Crushingly disappointing (though totally expected) if true. I really want a good Zoo Tycoon game, but there’s got to be some game in there. I was really hoping franchise mode would have some meat.
There are roughly 8 billion videos of people playing the beta, which was last month for those who ordered the deluxe edition.
Franchise mode from DeLadysigner
Lion Enclosure from TagBackTV
Here’s a guy who did floating islands (Avatar-like) for his lemurs.
And roughly 7.9 billion of those spend first 5 minutes just scrolling around looking at animals and telling me how pretty the game is. :-)
But thanks, I will take a look at those.
Yeah but an 1:20 minutes into the videos you hear someone say something like let’s see how much money we’re making… haha, none, and then they’re back to painting again. I mean it looks great and the building reminds me of Planet Coaster like right up to the neat staircases that hopefully they won’t get stuck on randomly like coaster. But hey no worries, he put in the bathrooms and now they’re paying. and another couple of hours to create toilets again… heh.
I’ll let someone else keep toying with this one.
oh man, that warthog one has the same freaking pathing bugs coaster did.
Hmm, that one seems halfway encouraging to me.There’s some oogling but there also seems to be some genuine budget concern and some meaningful animal management at the beginning. I don’t understand why the player seems to have control over the weather, though. Is that something that can be turned off?
Well, since one of the big draws is the animals, I don’t think you can completely fault people for saying “let’s build an enclosure for the lemurs/bears/turtles and see how it goes.” But unless you just play for an hour or so, you’ve eventually got to make a profit.
The beta was very short so it’s no surprise many people were focusing on just making a simpler zoo and having a bit of fun building. If you want to wait for the release to see how much challenge there is, that’s perfectly fine. And if you don’t want a fairly simple zoo management that lets you run rampant with building then maybe this isn’t the game for you.
I dunno what people think about Sips (he’s definitely an acquired taste) but he did a number of videos that were of him creating and running a zoo. He played a ton of Planet Coaster so he doesn’t have much trouble with the building tools (I think they are mostly identical tools). So if you scan through his videos you’ll find some interesting techniques. If you look around you can probably find them.
Or you can wait a couple of days an see the inevitable flood of Planet Zoo videos. That’ll work too!
I believe you can set the time of day and/or weather to your liking so you can see and build the zoo at your desired time. I do not know if the weather plays a part in the zoo simulation…
She was talking about needing heaters and whatnot for some animals when it was snowing in the stream.
I was bitterly disappointed with the beta, but I’m getting this anyways because I like animals. Sucks I’m such a sucker.
Bitterly disappointed sounds pretty extreme… What was disappointing about the beta? And are the items that disappointed you likely to be resolved for the release?
I hate the design tools. They’re finicky and hard to work with. What’s weird is they fixed a lot of design issues in Jurassic World Evolution, but didn’t bother utilizing them for this game (same game engine). It’s way too much Planet Coaster, but swapped in animals with the animal sharing as a hook. Game performance is also an issue just like it was in Planet Coaster. Once again, something that was fixed in JWE. Furthermore the graphics in JWE blow away anything done in the Planet series.
I hope the pieces I didn’t get to play with in the beta make the shortcomings easy to overlook. We’ll see.
I never played JWE, but I read that there was much less freedom in what you could design? If true, that would explain why it was easier to manipulate.
I enjoyed the beta, and the problems I had with it (online only for franchise mode, birth rates too high, bugs, learning curve) should hopefully be all resolved for the launch so I am pumped.
Very true. It’s not a CAD program like the Planet series. But in the case of Planet Zoo I’m not sure that would have been bad. JWE is as good looking as the actual movies. It’s amazing.
Mostly though, the game is just pleasingly, old-fashionedly challenging , in a way that belies its cutesy exterior. Take out too many loans, and you will be properly monstered by the interest payments. Expand too quickly, or give your animals everything they want straight away, and you will hemorrhage cash. Researching the enrichment bits you’ll need to make animals happier and make more complex enclosures costs vet time, and vets – as cat owners will know – will rinse you .
I want so badly to believe that, he goes on about this aspect for awhile, but it’d be a lot more convincing if the first half the the review weren’t a rapturous soliloquy on what a great CAD program it is (thanks for that construction @jpinard, it’s spot on).
Stuff like this drives me nuts.
I’ve been getting notifications for a while now that my bear’s habitat is a disease risk because it’s not clean, but repeatedly sending one of my zookeepers over to vacuum up enormous bear turds hasn’t made the notification go away. After several frustrating minutes I finally make a guess that the issue might be the small river running through the back of the bear’s habitat—even though the water looks fine (‘Water View’ mode doesn’t show any alarming red danger zones). I install a water purifier and the disease risk notification vanishes, but Planet Zoo didn’t make it clear that the water was the problem, and it should have.
It’s so nice to see a game about animals again, and to be getting great reviews from almost everywhere. Steam reviews are sitting at 88% positive at the moment, which is a feat considering steam’s hyper-critical userbase. I remember for Jurassic Park it started very positive but gradually went down, but I don’t think that will be the case here as many of the reviewers had alot of hours from the beta test.
Haven’t been able to play myself yet, will dive in soon.
Fixed. Was backwards. CTD’ing quite a bit.
Can someone send me a new PC please so I can play this…thanks in advance.