And yet they continue to release and sell DLCs having passed the ABC animals... Without taking into account that, in a hypothetical PZ2, the sales incentive could be in the new flying birds and aquatic animals that could constitute 70% of the DLCs leaving the rest to animals that the community still wants.
I don't want to delve too much into this discussion because frankly it has become a very black and white situation where I think there ought to be much more grey; but I do want to weigh in on this.
Making aquatic and flying birds be 70% of your DLCs is a very risky choice. Not only are there plenty of people who don't care for birds or aquatic animals; but on top of that, Frontier has already burned themselves on that. It's not as pointed out here as often; but one of the major criticisms PC2 got was that it leaned way too much on the waterpark side of things (the equivalent of birds and aquatics) instead of improving other areas of the game (as a separate critique from not having all the base game themes). I don't see them making that mistake twice, so I don't think that that's a route they're willing to take with their DLCs.
That being said, I also just don't think you can go for the same amount of DLCs with them being 70% fish and aquatics. People will go "clone" just as quickly as they did now, the moment there's more than one vulture you'll have a bunch of people saying it's an eagle clone. I'd personally want more DLCs which in turns means more development time which means more time for feedback on our side; but to me that's
just as valid as people wanting all the animals right away.
(Again, don't want to get dragged into the discussion whether either side is right; I understand both sides of the argument and there's things to be said for both)
My gut feeling for the PZ2 roster is that we'll get a large chunk of the main DLC animals (things like the jaguar, polar bear, a New World monkey or two, baboon), perhaps less direct clones (so maybe only the grizzly bear, not the HBB, and maybe we get the spurred tortoise in the base but not the Aldabra), but they'll still leave a few to resell alongside birds. In this way, for Frontier, it's a middle ground - they give us what they reasonably can in the base game without sacrificing quality, and make the DLC more attractive by giving us something they didn't in PZ1.
Yeah, for me the sequel has to be better first and foremost.
To me, that means that unlike last time, the base game roster should have ,proportionally to their popularity in zoos, enough animals per classic region so we can make decent zoos. We shouldn't start with another scenario where you can barely make a South American area, where there's basically only one Oceanian animal in the game, etc. In my opinion, 5 habitat animals for the commonly smaller sections in zoos vs 10 to 15 for the larger sections should at least be there to get started.
I personally then don't care
that much about whether a specific animal is in or not. If we have a better base game roster for South American animals for instance with things like coati, saki, capybara, giant anteater, macaws, etc. then I'm not going to be mad about the capuchin not making it in in the base game. Because then the sequel has a better starting point to me than the original had, and with all the potential other upgrades I'm going to be able to make a better zoo than I was able to do in the first game.
