Now that the beta is over, can Frontier please acknowledge the time issue?

Aneyh16

Aneyh16
Before I start, I just want to say I thoroughly enjoyed the beta and can't wait for the full release. Although I will only discuss negatives here, the positives outweighed them by a large margin for me.

So Frontier has been extremely communicative during the beta. Not only by putting out updates, but also by telling us what they are working on and even adding a new mode after a lot of feedback. However one of the biggest issues for me, and I think a lot of other people as well, has been how time moves way, way too fast. Yet this issue hasn't been acknowledged once since the release of the beta.

Time moving so fast comes with a lot of issues.

First of all, you can't bond with your animals. The only animals I really bonded with were my tortoise and elephant because they live for so long. All other animals die, and are born, way too quickly too feel any sort of connection with them. This also means all the uniqueness each animal has been mostly overlooked by me.

Secondly, breeding. One of the most patched aspects during the beta has been breeding. It started off with way too much, and with the last patch it happened so little your animals could die before having any babies. One of the worst decisions in my opinion was reducing litter sizes. Admittedly some were ridiculous, but a gharial having only one offspring completely takes away realism for me. I think if time is slowed down, a lot births would be easier to handle and animals would not die too quickly without having many offspring. With realistic litter sizes and time slowed down, I think all births would be more impactful as they wouldn't happen as often but would be a big deal when they do.

Lastly, management. Management has been greatly improved and franchise mode could be a real challenge at times. But because of the incredibly fast passage of time most of it is more tedious than it is gratifying. Water and power stations breaking down constantly, fences losing durability so quickly your mechanics don't have the time to do research or fix the broken down facilities, again so many births at the beginning making it very stressful to keep everything in check, inspectors and protestors coming way quicker than you can prepare for, etc.

In conclusion, the game is amazing. But time moving so fast just feels like I'm missing out on a lot of enjoyment I could have. Sometimes I just want to enjoy my zoo, look at the animals and relax. But you can't at the moment, no matter how well you manage everything. I couldn't at least. Not to mention the bonding with animals which I was really looking forward to.

I'd really like to hear your opinions on this matter as maybe I am more alone on this than I thought.
And thanks for reading the long post! I tried to keep it as short as possible :p
 

bamber

B
I am the one that feels alone in the last few days

I have tried for the more long living animals -you want birth to be impactful by elephant need to be 15 YEARS old to produce and will only produce every
9 Years if I get everything perfect ive been running the game on fast mode and still found it too slow

Meanwhile I am on the Great Great Grandparents of my antelope you have to balance for people want elephants so seem to want planet ostrich and planet antelope I want planet elephant and I would prefer to do that in less that a football season please
 

breezerHOG

breezerHOG
IMO 1 month should = 20 minutes, and one year should be about 3 hours

Guests should also leave the park at the end of the year, when the calendar skips over the winter months

forums.frontier.co.uk

Lets discuss the Length of Time per Year ..and.. how long Guests will stay in Parks

How many real-life hours would be acceptable for 1 in-game year without being too long or too short? 2 hours? 5? how about 10? I think we can all agree anything over 12 is too much! Planco Time = 8 Months 31 Days, Year X At the end of October 31st, the calendar skips to March 1st without...
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk
 

bamber

B
breezerHOG said:
IMO 1 month should = 20 minutes, and one year should be about 3 hours

Guests should also leave the park at the end of the year, when the calendar skips over the winter months

forums.frontier.co.uk

Lets discuss the Length of Time per Year ..and.. how long Guests will stay in Parks

How many real-life hours would be acceptable for 1 in-game year without being too long or too short? 2 hours? 5? how about 10? I think we can all agree anything over 12 is too much! Planco Time = 8 Months 31 Days, Year X At the end of October 31st, the calendar skips to March 1st without...
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk
Click to expand...


`1 Yr = 3 hours of game play ?

Welcome to planet antelope - 45 hours to get an elephant to maturity - over 30hrs to get siblings that's game play 70Hrs would take me over two months to acheive

Yes it should be hard to get an elephant but it should take that long serioiusly after last weekend the FAST game isn't fast enough
 

Voids Light

Voids Light
bamber said:
I am the one that feels alone in the last few days

I have tried for the more long living animals -you want birth to be impactful by elephant need to be 15 YEARS old to produce and will only produce every
9 Years if I get everything perfect ive been running the game on fast mode and still found it too slow

Meanwhile I am on the Great Great Grandparents of my antelope you have to balance for people want elephants so seem to want planet ostrich and planet antelope I want planet elephant and I would prefer to do that in less that a football season please
Click to expand...

