To be honest... the more I think about it, I think:
- birds will come in a large Aviary DLC that will come with a free update for the base game that will include flight animations;
- aquatic animals will come in a large Aquatic DLC that will come with a free update for the base game that will include swimming / diving animations (for animals that should be able to do them, like crocs, polar bears, etc).
These large DLCs might be priced up to 20,- and will include far more animals than just 4 or 5 and likely multiple scenarios.
If it will happen this way, then the small biome / continent DLCs that are released before above Aviary / Aquatic DLCs won't include aquatic or flying animals.
You're being far too optimistic.
I have no doubt we might eventually get aviaries, but again, they've tested the water on this already with
Jurassic World Evolution - expecting much more than what they gave that game is naively hopeful. Aviaries are more likely to be similar to exhibits, except perhaps on a larger scale, and with the birds inside them programmed to a specific looping path to make them dynamic. Before they add anything like this, though, they will need to work through some performance issues with the game, as even on high-end gaming PC's it seems to struggle after a certain point due to the sheer amount of constant movement being rendered.
As for aquatic animals, while I think it is something they will work on (they have the groundwork already, and seals/sea lions, otters, and penguins are all pretty much zoo animal cornerstones), I don't think we should expect too much here, either.
That said, from a business perspective aviaries are trickier than aquatic animals. As you proposed, adding diving/swimming animations into the game can work as a free update, so future additions to that class of animal can simply be added later as optional DLC, but aviaries are a feature we will basically have to pay for. So if we're paying for aviaries in one DLC, we only get them if we buy that DLC - this can limit Frontier's ability to add birds to later DLC packs, because they either have to include the whole aviary system
again in the next DLC, or work on the assumption that everybody already bought the initial DLC so they can just add birds.
The latter doesn't work, because if they, for example, made a new African DLC with African birds included in it, and someone bought it for, I don't know, the baboons but not the birds, how do they exclude the birds from gameplay if the customer doesn't already have aviaries?
In order to produce smaller DLC packs that don't cost too much but ensure a steady stream of profit, like the Arctic Pack, Frontier needs to be able to limit how much they put into each one. That's a business strategy. If they dump everything on us at once, then the community stops asking for new things, so discussion online around the game dies off, interest dwindles, and it's harder to reignite people's passion with the next big thing. The rise of social media and platforms like Steam really killed the old-school "expansion pack" model. Even
The Sims, often held up as the example to the contrary, releases millions of those smaller Stuff Packs and Game Packs regularly to stop people from getting bored.
So to conclude - I think aviaries and (certain) marine animals are possible and likely somewhere in the plan for Frontier, but I don't think we should get our hopes up too much about just how much content we're going to get, as Frontier is limited by the new age of game development.
