My ship is...well, “unwieldy” is putting it charitably. “Butt-ugly” would be more accurate. My little space plane has a set of double wings, a pair of rocket boosters bolted on, and a mismatched set of double engines—one pointing forward, one pointing back, a puny cockpit sandwiched in the middle. It keeps falling over, because this Frankenstein's monster was never meant to see the light of day.
As I attempt to launch for the fifth time, something dawns on me: I've never done this before. I've played Kerbal Space Program for hundreds of hours. More than any other game in my library. But I've never found myself parachuting a malformed, experimental craft into the Sea of Kerbin so I can run tests, fulfill my contract, and make bank. After all this time, KSP is forcing me to play it in a new way.
Update 0.24, or “First Contract,” is the next stage of the space agency simulator. KSP has been a solar-system-sized sandbox for three years now, but First Contract's budgets, contracts, and reputation system add a loose veneer of guidance to the game for the first time. Not into rules? These changes only apply to the game's career mode; sandbox mode is still a free-for-all.
New worlds
Reputation is the least well-defined of the three new systems. Your reputation grows as you experience success and fulfill contracts. In order for anyone to put up money funding a trip to the Mun, for example, you'll need to prove you're not a complete screw-up by hitting milestones like the first orbit. This makes sense. But what's left unknown is the exact reputation amounts required for certain new contracts. Reputation operates in the background, theoretically, but I don't have a way to fully understand its nuances. I'd like to see the reputation stats presented more transparently and have a bigger impact on what I can do and why. Perhaps future updates will see missions to Duna (the Mars equivalent in the Kerbalverse) only funded if your rockstar kerbal, the hero of previous missions with the high reputation rating, is at the helm.
I also don't know how KSP will handle failure. If I'm being honest, dozens of kerbals and millions of dollars worth of equipment have exploded during my hours playing for this preview. Between loading quicksaves and reverting flights back to launch, though, I have a spotless safety record in the game. But, and I'm just spitballing here, what would happen if I spent my entire budget on a manned trip to the moon, failed, and everyone died? There's an easily predictable death spiral in place where you don't have the reputation to earn good contracts, so you don't have the money to launch more ships, so you don't have a way to fulfill even basic contracts. What happens then? Is that game over?
I've got some quibbles, sure. The specific payouts, variables, and penalties for contracts will undergo a long tweaking process before the difficulty and the rewards line up. But the master-stroke of this new system is its depth and malleability. When KSP's boisterous modding community gets ahold of this system (which is running in 64-bit for the first time, by the way), we'll see entire storylines written to play out through contracts, each one supporting a custom-made set of variables and goals. For the first time there will be a real reason to build space stations and colonies on other worlds, and the exciting endgame will evolve beyond simply reaching the outer planets.
Before this update, I took a few months away from KSP to play other things. Now that I've seen the contracts system, I've been sucked right back in. If you've never played KSP before, you now have a better guide through the early game than ever before. With First Contract, I can see the final shape of what KSP will eventually look like, and it continues to surprise me.
