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.