This will probably be lengthy. Today's just going that way.
So recently having been pushed back into Planet Coaster by twitch followers I was surprised to discover how popular the game has still been for streaming. Now this is not me advertising myself, but just to iterate how viable the game still is and how it still has an audience and an appetite. I say this to reaffirm if you were in any doubt this is far from a dead game, its active as this forum shows and it has a passionate playerbase who approach it from many different povs.
PC is also a game which we shouldn't be in any doubt has achieve a colossal amount as a game essentially rebooting the theme park building concept and giving it some of the most amazing tools features and visuals of any park building game in recent memory.
With all that said, there are certainly plenty of bones to pick and achievements to celebrate. I will start with the contentious issues/things I want to see, and then talk about its positive achievements.
This will probably be even then a shorter overview than I would like to post, I will probably either later edit this, or post something with even more refreshed detail.
Planet Coaster was originally launched as THE park building game, and it certainly was that, yet now years later there are still multiple technical issues that seem so problematic they are more like bugs than just mechanics gone wrong. The issues with Vendors were finally addressed somewhat but many other small mechanical oddities remain. Meanwhile the games team itself seem to focus heavily on visual aesthetic updates to satisfy a youtube community whos sole focus is on building the most complex designs possible just for the sake of it. A quite curious step away from the park building format itself, you often have to wonder what is PC at this point? a park building game or just a park design tool. The comedy as well that many designs you see on youtube or social media contain so many items and complexities that if you were to actually put them in a decent sized park, the sheer volume of items would brick the framerate to an unplayable point.
DLC
DLC for Planet Coaster have been primarily about the aesthetic items that come with them, and less about rides or general park development. Now lets be clear, all of these packs have been in my opinion excellent in what they deliver. The adventure pack being one of my favourites it adds a lot of content to the game. As well as often adding in extra rides/shops and so on. However I think most people would agree at this point people want to see a genuinely meaty release of a DLC, a proper expansion and not just an add-on pack.
Its been discussed since the game released but yes - Waterparks. The Waterpark/Soaked pack for RCT3 was probably one of the very best, and its with good reason people still talk about it with regularity. Something along the lines of the Wild/Zoo DLC though would also be definitely welcomed. I can't imagine that a DLC pack with waterparks implemented could be anything other than a huge huge success so its bizarre there has been little to any mention of it from the Devs since release. It starts to feel like something that will honestly never happen, and if that's the case its not only a wasted opportunity but an absolute tragedy because PC deserves to have a big expansion at this point in time.
Mechanics
The PC game mechanics for the most park are very good. The game does a great job especially of creating building mechanics that are highly intuitive and functional allowing for easy but complex building. The ability to easily intersect object and rides is obviously one of its strongest points. However with these positives many smaller problematic mechanics that have been discussed nearly since release still persist. The games extremely harsh breakdown process for example, that happens seemingly way above anything that would be considered normal even with regular mechanics in attendance. Shop Vendors who seem to really struggle to enjoy their work and constantly quit, in stark contrast to Janitors and Security guards who seem to never have a bad day in their lives. The inclusion of a staff room certainly helped, except that the mechanic then of traveling too and from the staff room means that you are often forced to consider placement of vendor shops to be all in close proximity which ends up being restrictive.
Guest attraction to rides is another curious puzzle.
Guests will only pay for a ride based on its prestige, the higher it is the more you can charge we know this. And adjusting the rides sequence can also attract more people.
However I have observed that some rides placed in relative proximity and with even prestige and queue attractiveness as well as appealing to appropriate demographics seem to attract almost non-stop guests from inception to becoming classic. While another ride may struggle to ever have any guests attend it, where it struggles to break even for its entire life. Some rides like Zozo have an incredible ability to attract guests to an unbelievable degree, while others more arguably exciting barely attract any. Its a very strange disparity and maybe part of the challenge is to attract guests to those other rides but it does come off as just strange. Water Flumes are another insanely popular attraction. If you want to pull people into an area of your park that is struggling - just build a flume and you're good to go. They're usually more reliable than other rides and will make solid profit for their entire life until classic.
Ride Queue attractiveness is another weird one. Despite PC's focus on aesthetic flare throwing down a few trees and rocks is apparently enough to boost a ride to 100% queue in very short order. But if you try to design a ride queue area with other features, often despite having an absolutely epic queue area, you top out at 60-75%. Its a weird thing and obviously that's not what its all about, if you treat the game just as a statistical exercise you're missing the point. Still though, I often look at my queues and think what the heck... fire everywhere.. special effects... people should be falling over themselves to get on this ride. Instead they are going on the ride with a few rocks and generic trees that is a really basic thrill ride.
