One of the original goals for KSP2 was the use of a new engine to get rid of the technical debt from the first game that caused issues like the Kraken…but then the publisher forced them to use the KSP engine because “it would speed up development.”
And I and the other guy just said that you misunderstood the original comment. You’re the one who doubled down after the first guy.
Me making a sarcastic comment because you doubled down on the first guy by just posting a quote of the original comment isn’t white knighting. It’s just a conversation. If that’s white knighting, then 95% of all internet communication is some form of white knighting. And I can think of much better words to describe the YouTube comments section (and I bet you can, too).
Anyways, hope your Monday wasn’t as hot, humid, and disappointing as mine and I think everybody in this thread can agree that Larian isn’t Ubisoft or Activision, the world is a better place because of that, and the “live service industry” can go suck a big one and keep shaking in their boots.
Totally agree but the person they’re responding to implied they were some scrappy indie production. Ex33 (there are caveats/asterisks here but still) is a much better example. I think at its peak the whole team was like 40 people with hired hands.
Jesus you white knights need to calm down and let them respond for themselves.
Show me on the doll where that comment said Larian is an indie developer. Saying that they lack corporate interference does not equal claiming that they’re an indie team.
There’s this neat thing between indie devs and AAA corporate studios called AA. Big enough to fund larger projects than indie devs while being small enough to usually still be private companies that aren’t beholden to investors and therefore can take larger risks than the AAA devs are allowed, letting them make the games that they would want to play. CD Projekt RED and FromSoft both fit into this category as well, though all 3 companies are getting big enough to potentially start being considered AAA studios.
I would disagree with this sentiment on a basic game design level. I don’t know about the Zelda games, I didn’t care enough about BotW to play more than a few hours, but designing a large map that incorporates multiple biomes in a believable way is much more difficult than creating a bunch of smaller levels that don’t have to have any relation to each other in the slightest. You can get away with a lot more in terms of map geometry and set pieces when you load into each level individually.
This is obviously different when you’re talking about Bethesda-style load into every building style environments vs Elden Ring “You see that castle in the distance? You’ll be going in there eventually” design, but the fact that Bethesda makes their interiors separate from the rest of the world is how they cheap out on their games. It’s less hardware intensive and you can cheat a lot more in your design. And on a gameplay level that goes for Ubisoft-style collectathon map objects (and Zelda shrines in this case), but that’s not unique to open-world games - it’s a lazy cop-out that game devs have used forever to pad out their games. Collecting all the secret skulls in Halo is the same thing, but because it’s implemented well and doesn’t drag on forever with no reward like most open-world collectibles, it feels totally different.
The original idea that was sold to the public was essentially “Kerbal Space Program, but bigger.” I couldn’t tell you all of the details or the timetable, but there were a lot of new features planned from the start (a number of which were mods of the first game) including fixing issues that were present in the original and adding things far outside the scope of the first game like multiplayer, colonies, and FTL travel to a new solar system. The dev team openly talked about creating a new engine to fix the physics bugs and such, at least.
I don’t know what happened along the way, but it’s pretty clear that the KSP2 that we have has the engine of the first game in it, as to this day it has many of the same bugs.
My guess is that the team originally planned on a new engine, but at some point, management stepped in and demanded that they use the old engine. IIRC, there was some restructuring that happened during the development - both in taking the project away from the original dev studio working on it, and then restructuring the team that was working on it, so it could’ve happened at some point during that.
Like with pirating, it was always an issue of expense. They could legally take away your disk at any time and force you to uninstall the software from your computer. It just would never be worth it to go after any specific individuals for any minor infraction of the license. Digital licensing just made them capable of doing that with the press of a button.
KSP2 is such a sad situation all around. The guys working on it had the same idea and were going to build a brand new engine for it to fix the tech debt of the original, but management demanded that they use the original engine “to speed up development time.”
If they could, they would. But a lot of the time, they don’t even bother to keep the source code of the games that they make. It’s estimated that more than 50% of all games are lost to history because the companies that made them never kept the source code or a copy.
I remember there being a little scandal a few years ago when a remaster of a game came out and it still had the cracker’s logo in it from the pirated copy they used for the source code.
I like the way Ghost of Tsushima handled open world navigation with their wind system. Instead of a big GPS line or whatever that takes away from the game, the wind blows in the direction of where you’re going. Very subtle and works narratively while still being able to find where you’re going easily by just observing the world around you.