Heres the thing though, its not like you'll actually be waiting 9 real life months for the elephants to have offspring. You'll be waiting for about more than 30 minutes though. While this does suck, I rather have it to where time progresses slowly, so that I don't have to deal with dying animals every few seconds while I'm trying to build something. The time passing is so bad, that youtubers have to keep their games paused, since they have really big zoos, and all the animals keep dying or breeding too much.
 

Silhouette

S
Voids Light said:
Heres the thing though, its not like you'll actually be waiting 9 real life months for the elephants to have offspring. You'll be waiting for about more than 30 minutes though. While this does suck, I rather have it to where time progresses slowly, so that I don't have to deal with dying animals every few seconds while I'm trying to build something. The time passing is so bad, that youtubers have to keep their games paused, since they have really big zoos, and all the animals keep dying or breeding too much.
Click to expand...

Going along with what Voids Light said, people are asking for the base time to be adjusted to be slower. People that want to age their animals faster still have the ability to quicken time.

1year for 3hrs of gameplay would mean that each day is roughly 30sec (I just happened to be doing this calculation this morning so that's why I know this xD). Personally that's too slow for me, it's about what ZT2 was and I was surprised how slow the game felt replaying it again after PZ.

But I digress. Let's say for argument's sake, that's what we go for.

Double speed would be about 20sec per day, so 2hrs for 1year.

Triple speed would be about 10sec per day, so 1hr for 1year.

Those calculations aren't totally unreasonable to me. Bear in mind too that elephant births in real life are special because of how long it takes everything to happen. I don't mind feeling that same eagerness and wait in game
 

breezerHOG

breezerHOG
bamber said:
1 Yr = 3 hours of game play ?
Click to expand...

Im basing it off Planet Coaster (which you can see I went into more details in the link I posted)

1 year in Planco is just under 2hours, 1 month is about 14-15minutes and that is pretty short IMO, especially for a game thats about raising live animals

Planco also allows players to set the # of hours in a single day/month, which can extend or shorten the time a year takes

In Planco you can choose to set your park hours to only be open 1 hour per day/month which drastically shortens the length of 1 year compared to somebody who keeps their park open for 24hours a day/month

Dont forget theres only 8 months in a year with these games, and one month = 1 night/day cycle

If you ever use the fastforward feature, its very easy to achieve a park thats 50+ years old, and IMO its very unrealistic when guests live in a park for 10+ years (which happens often in Planco) thats why I would like to see guests leave at the end of each year
 
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NL_Mutso

NL_Mutso
Firstly, do we need another time-related topic? Pretty sure Frontier seen a lot of topics about it.

Personally I didn't have an issue with it, at first.. It became a problem when they adjusted breeding => basically forcing you to use FFW if you want to see any births etc. I don't feel the need to connect to the in-game animals, but everybody plays his/hers game differently.. Which is great !!

I think the breeding mechanic, notifications and time, are heavily connected. I feel Frontier acted too fast on the first 'complaints' of the amount of offspring. They quickly changed breeding (tweaked it twice) and took away the balance. Getting proper notifications when they were born/matured or died, was also of an issue. When you FFW you miss out on stuff or have too many injured/wounded animals.

The people who 'complained' about it, just needed to learn how to use the speed-buttons in this game.. I switched between speeds all the time...
 

Voids Light

Voids Light
NL_Mutso said:
Firstly, do we need another time-related topic? Pretty sure Frontier seen a lot of topics about it.

Personally I didn't have an issue with it, at first.. It became a problem when they adjusted breeding => basically forcing you to use FFW if you want to see any births etc. I don't feel the need to connect to the in-game animals, but everybody plays his/hers game differently.. Which is great !!

I think the breeding mechanic, notifications and time, are heavily connected. I feel Frontier acted too fast on the first 'complaints' of the amount of offspring. They quickly changed breeding (tweaked it twice) and took away the balance. Getting proper notifications when they were born/matured or died, was also of an issue. When you FFW you miss out on stuff or have too many injured/wounded animals.

The people who 'complained' about it, just needed to learn how to use the speed-buttons in this game.. I switched between speeds all the time...
Click to expand...

I just think the game just goes by too fast. Its not a great sign when a whole year passes by in around an hour.
 

Silhouette

S
NL_Mutso said:
Firstly, do we need another time-related topic? Pretty sure Frontier seen a lot of topics about it.

Personally I didn't have an issue with it, at first.. It became a problem when they adjusted breeding => basically forcing you to use FFW if you want to see any births etc. I don't feel the need to connect to the in-game animals, but everybody plays his/hers game differently.. Which is great !!

I think the breeding mechanic, notifications and time, are heavily connected. I feel Frontier acted too fast on the first 'complaints' of the amount of offspring. They quickly changed breeding (tweaked it twice) and took away the balance. Getting proper notifications when they were born/matured or died, was also of an issue. When you FFW you miss out on stuff or have too many injured/wounded animals.

The people who 'complained' about it, just needed to learn how to use the speed-buttons in this game.. I switched between speeds all the time...
Click to expand...

You can't really "learn how to use the speed buttons" when the slowest speed is too fast. Forces you to spend most of your time in pause.
 

NL_Mutso

NL_Mutso
Silhouette said:
You can't really "learn how to use the speed buttons" when the slowest speed is too fast. Forces you to spend most of your time in pause.
Click to expand...
We disagree on that, that's fine.. I don't think the normal speed is too fast, so I experience the game different than other people. Never felt forced spending my time in pause..
Only used when I had too much notifications from breaking down stuff or animals not doing that well. I only had some problems with the highest setting but when breeding was changed, that became less of an issue. Didn't like waiting 12 in-game years for 1 lion offspring and losing 2 lionesses in the process without any offspring (with good fertility)

So from my POV it's just learning to control the in-game speed, from your POV it's too fast.
 

Jeminyne

Jeminyne
bamber said:
I am the one that feels alone in the last few days

I have tried for the more long living animals -you want birth to be impactful by elephant need to be 15 YEARS old to produce and will only produce every
9 Years if I get everything perfect ive been running the game on fast mode and still found it too slow

Meanwhile I am on the Great Great Grandparents of my antelope you have to balance for people want elephants so seem to want planet ostrich and planet antelope I want planet elephant and I would prefer to do that in less that a football season please
Click to expand...

I've always been confused that you'd have a problem with elephants taking a long time to breed, grow up, and die? You say you want "planet elephant". Wouldn't that mean the elephants should actually be special? In slower game, a baby elephant would be a rarer and therefore more celebrated, special moment. They would also live so long, you would be more attached to them and appreciate them more. I also love the elephants and want to play with them, too. That doesn't mean I need to see multiple generations of them, as if I'm an immortal god, disconnected from time and watching the generations go by like fleeing insects. I want to be like a real zookeeper... who usually only see one family of elephants grow up in a single zoo. (Unless they trade their elephants out, and adopt a new family.)
 

bamber

B
hayleymills said:
I've always been confused that you'd have a problem with elephants taking a long time to breed, grow up, and die? You say you want "planet elephant". Wouldn't that mean the elephants should actually be special? In slower game, a baby elephant would be a rarer and therefore more celebrated, special moment. They would also live so long, you would be more attached to them and appreciate them more. I also love the elephants and want to play with them, too. That doesn't mean I need to see multiple generations of them, as if I'm an immortal god, disconnected from time and watching the generations go by like fleeing insects. I want to be like a real zookeeper... who usually only see one family of elephants grow up in a single zoo. (Unless they trade their elephants out, and adopt a new family.)
Click to expand...


I agree elephants SHOULD be celebrated but at the moment is a massive rush to go as slow as possible including ive see 3hrs = 1 yr game play that means that a new born elephant takes 45 Hours game play to mature. 45 hrs game play is not acheivable Im doing well if I play 5 or 6 hours A WEEK so over two months. There is no point in me trying to do it so get rid of the elephants they are unachievable

The clammer at the moment is the slowest speed is two fast - the last couple of days Ive found the fastest speed to slow

The game has to be balanced if you can spend 4 hours a day breeding an antelope great if you can spend a few hours a week waiting for your elephant to grow up it would be nice if they could do it in a reasonable time as well

I don't see in one night ( the are meant to be an acheivment) but would like to see in a week or two or three
 
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