1mo ago

Cities Skylines 2, Kerbal Space 2, Planet Coaster 2, Frostpunk 2... What Went Wrong?

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?

64 comments

C:S2 is likely too ambitious. Doing too many new things at once instead of incremental change.
KSP2 was a management fuck up. Let's take this IP and give it to a completely seperate studio with no experience in this kind of work while not allowing the original Devs to help despite being part of the organisation.
- C:S2 is likely too ambitious. Doing too many new things at once instead of incremental change.
  And C:S1's bar to clear was SimCity 2013. C:S2's bar to clear was C:S1 with several years worth of content updates
  
  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.
  
  I had it from release and honestly, even day 1 it smoked the competition in the city sim genre, releasing with features and scale than Sim City ever had.
  The DLC often introduced more systems, but they did feel 'extra', the game was perfectly functional before parks or tourism or natural disasters etc.
  The reason CS:2 felt so necessary is because the first was bloated and had underlying issues in it's simulation logic, like unrealistically inefficient driving, or a large expansion to residential areas causing all the new residents to die of old age at the same time, crippling the city. Every part of the GUI and logic just felt clunky compared to modern, polished games.
  
  I'd argue the DLCs did more than you imply. The extra modes of transit gave more options to move people, painting a custom park area made cities feel more realistic than premade square parks, universities could be a great centerpiece for a neighborhood. Its not like vanilla was unplayable, but the DLC defintely added more creativity for me.
- Let's take this IP and give it to a completely seperate studio with no experience in this kind of work while not allowing the original Devs to help despite being part of the organisation.
  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.
  
  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.
  
  As an art appreciator, and someone whose professional duties include project management, I love this comment, especially "[project management] can help you make something, but it won't be art."
  
  As a project manager (well sort of, but did IT projects for a while, have multiple friends in the gaming manager): Yes and no.
  From my point of view: The problem isn't the fact that games are art. While games have their creative side they also require good "brick and mortar work" in the back - as many games as went horribly wrong due to a lack of space for creativity went wrong due to a lack of "less than glamorous" brick and mortar work and overcreativity. (Most drastic example would be the reddit dragon MMO story)
  This is actually a reason why people who are very invested in the subject matter of the project they manage often are horrible project managers - and vice versa people who have no clue can't be good PMs either.
  Project management has one core component: Knowing when to ask whom. A good PM knows that the dev(or dev team lead) will always know better how long "feature X" will take. Of course I can try to learn how to do things... but that wouldn't help much as the exact dev or team will still have their individual speeds. But a good PM also will know when to ask someone else who is nore knowledgeable for advice or to confirm things. (I literally had an Dev trying to tell me a small feature would take two weeks. Fair enough. But interestingly enough two other Devs were fairly sure it takes 30min including documentation. Which sounded way more reasonable. Turned out said Dev always tried to pull these stunts with new PMs and his lead being on vacation)
  A good PM will also know when to give people space for creativity - and defend this room towards the budget.
  Sadly - and this is a problem existing on all sides around PM- in the end it all boils down to a simple thing: Everyone thinks they know better. The PM thinks they know the job of being a Dev(or engineer,etc. etc.) better than the actual people doing the job. And vice versa the Devs think they could do without PMs (they can't for larger projects it's impossible, for mid size projects often really inefficient) or know their job better.
  Such is life.
  
  Very insightful! Thank you!
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  they were told to scrap years of development
  Why on earth where they told to do that?
  
  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.
- What new things did C:S2 add? It felt like a slight graphical and qol improvement at best.
  
  At release you couldn't even reverse one-way roads in C:S1. Comparing it to C:S2's road tools is hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby.
- I mean for ksp2 saying it failed cause they had "no experience with this kind of work" is kind of weird, since neither did the ksp1 devs when they started that. And they didn't fuck it up either, let alone this badly. Remember that it was a passion project of harvester, working at a PR firm that just happened to let him do it under their roof and employment. The company did not even have any basic experience in game development, arguably even software development in general.
  
  Institutional knowledge is a real thing and also like you said, the first KSP started as a passion project. There's a huge difference in terms of pressure and expectation between developing your own passion project compared to developing a sequel of a highly regarded game.
- I didnt know it was a new studio too. Thats a classic mistake.
  
  Oh, the fucks up are massive. They hired a new studio, but also, they pulled the funding then the project without warning. Then they poached the devs, forcing the studio to close and sending them to a newly funded studio. But then, they forced the devs to scrap years of work from scratch, and start over the project with the old codebase and only a year as a deadline. Finally, when it became obvious it wasn't a massive success, they cut their funding too without warning, and sold the IP without telling the studio about it.
  KSP was mishandled so wildly that it should be a case study of how profit oriented management kills creativity and destroys IPs. They killed two studios and a massive IP with their shenanigans. This is why you never let the MBAs run anything.

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