PS4 KSP Impressions
OK, so it is a bit rough, but not broken, and runs fine. Definitely playable and still KSP fun, but not without some issues.
Graphics:
-Game look fine, some blend of medium and high settings. The textures for the VAB icons look worse than they do on the ship.
-Framerate was fine with a regular sized ship flown to the Mun and back. Was it locked 60, no. But Firewatch was in much worse shape at launch than this. I did not notice any major slowdown during my first mission. Bigger ships will likely cause more issues, but they do on most PCs too.
-Lighting seems to have some issues. When landing on the Mun, my landing lights did not illuminate things the way I would expect. It looked like only one light was on, and the other two off, even though all three were turned on
Controls:
-Why in god's name is motion control turned on by default? Moving the cursor with this is awful, turn it off immediatly
-No control mapping customization. This really needs to be added
-You basically move a mouse cursor with your analog stick for the majority of input outside of flying your ships
-Flying ships is actually pretty good, but switching around between things can be clunky
-Setting maneuver nodes isn't bad, but fine tuning the spot can be tough
-Moving the camera around takes getting used to
-Some big control issues come up when having to switch between ship control and cursor control. You click L3 and it brings up the mouse cursor, but you can't control your ship when cursor is up. This causes many issues for me, more details in impressions.
-Overall it is totally playable with a controller. A bit wonky, but some minor tweaks or allowing custom mapping could easily resolve it.
Building Ships:
-Easy enough to do with a controller. Not ideal, but not that big of a hindrance
-Getting used to all the shortcuts takes a minute
-Camera controls don't feel intuitive yet
-Didn't have much trouble building a ship. Could become more difficult with more complex ships, but overall it just takes a little more patience
Gameplay:
-It's KSP all right. I succesfully landed on the Mun and returned to Kerbin without any problems. Flying felt natural. In my mission to land on Mun and back, my biggest issue was forgetting the ablative shield. So, the real challenge still remains the gameplay, not combating any weird systems on the console version
-There is only a controller shortcut for time warp, but it actually only turns on physics warp which is really fucking weird. This is honestly the biggest curveball and complaint for me right now. It makes no sense. Once in space, why would you ever need physics warp? I have no idea why the shortcut isn't the exact same thing as the mapping on PC where if you warp in atmosphere, it does physics warp, and once in space, it is time warp. This has to be a bug or mistake. It is too important to be able to quickly go in and out of time warp to have it mapped to using a cursor every time. It even says "time warp" in the shortcut description.
-I expect for noobs, console might be tough. KSP isn't terribly intuitive, but at least on PC the act of mousing over things, left clicking or right clicking feels natural. Doing all these button combinations of holding L1 and hitting other buttons or long press buttons and short press buttons only clicked with me because I knew exactly what I needed to do so I just looked up the button combinations. For someone with zero knowledge of KSP, these extra button combinations may become a big hurdle on top of the already challenging learning curve of KSP
-The game did crash twice on me during warps into physics intense situations, eg warping into Kerbin atmosphere.
Overall initial impressions:
-It is not as bad or rough as I thought it would be, but it also has some pretty glaring issues at launch. Ironically I was very concerned about performance issues, but for the most part those haven't been a problem at all.
-The current button mapping and lack of customization is the biggest problem right now.
-The fact that when you go into mouse cursor mode, you cannot control your ship creates some odd situations. This means that you cannot actively check your Ap and Pe via mouse over while flying your ship.
-They really should take advantage of the DS4 touchpad. When you make contact with it, it should bring up your cursor, slide finger around, click to click in game, take finger off, instantly go out of cursor mode. That would be sooooooo much better.
-So with all of this weird cursor mode, control mode switch, this game absolutely needs Kerbal Engineer Redux as a build in mod. With some control tweaks and Kerbal Engineer Redux added to this game, I thing they have a really solid console offering on hand.
I will post some pics later.