Its these strange disparities that leave you wondering are these things intentional or just bugs that were never addressed? They also to a degree break your immersion and enjoyment of the game, because often logic seems not to apply and you end up unintentionally meta-ing the game simply out of necessity. Which is a great shame.
Small Things Matter
The game could benefit greatly from some small additions. People were incredibly hyped over the inclusion of Picnic benches when the game implemented those - which strangely seem to be really 50-50 if guests use them at all or never. But Planet Coaster could seriously use more of these small things. Its the small elements that give you much greater sense of design and strategy when building your park than any number of aesthetic pack pieces.
Lets just list a few small tweaks that would give a lot to the game:
- Vending Machines - enabling you to make extra revenue and fill in the gaps your vendors can't cope with.
- Season Passes - allowing guests to pay a bigger sum for regular attendance based on your parks overall rating, this could be tweaked as your park becomes better.
- Ride Photos - another oddity, nearly mandatory for all RL theme parks but strangely absent from PC? Ride photos could obviously boost your income for popular rides.
- Guests don't leave Queues - A mechanical tweak that if guests needs are satisfied they don't leave queues during a breakdown. This would reduce disruption around a ride and ensure its financial losses around the over zealous amount of breakdowns would be more manageable.
- Parking fees - another more management based element, but you could decide if your park charged for parking or had free parking. This could effect peoples initial mood coming into the park, or provide you with a small amount of extra revenue.
- Buy Land - Currently you have your park and that's it. Within challenge mode you should start with a small area and then be able to buy land to add to your park to factor into your finances.
Modding
Its obviously the developers own decision but enabling modding would solve many of the small mechanical bugbears and also potentially open up an entire world of visual additions.
Again the decision not to do this is the devs own call, and you can read into that however you wish.
Seasonal
No not yet more aesthetics. Seasonal as in peak attendance by guests. As everyone knows you have peak periods usually based around weather and school holidays. These peak periods obviously would bring heavier amounts of guests to the park and you would need to ensure you were setup to be able to handle those additional people. Conversely during the low periods you might have to lay off staff and even close down some sections of your park. This would add a considerable degree of arguably positive or negative management depending on your preference, so seasonal guest attendance should be something you can toggle in the game options. However nothing about this concept should really break or alter the core mechanics of the game itself so its surprising again not to see this implemented for Challenge mode where its all about dealing with the stresses and finances of your park. Instead of a steady dribble of guests into your park you'd have to cope with sudden bursts of attendance.
Special day offers/random events
If you felt your park was running very well with booms of guests you could consider hosting special day events with reduced entry costs or extra marketing which would then see your park have bursts of guest numbers.
Random events could also be implemented with say guests suffering from food poisoning and you have to cope with the vomit wave as well as the bad publicity? maybe you can use an option whereby you pay over the normal odds for positive press to balance things out? You could also have staff strikes instead of them just quitting, or how about school trips that turn up unannounced with tons of kids in the park in big groups putting special stress on rides and services. I'm sure there are any number of other guest related situations that could be added to give more of a real management experience for Challenge parks.
The Aesthetics
There is no doubt that Planet Coaster owns the aesthetics. When it was coming out people couldn't believe that what they were seeing was actually going to be in game, it looked that good it just blew peoples minds, and that's still the case. Its not just the guests and general overall design style either, its things like the ground textures. The Rock texture is probably the best texture ability for surface painting I have seen in any game, and also the way in which you are able to blend two textures to overlap without them having some harsh or visually jarring blend is superb. Then you have the great amount of visual aesthetic objects and the building mechanics all of which are amazing. The game is second to none when it comes to designing and implementing your visuals. It is a shame that modded aesthetic items cannot be included, and similarly despite the DLC packs it feels like we should have had more packs that just boost the amount of generic items like trees rocks plants and path items. As well as maybe boosting some of the default areas as well like Western Fairytale and so on.
There's so much that could be added in terms of aesthetics it really is a how long is a piece of string situation.
So I will simply say PC does do amazing work with its visuals its clearly the strongest feature of the game.
Challenge
This is about custom challenge scenarios. Adding this in clearly gives a huge amount to the game and the player. I don't have a great deal to add here other than its a big positive.
