All I’ve done so far is one dead-easy tutorial-ish scenario and try out the building tools, which in practice meant watching a lot of Youtube videos first - the official tutorials aren’t in the beta yet.
In terms of park management features it feels like RCT3 so far, with nothing noticeably novel other than a Zoo Tycoon 2-esque Challenge Mode (i.e. blank-map play with money and goals.) It has waaaaay more sophisticated tools for terrain and structure editing than RCT3, though, which is what will keep me coming back.
I’m perplexed by certain things. Some are ultra-specific questions, like why certain scenery pieces automatically exit you out of Edit Building mode. Some are missing editing features I can’t believe they didn’t do - there’s no way to combine Blueprints.
For general, non-tinkering audience the big question is whether the premade Blueprints we’re seeing in the beta are all the ones we’re getting in the full game. If they are, then it won’t really be possibly to build a precisely themed park with the premade Blueprints, and you’ll either need to make custom buildings yourself or download them from the Steam Workshop. (Like Cities Skylines, there will certainly be tons of cool stuff uploaded there. The trick will be navigating through all of it to find what you want.)
The beta seems to be CPU-limited. My specs are i7 4770k, GTX 1070, 16GB. I downloaded this map from the workshop and couldn’t get beyond 16fps. Tried lowering resolution and changing graphic settings to “lowest”, no dice. All eight cores were nearly maxed when I checked Resource Monitor. Time to upgrade to that 24-core Xeon!
That particular map is probably a worse case scenario. It’s fairly dense. I downloaded a few other maps and averaged 45-54fps. Frontier released a small patch tonight though not sure if it helped with performance.
I would say the beta is far more optimized than the alpha, but there is room for improvement. My guess is the guest pathing algorithm is a huge part of the bottleneck. (I just tested this theory on the above map… emptying the park of guests increased FPS from 16 to 35… and then the beta crashed).
I’ve yet to jump into the beta (damn you Farming Simulator 2015 for being so soothing in troubling times!), but on a recent livestream they talked about there being 12 scenarios in the final release.
Really tempted to dive in on this one. Really need a bright/fun distraction in my life. This seems like just the ticket.
And I’ve got extra time in my new low-information bubble. It’s awesome!
What’s the deal with the scenarios (at least going by the single scenario apparently in the beta)? Do you start with an existing park you have to fix, or a clean slate with some defined goal?
Both. Scenarios proper are like RCT3 - you’re given a per-existing park and need to expand/change it based on objectives. (Right now there are only two scenarios in the beta, ten more are coming with the full release next week.)
There’s also Challenge Mode, which gives you a blank map - but you need to earn money. You’re also given challenge goals (build this kind of coaster, say) which gives you rewards if you complete them.
(Then there’s Sandbox mode, where you don’t have to worry about money and everything’s unlocked.)
Thanks. I had to jump though some hoops and ended up finding a new game key on the Frontier store where I purchased it (along with Alpha access), then go into Steam and “activate a new product”. Good to go now.
It seems like kind of a jerk move. it’s like their digging a hole in the PR department and decided to go deeper. I mean it’s RTW is already available in EA with pretty much nothing but negative reviews… which suggests maybe they should cook that a little longer.
The RCTW developers have a backup project they’re about to move into full production (one that looks pretty cool actually). I see RCTW colllapsing and I don’t doubt the developers do too. Not sure of Atari’s plans.
I guess you get what you pay for, first hiring a company super cheap that only made crappy ports of games nobody wanted in the first place and no expeirence making their own. That didn’t last long as the first press releases looked way worse than the last game RCT3.
Then they passed it onto another developer with no actual PC gaming titles under their belt, and only a couple crap Facebook titles (UFO Games). They don’t have a real website, but if you go to their Facebook page they’re still bragging about being brought on to fix and finish RCTW. Not sure how long it took Atari management again to realize they’d just hired a company that had never made a PC game in their lives for the second time and had no clue how to make a successor to RCT3.
Thus it was passed off to Nvizzio, who scrapped everything that had been done before and in an attempt to get the game going as fast as possible decided to build it in Unity with the focus on players doing most of the construction work for buildings, rides, to free up their time for other stuff. They did this by porting some Unity tools into the game proper I think?
I would like nothing more than to meet the bozos at Atari who thought sending their only decent franchise to a company that had no experience. And then firing them and finding a second company with even less experience than the first. Then finally going with an unproven company who told them they had the skills in Unity to make it happen, and then of course when it was supposedly done it was a botched nightmare and had to be changed to early access. There needs to be a longform article on this debacle complete with interviews of all parties. That would be a fascinating read.
RollerCoaster Tycoon World isn’t godawful. Really, the worst thing about it is the fact that the devs are using Unity and it’s obvious they’re not able/willing to really buckle it down for performance, jankiness, and bugs. If it came out in a vacuum it would be a solid C. The rides work, construction is okay, the management side of things is fine, and the interface is workable. Supposedly, the launch version will overhaul the interface and add a progression system to the campaign. We’ll see. Like any construction/tycoon game, a good player can make it look great.
Mainly, I think Unity is the albatross around its neck. Get a couple hundred people in the park and the game slows to a crawl. It’s never going to not be a buggy, janky, sloppy game. The foundation is just not that solid.
Planet Coaster is just a lot more polished and I think we’re all assuming the game will have a lot more ongoing support post-launch because Frontier is a good developer and this game is self-published. We all know Nezzio is going to cut and run as soon as the checks stop coming from Atari.
Spare a moment to think of Parkitect. An indy dev decides to fight the good fight and bring back a game genre the big developers had abandoned - only to have not one but two big devs decide to get back into the genre.
I snagged Planet Coaster today, because I am weak and fond of park management games. I may also end up with Parkitect at some point, because the latter claims to run on Linux and also has some really snazzy data visualization features.
I see it’s still in EA. I think there is room for three good games though, especially since they’re going to release after this month. I mean if the game is good I can’t imagine passing it up when it releases just because there are two other games… that just delays it a bit.
A second option with a much deeper management, financial simulator can greatly work in Parkitect’s favor if people feel unfulfilled by that part of Planet Coaster. I was always disappointed with RCT3’s lack of challenge. That being said I have no idea how deep Parkitect’s financial simulation and challenge is.
