Last few years I’ve been excitedly waiting for sequels from several small-to-medium sized studios that made highly acclaimed original games—I’m talking about Cities: Skylines, Kerbal Space Program, Planet Coaster, Frostpunk, etc.—yet each sequel was very poorly received to the point I wasn’t willing to risk my money buying it. Why do you think this happens when these developers already had a winning formula?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] kartoffelsaft@programming.dev 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

they were told to scrap years of development

Why on earth where they told to do that?