Unfortunately its negative side is all the existing oddities around the game mechanics that could do with being just smoothed out a bit eg. Breakdown rates, tantrum vendors
Steam Workshop/Creativity
Another big positive is obviously people being able to create and share rides, and designs with others. However a negative is that people seem to focus heavily on building intricate convoluted builds featuring literally thousands of objects. While this is interesting in terms of peoples creativity and imagination, its not very practical when people want to build a ride costing $100K+ or featuring so many objects that trying to implement it into a park bricks peoples framerates.
There are some steam workshop builders and producer/creators for sure who do working on the smaller things like shops and environment builds, but they gseem less prevalent.
This is not to detract from peoples achievements in terms of creativity, clearly some of the designs take many many hours and are amazing works of art really. But that doesn't alter that they are often impractical in terms of their actual function in a park, and it further highlights the separation in the community between the sandbox builders and those who want to just build a park for management purposes with some creativity thrown in along the side. You end up with two creative builders the Hyper Builders who work on these massive projects and rides which are impressive but often impractical, and the more core Regular builders who design rides and elements to work within a standard and more realistic challenge park mode.
Conclusion - so far
Planet Coaster is no doubt an amazing game, I say that just to ensure this thread is read as not being needlessly critical.
It has totally reworked our thinking of what can be achieved and implemented within a Park Building game. I think before it came along you really would have been thinking - well it would be cool if they could do XYZ but it probably will never happen. Now we know that it can and has happened, the game has given us so much.
At the same time for all its achivements, it feels still a somewhat work in progress of a game. Multiple strange mechanic issues that on the face of it seem like they could be easily ironed out have never been addressed years after release. The DLC's while welcome have not added much other than some rides, and few mechanical tweaks and of course the all important aesthetic items for the Hyper Builders.
The biggest positive thing that PC could do at this point, is iron out some of the weird mechanical issues, put together a genuine Expansion not a DLC that expands beyond just building rides and scenery in a park, and then beyond that continues to implement small tweaks and mechanics that benefit your ability to make decisions as park manager, like seasonal guest attendence vending machincs and so on.
It would be a genuine tragedy if Planet Coaster only continued to implement DLC that are just really adding in content that for the most part already exists.
Its a good game right now, but with a little finesse could be a great game. Will this happen? Who can say at this point, we are far down the line all of these things take dev time and money and its anyones guess if Frontier think that its financially viable or something they even want to address. Either way I will still be playing the game, but hope our dreams are not lost in the æther.
- responses -
do you agree disagree? what should be the forward strategy at this point?
So recently having been pushed back into Planet Coaster by twitch followers I was surprised to discover how popular the game has still been for streaming. Now this is not me advertising myself, but just to iterate how viable the game still is and how it still has an audience and an appetite. I say this to reaffirm if you were in any doubt this is far from a dead game, its active as this forum shows and it has a passionate playerbase who approach it from many different povs.
PC is also a game which we shouldn't be in any doubt has achieve a colossal amount as a game essentially rebooting the theme park building concept and giving it some of the most amazing tools features and visuals of any park building game in recent memory.
With all that said, there are certainly plenty of bones to pick and achievements to celebrate. I will start with the contentious issues/things I want to see, and then talk about its positive achievements.
This will probably be even then a shorter overview than I would like to post, I will probably either later edit this, or post something with even more refreshed detail.
Planet Coaster was originally launched as THE park building game, and it certainly was that, yet now years later there are still multiple technical issues that seem so problematic they are more like bugs than just mechanics gone wrong. The issues with Vendors were finally addressed somewhat but many other small mechanical oddities remain. Meanwhile the games team itself seem to focus heavily on visual aesthetic updates to satisfy a youtube community whos sole focus is on building the most complex designs possible just for the sake of it. A quite curious step away from the park building format itself, you often have to wonder what is PC at this point? a park building game or just a park design tool. The comedy as well that many designs you see on youtube or social media contain so many items and complexities that if you were to actually put them in a decent sized park, the sheer volume of items would brick the framerate to an unplayable point.
DLC
DLC for Planet Coaster have been primarily about the aesthetic items that come with them, and less about rides or general park development. Now lets be clear, all of these packs have been in my opinion excellent in what they deliver. The adventure pack being one of my favourites it adds a lot of content to the game. As well as often adding in extra rides/shops and so on. However I think most people would agree at this point people want to see a genuinely meaty release of a DLC, a proper expansion and not just an add-on pack.
Its been discussed since the game released but yes - Waterparks. The Waterpark/Soaked pack for RCT3 was probably one of the very best, and its with good reason people still talk about it with regularity. Something along the lines of the Wild/Zoo DLC though would also be definitely welcomed. I can't imagine that a DLC pack with waterparks implemented could be anything other than a huge huge success so its bizarre there has been little to any mention of it from the Devs since release. It starts to feel like something that will honestly never happen, and if that's the case its not only a wasted opportunity but an absolute tragedy because PC deserves to have a big expansion at this point in time.
