Beta crashes for me when I try to use the Franchise mode. I did manage to finish the first Scenario (looks like there’s only one scenario in the beta) which took only a few hours. The in-game tutorial is decent. The UI and tools seem reasonably intuitive, though maybe that’s from my experience playing Planet Coaster.
Frontier already released a patch today… but it seemed to make the game crash even more!
I’ll dive back in once a new patch is out. Overall I really like what I see so far.
Finally got it to run and I have mixed feelings about this. First and foremost I abhor the Planet Coaster/Zoo interface. I think it’s abysmal and I have to spend way too much time searching for things.
I wish they’d used the Jurassic World Evolution interface and people style. The performance for the latter is stellar, and for Planet Zoo it is already janky - ie. lots of hitching and drops of fps. And that’s just on their first (and I’m guessing), smallest map.
I hope I’m wrong, but it’s once again looking like there is going to be no balance as far as the finances are concerned which means this is being directed at people who want to be CAD and interior decorators, vs. than those that want a strategy game.
As @Tim_N mentioned, animal graphics are excellent, but the design tools are still a challenge. Jurassic World Evolution’s tools were so fantastic I can’t believe they didn’t copy a bunch of them for this game. In case anyone missed it, these are made by same company and use their same internal development engine - COBRA.
To me - the interface is a jumbled mess. I’m sure those who deal with Photoshop would disagree LOL.
You don’t think animal management helps alot in that regard? Noone should buy this game for its finance or staff management features, much like noone bought zoo tycoon 2 for those things.
The trouble with the beta is that the balance is off at the moment. Animals are giving birth in zoos too often and far too easily. Time goes by a bit too quick. Yet, all of the criticisms I have of the beta are things that can be fixed, even in a month of dev time. For me at least, the foundations and systems are all there for this to be a great modern zoo game.
I don’t have much of a problem with the interface but agree it can be improved. My biggest wish with the interface is just to improve the animal market responsiveness. Making cash animals not rely on server communication would be a good improvement.
Its clear that they are using this beta to genuinely test their systems. They seem to be very responsive to all the feedback, even in the first day and patch (they slowed down births), so that makes me pretty confident.
What would be perfect is if they gave us simple difficulty options, or start parameters. You would have default game, then a tougher option for the game where people carry less money and maintenance costs are higher. I could have fixed Planet Coaster by re-balancing the financial side of the game if Frontier had just given us a couple mod tools (or options) to work with.
We’ll see how it plays outs, but I’m guessing they just want to push creators again and the rest of us are just out there. This is why I liked the original RCT games. They had a strong economic engine for the time which meant if you were bad at decorating you still had the rest of the game to satisfy you.
I agree with everything you wrote, but when you say:
I think that’s the strength of this game relative to the coaster tycoons: you have animal management. So even if you’re bad at design and think the financial aspects are too easy, there’s always the animals. That’s a big draw for me, I can see why it would vary from person to person though.
Anyway, the day after they announced the game I wrote a post on their forum begging for difficulty options. Unfortunately, noone seemed to agree enough to reply, and I have not heard anyone mention it since then.
PS - In the end, you can’t make a game for everyone. I have seen reddit threads in the last day saying there is too much animal management and that it’s hard to design cool zoos when you have to actually pay attention to the animals at times. I have also seen multiple threads saying it is impossible to turn a profit in franchise mode and that the finance side is too difficult.
If you can find the post I will respond!
BTW, I really do hope the animal management will be enough for me too. I just don’t have the patience nor talent to design all the stuff Frontier wants us to make to populate their games. I ended up enjoying JWE way more than I ever thought I would. Much more than Planet Coaster ironically.
We’ll see how this goes. I have very high hopes, so we’ll see how it pans out with the on-line component. I hope it’s well fleshed out and deep vs. a hackneyed one trick pony (the on-line animal trading).
Verifying game files in Steam seems to have fixed my crashes, fyi. I can get into career mode now, yay.
FYI, in case this was a dealbreaker for anyone, Frontier have decided from all the feedback to add a mode to the final game that is an offline Franchise mode:
I forgot to mention. I had actually made my own post about this, just a few hours before you posted this response. If you want to add you voice, please do so. I’d be happy to bump your thread too, but I don’t know your username there.
I’ve been watching some youtube videos of the Beta and that’s moved the title onto my radar from nowhere. So that’s good.
The downside is that it seems a number of streamers are spending an inordinate amount of time trying to place paths and/or pools of water. Laying things out (especially if you want to keep everything on a grid) seems pretty touchy. And when you include elevation changes… look out!
The animals to seem to be especially well done, though (no surprise there), and it seems like it’ll be a chill sort of game you fire up to have some low-stress fun.
Ironically, those were fabulously easy to do in JWE. Why they would dump something that worked so well makes no sense.
I wonder how old a build the Beta is featuring - if that build was current a week ago I’d be worried. But I bet the build is at two to three months old, since it takes a bit of time to get all the ducks in a row to have a public beta.
I will be eagerly watching when the game releases to see what state it’s in but I don’t think it’s a day one purchase for me.
Sadly I’m pretty it’s current. The only missing data is content. They’ve released 3 giant 4+ Gig patches since it was released to address concerns. You would not be furiously updating an old build.
Interesting. If that’s a current build I will definitely wait to see if there are still pathfinding issues when the game launches.
Heads up people!
This game is supposed to release on Nov 5, which is like… NEXT WEEK!
I really enjoyed watching some streams of the beta so I suspect I will be buying this for a low stress game experience.
Hmm. Nov 5th.
This or the PC release of RDR2?
Hmm.
So is there actual meat in this game now or more shinies than anything else?
Not that I saw during the preview period.
TUESDAY!
Is there a game play video for this game? Everyone I looked at on YouTube just seems to be people looking at the different animals.