A sequel to spacefaring simulation Kerbal Space Program is on the way from a new developer, it's just been confirmed.
Kerbal Space Program 2 was announced via teaser trailer during the Gamescom Opening Night Live press conference this evening.
It's due to launch in 2020 on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One - and that's all we know so far.
Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.
Over the course of my PC gaming career, I've conquered the world, slain the most terrifying foes, and uncovered the deepest secrets of many a dungeon. But when it comes to pure euphoria at having accomplished something astounding through a combination of thought, persistence, and fine motor skill, it's hard to beat landing Jebediah Kerman and his friends on the Mun—and returning safely—in Kerbal Space Program.
KSP is far from a completely realistic simulation of Newton's laws and the challenges of operating in deep space, but it's close enough that it truly expanded my understanding of how our universe works. It's one thing to read about gravity in a textbook or nod your head in agreement when someone on TV explains that orbits are basically objects falling toward each other with high enough horizontal speed to prevent a collision. But I never truly got it until I had to interact with gravity directly in this quirky game about little green astronauts.
The Mun is the closest and arguably easiest target you can send your Kerbals to, and it ends up being the trial by fire (sometimes literally) for any new mission controller's understanding of the rocket construction and flight mechanics. There are more distant, more difficult heavenly bodies to pursue, but reaching them never quite tops that very first time you manage to launch a crew of Kerbals in a tin can through space to tag an icy rock.
There were many failures on the way. Analyzing each hilarious disaster slowly taught me what worked and what didn't. There were some heartbreaking close calls, like making it to the Mun but having the lander tip over, stranding the crew there indefinitely, or having something go wrong on the final re-entry to Kerbin—KSP’s equivalent to Earth—which always serves as a stressful and dramatic finale to any mission.
But then came that one fateful mission came when everything lined up perfectly. My rocket was honed by many hours of learning and evolutionary pressure. My hands were steady on the flight stick. I lifted off, put myself into a beautiful circular orbit around Kerbin, executed a near-perfect burn that used as little fuel as possible, and set down gently in the smooth bowl of an enormous crater. My intrepid kerbal captain disembarked, took some readings for science, and hopped back in to head home. The moment of truth came as I blasted him into a re-entry orbit, jettisoned everything except the heat-shielded capsule, and held my breath hoping that my trajectory would use Kerbin's atmosphere to slow us down enough not to crash (a technique called air-braking) without causing enough heat from friction to cook poor Jeb alive.
The heat shield caught fire as the air pressure increased and Kerbin got closer and closer below us. At one point, the temperature readings got so high that I thought the whole mission was about to go up in flames after everything else had gone so well. I realized that the auto-adjusting gyroscopes supposed to keep the heat shield fully facing into the atmosphere were letting just a bit of air past to hit the capsule itself. This usually doesn't happen and may have been a glitch, but I didn't have time to worry about that. My only option was to take the joystick and make a series of tiny adjustments to ensure the heat shield was taking the brunt of the friction.
My wrist was sore and my teeth were clenched by the time it was all over, but eventually the flames subsided. My heart skipped a beat in the moment it took the capsule's parachutes to deploy, as they can become damaged in flight and lead to a catastrophic failure at the 11th hour. But those white plumes eventually billowed out and carried Jeb to a safe (if not comfortable) splashdown in the crystal blue ocean. I felt like one of those people jumping up and down in Mission Control after every successful return in a space movie. I was ecstatic. My heart was beating fast and I had a huge smile on my face. I knew in that moment that Kerbal Space Program was something special. And I've delighted in taking my Kerbals higher, faster, and further ever since but nothing has ever felt quite as fulfilling as that first successful run to the Mun and back.
Kerbal Space Program, still one of the best games you can play on PC today, has brought out its second-ever expansion, Breaking Ground, which gives you more things to do once you touch down on another planet.
You'll get booster antennae, solar panels, weather stations, seismometers, ion detectors, a device that analyzes goo and other equipment to deploy after you land. They'll collect data that you can relay back to Kerbin, learning more about the place you're visiting. The seismometer particularly takes my fancy: to get a reading, you have to deliberately crash things into the surface. Check out some of the gizmos in action in this trailer from last week.
You'll also find new surface features, such as meteors, craters, rock outcroppings, and cryovolcanoes. You can pick some of them up—rocks, not volcanoes, presumably—and bring them back home for further testing. Any that you can't take home will have to be analyzed on-site, either with your Kerbals or with unmanned rovers, which have new robotic arms to scan the area around them.
Lastly, the expansion adds new items to plug into your crafts, such as hinges, pistons and rotors. You'll get a robotics controller system to make sure they all work together.
It certainly sounds substantial, and the fact it's only the second expansion since Kerbal Space Program came out in 2015 makes it feel like a big deal. Making History, the first expansion, was very good indeed—check out Ian's review here.
It's $15/£13 on Steam.
For a game about spaceships, Kerbal Space Program‘s latest expansion has a curiously terrestrial focus not to mention name: Breaking Ground. Out now, it doesn’t do much for spaceflight but does give more to do once you’ve actually landed somewher eout there. Along with new ground-based deployable scientific research gadgets, it adds surface formations to study and, most importantly, robotic pistons and joints and things. Remember: robotics components are for serious scientific expeditions only. Don’t get any ideas about building a giant mechanical tarantula to skitter around mission control. And if you’re using a mod to add multiplayer, don’t you and your pals have any ideas about starting a Robot Wars on the Mun. Science only, okay.
Just ahead of its launch next week, Kerbal Space Program’s Breaking Ground expansion has published a trailer that shows off the scientific data-gathering bits and bobs you’ll be able to send around the solar system when the DLC arrives.
As the trailer illustrates, Breaking Ground will send you on science missions to other planets, where you’ll use new gear to gather data about local seismology and weather. You’ll be able to scan and collect samples discovered around the solar system, using new robotic armatures that bend and twist to your heart’s delight.
What’s potentially even more exciting, however, are the new components for spacecraft the expansion is introducing. There are hinges, pistons, servos, and rotors, and each of these new pieces means an infinitude of potential new designs, based on what the Kerbal Space Program community has already concocted without them.
The trailer also shows some of the new robotics in action, and I can only imagine the kinds of amazing, spindly monstrosities that KSP players are going to manage to pack into their rocket payloads.
Check out our interview with Kerbal Space Program’s developers to learn more about Breaking Ground. It’ll be launching May 30.
We wanted to broaden the possibilities for future development, adding a time-based mechanic with deployed science, which also introduces inventory into stock KSP.
Exploring celestial bodies and using rovers has never had as much value as we would have liked, and while the real Opportunity is now quietly resting on Mars, we wanted to give the players the opportunity to do more valuable science driving across Duna (and the other bodies) in KSP. So we added interesting new features to the surface of the planets that can be explored and have experiments performed on them.
Giving our community the ability to build even more complex creations might seem like a strange idea for anyone familiar with KSP, but it is something the whole team is passionate about. I’m really looking forward to seeing what people can make and animate with the new parts and controller combination.
For the spacesuit we tried a few options based on existing concepts from real life space programs, but some of those looked too slim or too sci-fi-ish. We also tried different helmets, but something felt weird about the shapes, and as the Kerbal helmet is iconic, we kept the classic shape when designing a new one. Apart from the design, we wanted to give the suit something that the others don't have: An emissive light at the seams, something that comes in handy to help find your Kerbals when they are far from the sun or on the dark side of a planet! At first, we thought skinning the accordion arms would be problematic, but we managed to do it, and we are pretty happy with the result. We hope you like it as much as we do!Click here to see the Suits in high-res.