Mechanics
The PC game mechanics for the most park are very good. The game does a great job especially of creating building mechanics that are highly intuitive and functional allowing for easy but complex building. The ability to easily intersect object and rides is obviously one of its strongest points. However with these positives many smaller problematic mechanics that have been discussed nearly since release still persist. The games extremely harsh breakdown process for example, that happens seemingly way above anything that would be considered normal even with regular mechanics in attendance. Shop Vendors who seem to really struggle to enjoy their work and constantly quit, in stark contrast to Janitors and Security guards who seem to never have a bad day in their lives. The inclusion of a staff room certainly helped, except that the mechanic then of traveling too and from the staff room means that you are often forced to consider placement of vendor shops to be all in close proximity which ends up being restrictive.
Guest attraction to rides is another curious puzzle.
Guests will only pay for a ride based on its prestige, the higher it is the more you can charge we know this. And adjusting the rides sequence can also attract more people.
However I have observed that some rides placed in relative proximity and with even prestige and queue attractiveness as well as appealing to appropriate demographics seem to attract almost non-stop guests from inception to becoming classic. While another ride may struggle to ever have any guests attend it, where it struggles to break even for its entire life. Some rides like Zozo have an incredible ability to attract guests to an unbelievable degree, while others more arguably exciting barely attract any. Its a very strange disparity and maybe part of the challenge is to attract guests to those other rides but it does come off as just strange. Water Flumes are another insanely popular attraction. If you want to pull people into an area of your park that is struggling - just build a flume and you're good to go. They're usually more reliable than other rides and will make solid profit for their entire life until classic.
Ride Queue attractiveness is another weird one. Despite PC's focus on aesthetic flare throwing down a few trees and rocks is apparently enough to boost a ride to 100% queue in very short order. But if you try to design a ride queue area with other features, often despite having an absolutely epic queue area, you top out at 60-75%. Its a weird thing and obviously that's not what its all about, if you treat the game just as a statistical exercise you're missing the point. Still though, I often look at my queues and think what the heck... fire everywhere.. special effects... people should be falling over themselves to get on this ride. Instead they are going on the ride with a few rocks and generic trees that is a really basic thrill ride.
Its these strange disparities that leave you wondering are these things intentional or just bugs that were never addressed? They also to a degree break your immersion and enjoyment of the game, because often logic seems not to apply and you end up unintentionally meta-ing the game simply out of necessity. Which is a great shame.
Small Things Matter
The game could benefit greatly from some small additions. People were incredibly hyped over the inclusion of Picnic benches when the game implemented those - which strangely seem to be really 50-50 if guests use them at all or never. But Planet Coaster could seriously use more of these small things. Its the small elements that give you much greater sense of design and strategy when building your park than any number of aesthetic pack pieces.
Lets just list a few small tweaks that would give a lot to the game:
- Vending Machines - enabling you to make extra revenue and fill in the gaps your vendors can't cope with.
- Season Passes - allowing guests to pay a bigger sum for regular attendance based on your parks overall rating, this could be tweaked as your park becomes better.
- Ride Photos - another oddity, nearly mandatory for all RL theme parks but strangely absent from PC? Ride photos could obviously boost your income for popular rides.
- Guests don't leave Queues - A mechanical tweak that if guests needs are satisfied they don't leave queues during a breakdown. This would reduce disruption around a ride and ensure its financial losses around the over zealous amount of breakdowns would be more manageable.
- Parking fees - another more management based element, but you could decide if your park charged for parking or had free parking. This could effect peoples initial mood coming into the park, or provide you with a small amount of extra revenue.
- Buy Land - Currently you have your park and that's it. Within challenge mode you should start with a small area and then be able to buy land to add to your park to factor into your finances.
Modding
Its obviously the developers own decision but enabling modding would solve many of the small mechanical bugbears and also potentially open up an entire world of visual additions.
Again the decision not to do this is the devs own call, and you can read into that however you wish.
Seasonal
No not yet more aesthetics. Seasonal as in peak attendance by guests. As everyone knows you have peak periods usually based around weather and school holidays. These peak periods obviously would bring heavier amounts of guests to the park and you would need to ensure you were setup to be able to handle those additional people. Conversely during the low periods you might have to lay off staff and even close down some sections of your park. This would add a considerable degree of arguably positive or negative management depending on your preference, so seasonal guest attendance should be something you can toggle in the game options. However nothing about this concept should really break or alter the core mechanics of the game itself so its surprising again not to see this implemented for Challenge mode where its all about dealing with the stresses and finances of your park. Instead of a steady dribble of guests into your park you'd have to cope with sudden bursts of attendance.
