This might come as a surprise to you, but developing a new rig takes much more effort than using an existing rig and just cut the tail of. Frontier only has to create a new skin and can use the existing walking and climbing animations of the red Panda
Well, yes and no. When making a zoo game like this, there are shared rig sets that form the base, like a big cat rig. Those are specifically created so that they can be re-used with slight adjustments. So it's not like "oh will take a red panda and cut of the tail" ( which you don't even need to do, just don't rig the model to the tail nodes), but it's more "lets use this base rig we created and fine-tune it to fit the animal we want".
However, adjusting rigs is indeed often easier than doing an entire new rig, it is important to understand that this is only the case when very small changes need to be made. Transferring a red panda rig to a koala rig for instance, which is quite different skeletal wise, is actually a very painstaking job and takes so much more time, that it's actually easier and takes much less effort to do it from scratch, or at least use a very very early base rig.
People seriously underestimate how hard it is to change rigs and animations of animal A to animal B if these animals are very different in bodyplan. It is in that case much easier to just do one from scratch, especially if you're paying someone to do it.
Are those two animals really that different? I only watched some YouTube videos, and I thought them to be quite similar. They are even inaccurately called koala bear.
Oh yes they are, they certainly move in different ways. As a general rule of thumb, when it comes to animals, skeletons are often a good representation of what an actual rig will look like. Trying to repurpose an red panda rig to a would be incredibly difficult, especially do the length of the body, the hunchback, the way it sits in the trees etc. So it's rather hard to do, to a point that it will most likely take more effort than to just do it from scratch.
Frontier already showed, that they are willing to take rigs from existing animals for animals, that are quite similar, but have (for biologists) notable differences in movement.
Oh yeah for sure, and that's a good thing. There's no need to make a new rig for every big cat or every horse species, that would be way too much work and wouldn't be efficient for the game either. Frontier does also seem to work with shared behaviours ( a behaviour is an action that contains one or more animations), so that makes things a bit easier. The giant anteater for instance has a new rig when looking at the model in a 3d software, with its own set of animations, but it does share its behaviours with the aardvark so it seems.
Aside from that, I wonder why people are so concerned about koala's being quite arboreal, when we literally have orangutans in the game that should be mostly arboreal and aren't in the game either
I don't think it's something that will stop Frontier, at least not from the looks of it
