@ Gui13:
This game will get a multiplayer mode and there is a multiplayer mod out there

@Luke:
KSP .24 will be released shortly (hopefully in the next hours). It will include missions and budget so you might find something to do again. I personally had the same problem. While I love KSP it gets boring to just land on every celestial body all over again.

[…] you know, I have been trying to get Kerbals to and back from the Mun lately. Before I got the space exploration bug, I was playing The Walking Dead: Season One which […]

Gui13 wrote:

What this game needs is a multiplayer mode!

Since the Kerbals treat their space program as trial-and-error(-and-try-again) you can start a kind of offline-multiplayer:
Make a list of how many flights you needed to get a soil sample from every biome on Mun and Minmus (for example) and how many Kerbals died in the process or where left in the void. Compare with someone and you got a multiplayerish experience :)
Sure, not as great as a slap-a-rocket-together-and-race-for-the-Mun direct competition (after all there IS a second space center on Kerbin) but could still prove interesting.

Right now I’m trying to get a probe with the Stayputnik core on the Mun and back.
Eight tries: 3 ran out of electricity because I didn’t account for the charge the core needs. 2 didn’t quite get caught in Mun orbit and are now on an orbit that has a 200 day apoapsis. 1 exploded on the launchpad due to an oversight in staging (Sepratron tried to push my final stage back onto the launchpad while the rest wanted to go upwards). 1 tipped on touchdown and then ran out of charge because it rolled into shadow and ran out of charge) and the last exploded when I tried to save it from a touchdown-tippover…
Landing pods is much easier, I found!

What this game needs is a multiplayer mode!

@ Chris Wellons:

Man, that guy makes everything seem so easy. He is like “let me just set this course here” and bam, perfect trajectory followed by perfectly executed 5 second burn that takes him into the right orbit. Meanwhile it takes me like 15 minutes of fucking around with the sliders to get a shittiest of all orbits that requires like a 3 minute burn after which I’m completely out of fuel, but it doesn’t matter because I crash into the Mun before I’m able to slow down to real-time from maximum wrap. :P

@ Gothmog:

Thanks. My brother has been playing that before I infected him with KSP fever. That game is on my wish list now. :)

@ MrPete:

Oh, Drifter looks kinda cool. It kinda reminds me of Freelancer. I will check it out.

Well, Banished is not only unforgiving, it’s a pretty delicate balance of everything, requiring about as much attention to detail as a triplet of KSP flights to Moho, Eve and Jool that are entering their target orbits at the same time.

Another game (recently arrived on steam early access) without an overarcing story is Drifter.
It’s a kind of flat space game, meaning you’re only flying on one level, without the third dimension. Also still in development but so far it’s got a good “just one more jump” addiction to it.

Heya Luke-
Great article. I’d say one of the recent games that fit this mold is “Banished“- but so far all the stories I’ve crafted through playing are, well, BLEAK. Stories of a family that dies of dysentery or runs out of firewood and freezes to death.
It’s a good game to be sure, but expect to fail and feel a pang of guilt that that kid named Otto you saw playing around in the town square didn’t make it through the winter.

Heya Luke-
Great article. I’d say one of the recent games that fit this mold is “Banished“- but so far all the stories I’ve crafted through playing are, well, BLEAK. Stories of a family that dies of dysentery or runs out of firewood and freezes to death.
It’s a good game to be sure, but expect to fail and feel a pang of guilt that that kid named Otto you saw playing around in the town square didn’t make it through the winter.

If you want to see a master KSP player in action, check out Scott Manley. I recommend starting with Eve Or Bust. It’s both educational, since he explains some of the science and history involved, and fascinating, seeing him use some crazy fuel-saving techniques to accomplish his missions.