Special day offers/random events
If you felt your park was running very well with booms of guests you could consider hosting special day events with reduced entry costs or extra marketing which would then see your park have bursts of guest numbers.
Random events could also be implemented with say guests suffering from food poisoning and you have to cope with the vomit wave as well as the bad publicity? maybe you can use an option whereby you pay over the normal odds for positive press to balance things out? You could also have staff strikes instead of them just quitting, or how about school trips that turn up unannounced with tons of kids in the park in big groups putting special stress on rides and services. I'm sure there are any number of other guest related situations that could be added to give more of a real management experience for Challenge parks.
The Aesthetics
There is no doubt that Planet Coaster owns the aesthetics. When it was coming out people couldn't believe that what they were seeing was actually going to be in game, it looked that good it just blew peoples minds, and that's still the case. Its not just the guests and general overall design style either, its things like the ground textures. The Rock texture is probably the best texture ability for surface painting I have seen in any game, and also the way in which you are able to blend two textures to overlap without them having some harsh or visually jarring blend is superb. Then you have the great amount of visual aesthetic objects and the building mechanics all of which are amazing. The game is second to none when it comes to designing and implementing your visuals. It is a shame that modded aesthetic items cannot be included, and similarly despite the DLC packs it feels like we should have had more packs that just boost the amount of generic items like trees rocks plants and path items. As well as maybe boosting some of the default areas as well like Western Fairytale and so on.
There's so much that could be added in terms of aesthetics it really is a how long is a piece of string situation.
So I will simply say PC does do amazing work with its visuals its clearly the strongest feature of the game.
Challenge
This is about custom challenge scenarios. Adding this in clearly gives a huge amount to the game and the player. I don't have a great deal to add here other than its a big positive.
Unfortunately its negative side is all the existing oddities around the game mechanics that could do with being just smoothed out a bit eg. Breakdown rates, tantrum vendors
Steam Workshop/Creativity
Another big positive is obviously people being able to create and share rides, and designs with others. However a negative is that people seem to focus heavily on building intricate convoluted builds featuring literally thousands of objects. While this is interesting in terms of peoples creativity and imagination, its not very practical when people want to build a ride costing $100K+ or featuring so many objects that trying to implement it into a park bricks peoples framerates.
There are some steam workshop builders and producer/creators for sure who do working on the smaller things like shops and environment builds, but they gseem less prevalent.
This is not to detract from peoples achievements in terms of creativity, clearly some of the designs take many many hours and are amazing works of art really. But that doesn't alter that they are often impractical in terms of their actual function in a park, and it further highlights the separation in the community between the sandbox builders and those who want to just build a park for management purposes with some creativity thrown in along the side. You end up with two creative builders the Hyper Builders who work on these massive projects and rides which are impressive but often impractical, and the more core Regular builders who design rides and elements to work within a standard and more realistic challenge park mode.
Conclusion - so far
Planet Coaster is no doubt an amazing game, I say that just to ensure this thread is read as not being needlessly critical.
It has totally reworked our thinking of what can be achieved and implemented within a Park Building game. I think before it came along you really would have been thinking - well it would be cool if they could do XYZ but it probably will never happen. Now we know that it can and has happened, the game has given us so much.
At the same time for all its achivements, it feels still a somewhat work in progress of a game. Multiple strange mechanic issues that on the face of it seem like they could be easily ironed out have never been addressed years after release. The DLC's while welcome have not added much other than some rides, and few mechanical tweaks and of course the all important aesthetic items for the Hyper Builders.
The biggest positive thing that PC could do at this point, is iron out some of the weird mechanical issues, put together a genuine Expansion not a DLC that expands beyond just building rides and scenery in a park, and then beyond that continues to implement small tweaks and mechanics that benefit your ability to make decisions as park manager, like seasonal guest attendence vending machincs and so on.
It would be a genuine tragedy if Planet Coaster only continued to implement DLC that are just really adding in content that for the most part already exists.
Its a good game right now, but with a little finesse could be a great game. Will this happen? Who can say at this point, we are far down the line all of these things take dev time and money and its anyones guess if Frontier think that its financially viable or something they even want to address. Either way I will still be playing the game, but hope our dreams are not lost in the æther.
- responses -
do you agree disagree? what should be the forward strategy at this point?
Last edited:
