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Kerbal Space Program announced for PS4.

hesido

Member
PS VR + Move support please. I want to be be Godgineer working on my space rockets, looking around and welding stuff on another.
 
Color me surprised. But Squad is a fantastic developer, I wish them the best.

That being said, itd be really disappointing if they don't include some officially sanctioned mods. Playing without Engineering Redux, Kerbal Alarm Clock, or precise node would be hell.
 

Aureon

Please do not let me serve on a jury. I am actually a crazy person.
Color me surprised. But Squad is a fantastic developer, I wish them the best.

Honestly, what?
The base game is completely amazing, and the underlying idea is pure genius - but every addition they've made upon it has been a major failure, and technically it's pretty bad.
The game design is genius, but as a studio? The last good addition i saw to the game was.. proper SAS in 0.21.
 

sheamus

Member
Tip for ps4 new user learn about asparagus staging and shoot for the second moon over the first takes roughly the same amount of thrust but you don't have to worry about gravity, plus u can land with RCS
 
Honestly, what?
The base game is completely amazing, and the underlying idea is pure genius - but every addition they've made upon it has been a major failure, and technically it's pretty bad.
The game design is genius, but as a studio? The last good addition i saw to the game was.. proper SAS in 0.21.

Ha. Please tell me how .21 to 1.0.5 is a failure. Since .21, this is what they have done: Added a career mode with upgradeable buildings and tech trees, addes science research/resources to supplement the career mode, being able to level-up/specialize your Kerbals, added 64 bit support, added proper aerodynamics and heat systems, revamped the rocket assembly, added contracts to give you actual milestones, added a plethora of parts, added reputation systems, added subassemblies.

And that's off the top of my head. It's one of the few early access games that has absolutely delivered on its promises.I'm looking forward to your rebuttal, the aerodynamics overhaul in itself is a huuuge upgrade from earlier versions.
 

Aureon

Please do not let me serve on a jury. I am actually a crazy person.
Ha. Please tell me how .21 to 1.0.5 is a failure. Since .21, this is what they have done: Added a career mode with upgradeable buildings and tech trees, addes science research/resources to supplement the career mode, being able to level-up/specialize your Kerbals, added 64 bit support, added proper aerodynamics and heat systems, revamped the rocket assembly, added contracts to give you actual milestones, added a plethora of parts, added reputation systems, added subassemblies.

And that's off the top of my head. It's one of the few early access games that has absolutely delivered on its promises.I'm looking forward to your rebuttal, the aerodynamics overhaul in itself is a huuuge upgrade from earlier versions.


First, a disclaimer:
Please don't mistake me critiquing the game for me not actually liking it. The core design is pure genius, and it's one of my favourite games of all time, and goty 2013.
It's the very reason i'm so dismayed at the progression.

A feature doesn't make a game automatically better - Perfection in design is reached when there's nothing left to take away, not when there's nothing left to add.

The aerodynamic system, which i wanted forever, does not actually encourage aerodynamic buildings. It's substantially a different randomness generator.
There's some (minor) logic in building for re-entry now, and the heat system is a consideration that i've had to make in two or three builds, but it's not really done much except have me put a heat shield on the flip side.
And maybe complicate Eve further, as if that needed any.

Asparagus staging is alive and well, which, at least to me, means the drag model has failed.


Career mode, to my dismay, has added next to no value to the game - there's no actual gameplay created by it, nor is it transparent enough to just reward the player - it's in that middle ground, misjudging the player capabilities up and down and providing absolutely no challenge, in either money or science.

Science is completely borked from the decision to keep the biomes the way they are - you can fill the entire science from just the two moons, since the first landing gives as much science as any measurement in a successive biome, and there's EIGHTEEN of them, at two altitudes.

Credits are, largely, irrelevant - since they're built in a way that makes it impossible to play the very game if you're out, they've made a system in which you get far more than you need, and never need to worry about them. If you screw around with settings, you may get forced to farm them, which won't make the gameplay one bit more interesting. And if that's the case... what's the mechanic doing in your game? Nod to realism?

It's built as if it's a management game, but it's not - and somebody along the line realized this and neutered all the management into oblivion, making it add absolutely nothing to the game if not some minor easing effect to reduce the "WHAT THE HELL ARE THOSE PARTS FOR?" effect.

The entire management subgame was a good idea, but after years of development it ended up being a half-baked, completely unbalanced mess. When a developer has to put up a slider...

The game still needs some completely vital concepts to get introduced in-game, like Hohmann transfer windows, which honestly ends up being google-fu.

Meanwhile, the controls continue to be incredibly anti-intuitive (if very powerful), the tutorials are a joke, and no new gameplay challenges have been added in years.
Base management is still a joke, and the game has to get modded to get properly played, and GPU physics isn't in, and music is still the three royalty-free tracks they had in prealpha.

I lament that they've gone for new, flashy features which ended up being mostly messes instead of much-needed polish, or ease of use features, like spacebases or partial automation for things like docking.
The direction hasn't followed hardcore (polish) nor newcomers (ease of use), but rather... i don't know.
 
First, a disclaimer:

1The aerodynamic system, which i wanted forever, does not actually encourage aerodynamic buildings. It's substantially a different randomness generator.
There's some (minor) logic in building for re-entry now, and the heat system is a consideration that i've had to make in two or three builds, but it's not really done much except have me put a heat shield on the flip side.
And maybe complicate Eve further, as if that needed any.

2Asparagus staging is alive and well, which, at least to me, means the drag model has failed.


3Career mode, to my dismay, has added next to no value to the game - there's no actual gameplay created by it, nor is it transparent enough to just reward the player - it's in that middle ground, misjudging the player capabilities up and down and providing absolutely no challenge, in either money or science.

