Breeding/genetics "surprise"?
- Thread starter JamieCA
- Start date
I don't like the tone of this post.
First of all, which promised features are lacking, exactly? I mean We've got a bit of a rocky start, yes, but I don't really recall anything that would have been announced and has been missing outright.
As for the surprise, well, why would they tell us? It would kind of defeat the purpose, don't you think?
its obviously the albino / leucistic
I was hoping it was something more than a improperly named color variation sigh.
We're lacking a lot of promised features, actually. One example being that ""every animal is a unique individual with a distinctive look and personality", which was a big selling point of advertisement the devs used for this game. There has been constant advertising of "realistic and authentic" animals with "realistic behaviors and personalities", and that animals would feel "lifelike". I remember at one point they even claimed you'd be able to tell individual animals apart just by looking at them or learning their individual behavior.
So far, we have absolutely none of that. Animals perform acts randomly, there is no personality, there's nothing except a randomness factor of "go here, do thing, wander around aimlessly"- besides hunger or thirst "motivating" them to eat and drink, there is no real logic behind the animals' actions, it's all just random, and after awhile, you realize they all just do the same exact thing over and over and over, day in and day out, with no variation, like robots. They do not feel alive. They do not have personalities. There are no individual traits- animals of an entire species all act exactly as a hivemind, with no differentiation between them whatsoever. Try to have a wolf pack, and the instant the first set of pups go up, suddenly it's battle royale, wolf against wolf, everyone immediately turning on eachother with no thought or reason, all because their group size reached an arbitrary number value that isn't even realistic for wolves at all. Even the parents, who are supposed to be a bonded pair for life, suddenly go at eachothers' throats. There is no realism in behaviors. No individualism. Every animal is exactly the same, and not only that, but almost every single species in this game acts completely unrealistic and incorrect for their species. Herd animals that live in herds of up to 200+ in the wild, are limited to 15 ingame before fights start, regardless of space. Animals that, in real life, can have MULTIPLE males in a group, as subordinates, even in animals that do have ""alphas"", can only have one single male ingame. Wolves, for some odd reason, can only live as a pair, yet have an alpha system that is, for one, completely outdated and has been debunked by the same exact scientist who came up with it, and two, makes no sense given that they can only have two. What's even the point of "alphas" if they're only a pair in the first place and won't tolerate others period? How are they any different from bears or tigers? At that point they're not even fighting over alpha status, they're being territorial and trying to kill the other wolf. Which is not at all how wolves in a family pack work.
We were also promised, specifically, that every animal would have a distinct look. Animals would have uniquely generated coat colors and patterns. So far, only a tiny, select few of animals have even the slightest, tiniest bit of variation at all, and wolves, which are the most color and pattern diverse wild mammal on the planet, have absolutely none. At all. All the EXACT same shade of gray, the EXACT same marking patterns. No differences, despite the fact we were PROMISED variation among individuals.
We were also promised that we would be able to trace a family line back to its roots via a family tree.... which... is not ingame. We were also promised more social behaviors during the beta, they said that most social behaviors were simply disabled and would be in the full release... and, of course, they are not. There are maybe 2 total social interactions between animals of a species: mating and a single, occasional play animation. Nothing else. Offspring and mothers have only one single interaction, siblings have only one single interaction and that's it- it's the same as it was in the beta.
So, yes. We are, in fact, lacking many things that we were promised by Frontier before the game's release.
Everything here 100% except that there is actually a bit more social interaction variation (a tiny bit) but it's so incredibly rare you won't see those behaviors without staring at your screen without looking away and only looking at one particular group of animals for a hour or two.
Exactly this. These are the features I was most excited for (alongside the beauty and detail of the foliage and build items, and the game graphics - which are gorgeous but lack any purpose whatsoever if the animals are robotic). I just want an official, detailed statement from Frontier, confirming/denying/expanding on these exact points:
- Animals will have differences in coat colour and pattern, but something is preventing those from working at the moment. This will be fixed.
- Social interactions will occur at a massively increased rate (and will be the "idle" interactions, just as common as walking/climbing, when your animals are healthy and have good welfare), but right now they are still working on triggers/trigger rates.
- Social interactions/other behaviour will vary between individual animals within a species (e.g. one crocodile spends most time swimming, the other spends most time basking, one zebra likes grooming friends, the other zebra prefers to play chase).
- Young animals will stick closer to their mothers and will have many and frequent social interactions with mum/dad.
- Young mammals will suckle from mothers.
- Pack/herd structures will be adapted to represent reality (e.g. wolf pack number increased to at least 6).
- Wolf social structure will have a complete overhaul. Once an alpha pair is established, the pack will not fight.
- Day lengths will be slowed down (hopefully to about 1/3 the current speed).
- Breeding will be more difficult - animals need to adjust to their home and have good health and welfare before they will mate.
Zebra 1 has low hygiene and is within x metres of zebra 2 = grooming
Zebra 1 is feeling playful and is within x metres of zebra 2 = play chase
Zebra 1 has low social bar and is within x metres of zebra 2 = grooming
Zebra 3 is hungry and is juvenile child of zebra 1 = suckling
Individually occurs by having these "need bars" differ between animals, so one rarely needs it's social meter filled, another gets hungry more often, etc. These "traits" could be genetically inherited?
It's probably obvious from those lines, but I am not a programmer. I would love to know if this is the sort of thing currently holding back the features we were promised and have yet to see in game. I would really, really love an actual explanation of what the expectations of Frontier are on these features. My expectations are frequent social interactions that happen between all social animals, at least once every minute of real life time (given that they're healthy). Most of my chimps, for example, should be socialising with one another in their environment at any given point. I expect that coat variations should be obvious in species like wolves, and more subtle pattern differences in zebras, tigers and wild dogs. I don't expect variation in hippos, elephants or rhinos (but slight tone/shading differences would be cool).
We need a statement from Frontier to let us know if our expectations are vastly different to theirs, and an update on what is being done to implement promised features and when we might expect them.
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I can live without the suckling (but would be neat). I can even live without the time changing (but would also really, really, really like the default time to be slower or another option that allows for a longer day without the animals being slo mo). The rest is completely necessary. In another thread Bo said they are addressing "short term" fixes first and then longer term fixes. They did acknowledge that social interactions are not happening as intended at least. I don't think they grasp how big of an issue this is though. The game should have been delayed. It was not. So I am considering it early access and hoping they continue developing it so we can have the awesome zoo game this can be instead of micromanagement the game.
I find myself feeling that I'm playing Beta 2.0, too. I understand them making "quick fixes" first, but it needs to be taken pretty seriously that these huge gameplay features are completely lacking. I have faith in the team that they will do everything they can and are working really hard to put these features into the game, but I'm also a scientist, and I can't go on faith alone! Maybe they should have delayed release, but if this period of chaos and lack of features means that they will be tweaked and made incredible from our feedback, then I can handle that. We just need some more communication and transparency from Frontier.
All of this. They specifically promised a lot of things that are not in the game, hopefully because bugs and balance issues.
I will add too that they specifically said time in the beta was speed up, but they never addressed again why is still so fast now. Did they change their mind or...?
I love the game, but some things are really being hard to overlook. Time speed and herd/packs numbers being completely wrong are two big ones for me.
Also animals breed like crazy, but I hope that is more manageable when they fix the time.
I think they can fix all of this. I hope they will-they provided significant free updates for PlanCo. My gut feeling is that PlanZoo has been much more complex to build and they underestimated the time it would take to get it running smoothly and as promised.