Games

I never played cs1 on release, only played after it was nearly 10 years old, but my understanding is it vastly improved over updates and dlc (which unfortunately did cost more but did at least add meaningful changes for the most part).

Im curious to see where CS2 stands in 3-5 years when mods have really taken off and the devs had made most of their major tweaks.

The decision making behind this is incredibly hard for me to understand. Just a very, very nonsensical way to run the project, on paper. I wonder about the circumstances.

The rights were aquired by Take-Two Interactive in 2017, and they wanted a sequel to be released in 2020.

The dev studio shut down in 2023 and current status is unkown.

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:

1. were willing to sign more restrictive contracts without the confidence to push back
2. 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)
3. 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.

You see this a lot in project management. People go to school to learn to manage projects, and they think that all projects are pretty much the same. You define the deliverables, set the schedule, track the progress, and everything should work out fine. When the project is a success, they pat themselves on the back for getting everyone to the finish line, and when the project fails they examine where in the process unexpected things happened.

Video games are an art form. Creativity can't be iterated into existence, and the spark of fun is more than the component parts of a good time. Capitalists believe that they can invest in the creative process and buy the value of the talent of extraordinary people. They have commoditized creation, dissecting each step and then squeezing it into a format that fits into a procedure.

Here's a Kanban board of game features, pick one and move it to the next phase. Develop, test, evaluate, repeat. What are your blockers? Is this in scope? Do we need to push the deadline?

That can help you make something, but it won't be art.