4Science is completely borked from the decision to keep the biomes the way they are - you can fill the entire science from just the two moons, since the first landing gives as much science as any measurement in a successive biome, and there's EIGHTEEN of them, at two altitudes.

5Credits are, largely, irrelevant - since they're built in a way that makes it impossible to play the very game if you're out, they've made a system in which you get far more than you need, and never need to worry about them. If you screw around with settings, you may get forced to farm them, which won't make the gameplay one bit more interesting. And if that's the case... what's the mechanic doing in your game? Nod to realism?

6It's built as if it's a management game, but it's not - and somebody along the line realized this and neutered all the management into oblivion, making it add absolutely nothing to the game if not some minor easing effect to reduce the "WHAT THE HELL ARE THOSE PARTS FOR?" effect.

The entire management subgame was a good idea, but after years of development it ended up being a half-baked, completely unbalanced mess. When a developer has to put up a slider...

7The game still needs some completely vital concepts to get introduced in-game, like Hohmann transfer windows, which honestly ends up being google-fu.

8Meanwhile, the controls continue to be incredibly anti-intuitive (if very powerful), the tutorials are a joke, and no new gameplay challenges have been added in years.
Base management is still a joke, and the game has to get modded to get properly played, and GPU physics isn't in, and music is still the three royalty-free tracks they had in prealpha.

1 I don't see how you can say that. It's not FAR's quality, but it's definitely not a 'randomness generator'. Orientation of your craft in the atmosphere affects lift and drag now, the amount of lift and drag you generate is now dependent on velocity AND air density/elevation, along with being dependent on the amount/type of parts on our craft....and wings can actually stall now along with nose cones being practical instead of just being for show.

On the heat transfer side of the coin, it really affects the way you can(or can't) aero-break from an interplanetary mission. In the old models, you could come flying back from a jool mission straight into Kerbin at ludicrous speeds as long as you had parachutes, regardless of craft design. In the new versions, the same maneuver will burn you to a crisp 5,000 meters into the atmosphere. In order to be successful, you must incrementally bleed off your speed through the atmosphere.

2 The fact that Asparagus staging still works is not a testament to bad aero. Theoretically, it is realistically sound and does improve delta v over typical staging, ...BUT, it is not nearly as efficient as it use to be pre-aero update and is more prone to diminishing returns. I have imported in my old, heavy, bulky asparagus launchers into 1.0 and it takes drastically more delta v to get into orbit than a sleek, properly made rocket . The reason why Asparagus staging isn't used in real life isn't because the aerodynamics don't allow it, but because it is a VERY complicated to displace fuel and oxidizer from engine to engine with fuel pumps in a consistent way.

3 I disagree. Is it perfect? No, though rebalanced tech trees add great challenge(try out BTSM, but I won't bring in mods to this). The game has always been sandbox first, the initial enjoyment of it was setting a goal for yourself and trying to conquer it. The career mode simply adds more restriction, which induces creativity. A good player could build a craft with unlimited resources and get to just about anywhere with ease(except EVE, which required a lot of foresight[for a single launch journey]), but the career can add incremental challenges like "get to minimus with a craft that weigh less than 30 tons on tier 3 parts" or "get to duna with no parachutes and no nuke engines" or "get to the mun with 18 parts, no fuel pumps, and no maneuver nodes". It does a great job of restricting parts to make you come up with fun designs. Could you cheese it and just exploit all the biomes in kerbins SOI to unlock everything? Sure, but the game doesn't(and shouldnt't) expect you to be well-versed in every aspect of space travel at tier 1 parts.

4 I already touched upon this but I don't think players-new or old- should be expected to extract all the science from every initial biome in the game. It's kinda like a player of an RPG being able to grind to high levels early in the game, it's possible, but not very much fun or common.
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5 I partly agree with you on credits being not properly implemented, but I will say that it CAN add another degree of restriction to make sacrifices to what you want to do. For instance, you have 20,000 dollars and you want to go the mun. so you make a craft that is 19,000 but you wanna add a research bay, not only will it cost more money, but you need more fuel now...what do you do? Remove batteries? Tighten up your Delta V cushion?

I will admit, as a long term player, credits are never a big deal even when I play vanilla hard mode...but BTSM[Better Than Starting Manned] is another story, I seriously recommend it to any KSP vets.

6 I never felt like I was really managing anything, besides upgrading the launchpad to increase weight, the VAB to increase parts, or satellite array to track asteroids etc., but that seemed felt like progression milestones imo. I agree with the unbalanced part, but it is kind of hard for this game to be balanced for every player... I could get to the Mun and back on tier 1 parts(well, pre-aero update), so should I expect the tech trees to be balanced for my sake? Probably not, but that's why the slider is a necessary evil.

7 Completely agree...besides a couple of trial-and-error attempts for a new player going to the mun or minimus, getting anywhere else is impossible without some googling. They drastically need to implement a sanctioned "protractor"-esque mod to assist transfers.

8 Never had an issue with the controls, but different strokes. Tutorials need to be better. I think the tech tree adds MANY gameplay challenges..It creates construction restrictions which you can overcome in different ways instead of "here's all the parts, all the money, you don't need to make sacrifices".

I see were you are coming from, but it seems part of the problem you have with the game is that its not balanced around experienced players,which makes most of the new additions flash by in an instant if you don't properly set your difficulty.
 

GodofWine

Member
Today's Dev notes mentioned this would re-enter certification after a few minor issues are ironed out, so it sounds like it was at some point submitted for certification, implying its darn near done... Maybe...is anything really ever finished on Kerbin though??
 

GodofWine

Member
Officially coming in July, brush up on your physics and orbital transfer dynamics... Or just doodle plans with tons of boosters and forget to add parachutes.
 
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