Please do not assume that if a bug isn't mentioned that it is unknown to us or not being worked on - this is a top-ten list. This list is not exhaustive (there are dozens of people working on dozens of items simultaneously, and there are some features that we really do want to be surprises), but it'll give some visibility into the issues we're tackling. I'm extending trust to you and will talk about a few things that are not yet complete, so you can see some of the ropes we're hauling on every day - some of which may prove to be long. Increased transparency carries costs, and those have to be balanced against other feature-facing work we could be doing. In such cases, we then need to take the time to explain in technical detail why the implementation of such and such of a feature is non-trivial in KSP2. Similarly daunting is the possibility that we'll announce that we're working on something the community perceives as "easy" (an especially common situation when we're working on a feature that is already functional in the original KSP), and then take a long time delivering that feature that people may decide we don't know what we're doing. Yes, there's always the chance that when we talk about a feature in development, that we're also creating an expectation that the feature will be present in the next update. Still, I'm questioning my choice to withhold information about systems in progress. When I hold back on such items, I comfort myself that the less I reveal now, the more surprising the patch notes will be when we release them. That's my catch-all term for that very meaningful category of progress that, because of my reluctance to write bad checks, can't yet be talked about it detail. So you see lots of that.īut the other thing you see lots of is some variation on "improved stability and performance". They're fun and they're safe, and artists are always creating new content. What is safe, then? Well, for the most part, content updates like new art, parts, and graphic improvements come along in nice, neat little parcels that are not only visually pleasing, but also are unlikely to generate an unmet expectation. By my standard of "don't talk about it until it's truly done," neither of those scenarios yield anything that's safe to post about. They often take the form of "we've made great progress on x category of a super annoying bug" or "this feature looks good but we haven't had time to fully validate it yet". Before each post goes out, I meet with the production and community teams to review the past week's progress, and many great, exciting developments are discussed. Now of course, I haven't gone literally silent. When you combine this "stay quiet until you're absolutely sure" ethos with a more dispersed update cadence, what you get is long periods of silence. With a game this complex, nothing is ever assured until is has been thoroughly tested by QA. For this reason, we have avoided talking about features in progress, bugs under investigation, or internal delivery deadlines. I feel this burden especially keenly because in the past I have personally announced dates that turned out to be incorrect. In the past, every item in these posts has has to cross a threshold of certainty - we don't want to announce some new feature or target date, only to experience a trust-eroding failure to follow through. Our team has been reading your comments and asking one another if there's some way we can do better. The last post received a lot of comments, many of which expressed doubt, frustration, and in some cases anger about either the seeming lack of progress on KSP2 or the perception that a dark reality about the game's state is being concealed. This past week has been a learning experience.
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