This is either good news or bad news, depending on your perspective. Kerbal Space Program 2 finally has a release date, which is one giant leap for Kerbal kind and one giant roadblock for interstellar species of every other kind.
For those who didn’t play the first Kerbal Space Program, the game revolves around sending little aliens called Kerbals into space. Preferably without blowing them into millions of tiny pieces that then orbit the species’ home planet of Kerbolar, but more often than not a catastrophic flaw will cause your spacecraft to veer wildly off course, careening into the side of a mountain or plummeting back to the ground upside-down and on fire.
Of course, the hilarity of this plucky species trying and failing to reach the stars is what made Kerbal Space Program so much fun.
Development on Kerbal Space Program came to a close last year with Intercept Games focusing entirely on the coming sequel, which will feature significant upgrades over its predecessor. Originally set to release in 2021, COVID-19 got in the way and got the game pushed to 2022, and then again to 2023. With today's announcement, we know the game is releasing to Steam and Epic Games Store early access programs on February 24 with an introductory price of $49.99.
Early access means Kerbal Space Program 2 will undergo a sort of extended beta period, and the players will at times feel a lot like the Kerbals they're sending into space.
"For us, failure is not only an option, it's absolutely mandatory," said creative director Nate Simpson in today's announcement. "One of the things I'm excited about with early access is it kind of makes everything feel a little more Kerbal in the sense that we're gonna get some things wrong. We're gonna make some assumptions that are incorrect. We're gonna fail out loud. There's nothing more Kerbal than that, actually."
The plan is for players to provide feedback during the development process. Kerbal Space Program 2 will first arrive with an extensive expansion of spaceship parts and a refreshed onboarding system for new players. At first, space travel will be limited to the local Kerbolar system, but future updates plan to add interstellar travel as well as colonies, more tech tree items, modding, and multiplayer.
You can wishlist Kerbal Space Program 2 now to be notified exactly when it becomes available to buy.