What I would really like to see in these games is more emphasis on modern theme park sim/management. So much of these games are built on an outdated idea of amusement parks in which everything is owned and run by the park staff with a ticket price attached to each ride. Big, well designed, corporate-run parks don’t work like that anymore.
The majority of revenue should come from the front gate, concessions stands, and services with ride prices included in the gate fee. (You can do this in both Planet Coaster and RCTW, but it’s very hard to manage because all the tools are built on a price-per-ride model.) Also, modern parks generate a lot of revenue from co-marketing deals. Those Coke billboards? The Dole Pineapple Tropical Habitat area? The Imagineers Exhibit brought to you by PG&E? Those are profit centers in major parks nowadays. This is how Disney, Six Flags, and Knott’s work.
These aren’t hayseed mall parking lot traveling amusement parks. I’m literally digging out mountains and creating new waterways here! I shouldn’t be depending on nickel & dime income.
Also, I feel PC and RCTW leaves a lot of virtual money on the table by not including accommodations for visitors.
While I love the old RCT games, I really want this vision to be there too. Granted the ‘sponsorship’ stuff might be less fun to manage than other items, but perhaps that could be rolled in? Say you get to place a coaster, and there are two versions. One the normal, the other a sponsored. The sponsored has lower maintenance costs, and lower up front. However it also would lower the aesthetic appeal, or happiness meter, versus the regular.
That way you can mechanically integrate ‘sponsorships’ without having to get away from the core fun of managing rides and parks. Anything to stay away from some spreadsheet type ‘manage sponsorships’ UI.
Another thing I’d like to see? Variable quality of goods. These games have balloon stalls, hat stalls, burger stalls, and junk like that which is fine, but higher quality, more expensive souvenirs or better food isn’t really an option. Like, you can fake it by taking the burger stall and building an expensive-looking restaurant building around it, but it’s not really doing anything other than driving up the price of the prop.
Again, look at Disneyland. They have burger stalls and churro stands, but they also have actual no-fooling restaurants that offer more expensive, fancier food. Those eateries are always booked up. The Blue Bayou in Disneyland costs more because they offer food you can’t get along the sidewalk. And don’t even get me started on Club 33!
Some of these sound like opportunities for expansion packs to me. I agree. I prefer the at the gate approach and want to see who rides what rides because they’re fun not because there is 10 dollars left in their pocket, but maybe they could go that route with additional content and some AI tweaks to behavior?
Guys! Guys! Did we know that the music for Planet Coaster was composed by the brilliant Jim Guthrie?! Because I don’t think we knew that. And by “we,” I mean “I.”
I did what people do in Coaster games, built a stupid one and tried it out. Sadly, it was so nauseating (and named the Nauseator!) that no one in the park would ride it, so I had to kill it. Here, have a video.
+1 for the realism of the game’s simulation as not one of your park’s guests wanted to ride that thing.
That reminds me, I used to enjoy building death trap roller coasters in these types of games, will that still work here or do the guests refuse to ride on obvious killing machines?
Here’s the secret: customers don’t mind a long queue if it’s fully themed. Get your queue theming up to 100% and they’ll be fine with a long wait.
It’s not so much the tools as the analytics - it’s not clear form the existing UI why I as the park manager want to charge a flat park entrance fee when per-ride fees give more concrete feedback on what’s profitable and what’s not. There needs to be some kind of report that compares popularity with operating costs for when you’re charging a flat entrance fee with no per-ride price.
I’d hoped that the park management would get as big a leap ahead as the building tools or coaster sim, but instead it seems to have gotten less attention than RCT3. Lack of proper restaurants is a real disappointment - really all they had to do is put in a “restaurant table” object that guests want to sit at while they eat and makes guests willing to spend more money on food when one is around.
The scarcity of non-food retail is also saddening - modern parks aim to minimize the time you spend waiting in line in person for rides, not so that you can ride more rides, but so that while you’re waiting in a virtual line for your beeper to go off you can spend more time in the park’s shops and restaurants, happily spending money. It’s a huge part of modern park management, but there doesn’t seem to be anything in PC to reflect it (like some higher-end retail options.)
Yes 1,000x. I posted at Parkitect that I’d hope they’d go heavy with business and realism side to help set their game apart from the two options we have now.
Planet Coaster hits one of my big pet peeves right out of the gate. Not only does it not have a proper tutorial, it doesn’t even play the tutorial videos in the game! Clicking the main menu selection for the videos leads to the YouTube web page popping up through Steam. WTF Frontier?
RollerCoaster Tycoon World has actual tutorial scenarios through its career progression. The first couple of scenarios are literally the old-school “click this to do that” type thing. The Unity engine IP franchise cash-in game with no less than 3 studios shuffled through its development has a better learning curve than this game.
I will agree with this as well, though to be honest, it’s not that hard so far to figure out.
One item though: where in the hell are waste bins at? I would like to put some around my park but can’t find them on the menu.
I’m also not a huge fan of huge chunks of the available resources being placed behind the research tree. I’d rather see it used as adding awesomeness to an already nicely rounded availability menu. I guess it goes both ways though.
The task that really jumbled me up was building right-angled paths with sharp corners. When you check the box to do that, you get the dialog to click on a grid, and I’m like “WTF? What grid are you talking about? Where?” It took me a while to figure out that the game wanted me to select a gridded area like a building or a ride on which to orient the X and Y lines.
