from 4 to 5 is obvious. They put a lot of love into making Skyrim better than its predecessor in tons of ways. With the absolute flop of Starfield, they’re putting all their chips into TES 6 and they know it. They’re going to stick to the core gameplay that everyone expects, but how they expand and improve upon it is really what will make or break them. If they get the story telling down, it’s all up to the mechanics of the game and design of the world.
My bar has absolutely raised by them putting this remaster out.
I don’t think I agree on them going all in for TES6, I think oblivion and the upcoming fallout 3 remake (confirmed by court docs ages ago) are probably going to lean into monetized mods, just like skyrim has been for the last decade. Skyrim’s creation club made it a pseudo live service game, where they can maintain bethesdas tiny team size (Relative to most AAA devs) and still get ongoing payout for a decade or more, letting players generate new content to buy into. Optimistically this means they’ll have plenty of funding for TES6 to hire some decent writing staff and put together something great that’s presumably been at least thought about the last 14 years since Skyrim, but it might just be going into Microsoft’s coffers.
For the record RetroDECK also got Matrix instance as well. But Revolt have so far been more active then Matrix (even tho we had that one for a long time).
But I do agree with that Discord is not a replacement for forums. You should not use Discord as your primary information hub.
For us our own wiki is the master of information. If something relevant is said in Revolt / Discord / Matrix we will add it to the wiki, people should not need to register various accounts to access the information.
Github is also where we handle “real” issues, while Discord / Matrix / Revolt is helpful for community members helping other with minor issues or general banter.
One reason why forums died out was the need for direct engagement and a sense of active community belonging, that they simply did not offer.
We also did not create all of these spaces from the beginning. Some community members did it, like the subreddit. Then you have a choice either you create it and own it, or a fan will.
Well, once the service becomes large and popular we could try to find people interested in investing into the platform, then we just need to make sure it stays interesting to more and more investors over time. Should be sustainable, sounds oddly familiar tho but i definitely just made it up rn on my own
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for promoting gamesieve! I suck at marketing, so it’s really gratifying to see that I’ve apparently built something worthwhile enough that suddenly a complete stranger is doing my job for me, there. :)
(Although… is it deliberate you didn’t actually link to the site?)
Also, ooh, I didn’t know Islets yet! That looks worth investigating further. Thanks!
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