Yeah, now that we're in July, I think June 2024 will go down as the quietest month in the history of the game.
A grand total of 4 posts on their social media, the forums grasping for topics to discuss, and a minute and half discussion on the live stream (also am I the one with thought the host seemed kind of idk "annoyed" to talk about PZ?)
It's certainly a bizarre time. We know another pack is coming, but still I've never seen an transition period between DLCs this quiet, tbh I almost forgot about the game lol
I mean, it's certainly calmer than things were in summer 2020 when there was that massive gap between the South America and Australia packs. Haha.
I'm just
really glad they told us there was another pack coming during that one livestream. Because without
that the temperature and speculation in these threads would be
very different... My money is still on seeing a bit of a ramp-up in general from Frontier in ~2 weeks for the new game, followed by a SteamDB update for Planet Zoo shortly thereafter and a subtle tease during the next livestream. So hopefully the silence is ending soon!
TBH I thought the middle ground they reached was pretty good, sacrificing one single exhibit animal is worth it for the quality of props we got.
I finally finished my “entrance” (it’s probably the most effort I put in one, but I still have an issue with how my builds look) and decided I want the barnyard animals to be the first animals of my zoo. The props + animals got me back into building habitats again. It took me 2 ish hours to make a combined barn and highland cow habitat, and I like how it turned out! I tried to do what I learned in my Education in Zoos thread, and make the place seem more “real”. I will try to get screenshots as I am actually happy how it turned out. (But man, I really wish the game had some WTE birds. A nice barn owl would have been ABSOLUTELY PERFECT)
So while animal variety can help, those props absolutely made the pack for me.
The props were pretty okay. But man, I honestly think the lack of flexicolor options for the bulk of the pieces
really holds that pack back. Even the picket fence pieces we got only had one channel! So you can re-color them but they're always going to look rustic and worn with no option to make them look "new." Same with the other wooden fence pieces, the barrels, etc. That's maybe the sacrifice they had to make but I actually think the pack on the whole would be received better if they had made more of the pieces flexi. They're still useful but making some of those pieces flexicolor would have made it 200% more useful and made the response to the pieces less tempered.
All that said, I actually think this pack
really inspired a lot more people than usual to build specifically for the pack (and in a different way) like you just outlined. Much more so than, say, Eurasia, ever had a hope of doing.
Not to mention that there really isnt a fitting unless you got into exhibit mammals and birds.
There is stuff like bearded dragons and such who you could consider domestics, but those arent barnyard animals at all
Oh, for sure! There's quite a few animals that they could have squeaked in one way or another. But most wouldn't fit the barnyard theme. The only two possible options I could think of would be rabbits and/or a barn owl. Rabbits as exhibit animals would be weird and we all know the deal with the barn owl so... Yeah. No exhibit makes sense for that pack!
