"Since the festive month of December is soon upon us, we are preparing a special holiday update for you! This free content update will be like an early Christmas present for our beloved community. It's going to be filled with a variety of goodies...."
This is a quote from the Christmas update announcement that was linked in an earlier post.
If this doesn't sound like the company acts like it is doing us a favor by adding new rides, while completely ignoring every technical and design issue raised since release, I don't know what does. They're not fixing anything. or even promising to fix anything. Just what we need, a third ferris wheel. Seriously, do they really think this is something people want? We're trying to make theme parks here, not county fairs. Have you seen a ferris wheel in any Disney park, or Universal or Six Flags, never mind 3 different kinds.
I never said it was evil. I said it was typical of the kind of behavior I've come to expect by game companies. But to expect a company to miss the Christmas buying season because the game isn't completely finished is unrealistic. And of course, as I said, they had to release in order to compete with RCTW. After all, they don't want THEIR customers playing Atari's game while waiting for PC to be released, no matter how bad RCTW might be.
But if they want to give us a treat, how about letting us create our own filters in My Blueprints...or letting us build tracks on paths. Or letting paths cross over each other? Give us a linear transportation system like the skyway thing in RCT3 or at least a turnaround for transport rides so we don't have to circle the entire park perimeter. That, to me, would be a decent update. Make a pathing system that doesn't act like a drunk snake every time I want to connect two paths. Let us put down shops and facilities anywhere, including paths and get rid of the autopathing to shops. It's irritating and restricting. Yes, I know I can hit control to avoid it, but it would make more sense to hit control to create it and let the default be straight.
They may actually be trying to fix things, but this first update announcement doesn't give me a lot of confidence. Having played theme park builders since the original Bullfrog Theme Park game, I guess my expectations are higher than a lot of younger players. And having grown up in an era of DLC and free to play/pay to win games, to them it's business as usual. I'm sure that there are players here than never even played the earlier RCT games so they don't know what is missing in Planet Coaster.
But I do. For a theme park design game there are a few really glaring omissions. Here's just a couple: fences, flowers and flower beds. hedges (not counting the topiaries), more variation in lighting. Two street lamp designs (not counting the skull) is anemic. The inability to copy multiple selected scenery pieces (which we could do in alpha) without having to make it a blueprint. No tables or chairs for a restaurant or cafe. No indication that they will allow people to create and import their own 3d objects. This should have been allowed as early as the alpha, or at least by now. Much more variation in terrain painting. Being only able to paint areas from the terrain you start with is useless. We should have textures that copy the pathing textures to fill in areas which paths seem to miss. One real issue is the inability to rotate or change the orientation of gridded objects (except for the 90 degree movement). I mean, seriously, we can't make a diagonal wall? And I can't join two separate buildings into one. And the choice of which objects are griddable and which aren't seems to have no discernible pattern. One type of column is griddable, another type isn't. There are so many limitations that it can hardly be called a simulation.
The UI is a disaster. The dialogs for management are way too big and are mostly empty space which could be removed easily as one player already demonstrated in another thread a little while ago. They aren't moveable or resizable, which is ridiculous in any application these days. If you want to find a blueprint in My Blueprints, you have to type in the keyword which is not remembered if you close the window. It should at least default to your last search and keep a record of your last 10 searches like a browser does. I warned the developers way back in alpha that custom content management would become unwieldy if there were no user created filters. That is already happening. With thousands of blueprints and cc already on the workshop, it will only get worse. There should also be a favorites filter.
That all said, it is still a beautiful game graphically, and the animations and scenery that we do have is excellent. The coasters look very good as do the flat rides.
And I think the game has a lot of potential, but if they continue to add on content to placate the "gimme new stuff" crowd, the game's issue will never be dealt with. In the words of Yoda, "before add new stuff you do, fix the game first, you should."
