I know, I know, many people are tooting the same horn, but I think, it's really important to give the most feedback possible at the moment cause I love this game and want to see it improved.
Hi, I am a player of planet games in general. I love rollercoasters a bit more but I also love zoos so I played both games happily and was really looking forward to PC2. I thought that a game with all the improvements from Planet Zoo but for my favorite subject, Theme Parks, would be great.
I now have around 45 hours of PC gameplay in. I played Franchise Mode and have not seen many things in the game, for example, I didn't try pools and flumes yet and didn't try Sandbox or Career Mode. I just build my own, small, nice park with the simulation on and to be honest, I am having fun.
Compared to others who say they are going back to Zoo, I plan to continue playing Coaster 2 and Zoo both.
But here are some things that I have found irritating and frustrating and think they need to be changed asap:
The UI/UX:
The guest and staff AI:
These are the things that came to my mind. I will add/edit this when I find more stuff.
I hope, Frontier is listening cause a "mixed" reaction on steam for my favorite game franchise is just sad...
Hi, I am a player of planet games in general. I love rollercoasters a bit more but I also love zoos so I played both games happily and was really looking forward to PC2. I thought that a game with all the improvements from Planet Zoo but for my favorite subject, Theme Parks, would be great.
I now have around 45 hours of PC gameplay in. I played Franchise Mode and have not seen many things in the game, for example, I didn't try pools and flumes yet and didn't try Sandbox or Career Mode. I just build my own, small, nice park with the simulation on and to be honest, I am having fun.
Compared to others who say they are going back to Zoo, I plan to continue playing Coaster 2 and Zoo both.
But here are some things that I have found irritating and frustrating and think they need to be changed asap:
The UI/UX:
- There are some hurdles I don't understand, why they are there. I suspect it's because of console control but I don't know.
- If I Ctrl+X something, copy it once, I need to Ctrl+X again. In the former games, I didn't have to.
- If I Ctrl+D something, the first one is at the same height as the original piece but then it doesn't keep the height! I don'T get it. In the other games, the good thing was that I could Duplicate stuff once, set the height and then place as many of the piece I want at the same height. One of the quickest ways to build custom kerbs, fences, covers, walls etc. Not possible anymore.
- If I want to select many things by just pressing shift, it doesn't work. I first need to click the multiserlect, hold shift anyway and then confirm this. This is cumbersome.
- The hitboxes! I don't get why the hitboxes of so many objects are so much larger than the object itself Things can be pretty much impossible to select if they are near some plants or frames or a ride. Yeah, you can customize rides, cool. But If I want to place a planter inside a ride area, then think about chaning it's color and cannot select it cause it's always the ride itself being selected, it is very frustrating. I found a workaraound to delete every thing that's in the way, select the piece, then use Undo to undo these deletions and still have the thing selected. That is very cumbersome.
- The path rounding tool is sometimes just not rounding paths.
- The queues not having the full control of the path tools, snapping in weird ways and the feature of holding Ctrl for it to not snap not being well documented. Queue control is lacking anyway cause for some options for the queues you need to go back to normal paths, set the options and then go back to the queues, which is really weird.
- Many features not being well documented anyway.
- Colors not being kept when placing the same item or the same item group like plaster pieces. Together with the hitboxes, this is really frustrating, cause you can't keep the color but when you want to select the objects, you can't and then you still need to do the whole goosechase with the multiselect. There the issues stack up and the experience is really frustrating.
- Why... oh why does the bottom toolbar with the different menus (Scenery, Facilities, Paths and all that..) vanish if you have something selected or are in a different menu or something? You have to exit everything before selesting something else there. Sometimes this means 4 mouselicks before I can select to build something. That is really cumbersome.
- And here is the question: Why was the menu for stuff on the bottom on the screen from the other games wrong? It is more convenient, you don't need to scroll trough so much stuff, you didn't have to have menus nested in other menus and scrlling stuff in small windows? Why change a running system? And then keep it for scenery anyway? Why two systems in one game if you only need one?
- Pieces are still giant sized. So if you could let us make them much smaller with scaling than it is possible now would be great.
- In the search bar, the X is missing. In Planet Zoo, there was an X next to your search input where you could just delete the input and have all the objects shown. Why isn't it there in PC2?
- Setting colors is hard because of the blue overlay while recoloring. Please make that go away when recoloring objects.
- Can't you make the Billboards scalable?
- The trigger sequencer has amazing capabilites but the UX is cumbersome cause you can't shift select multiple objects. This makes it quite tedious to work with. And you can't put an effect on the same track more than once, which means you can end up with hundreds of tracks if you want a sequence for a few minutes. And you can't copy and paste. And when I edit elements, it jumps all over the place. So I need to scroll back to edit the next element. And mybe you could program it so that if you hit Enter on the keyboard, the cursor jumps to the next input field with all the numbers selected so you can enter the next number withouth clicking.
The guest and staff AI:
- Did you visit a theme park once in your life? People in the game complain about long queues when the wait is 2-3 minutes. In real life, a wait of 15-20 minutes is considered a nice short wait. People stand for 60 minutes or 90 minutes or in the extreme cases for more hours for a ride. I think the people could complain for long queue times qhen it is longer than 30. That would be more realistic. Also from a creative standpoint, themeing the queues of a ride is a large component of the PlanCo games. In this game, it is pretty much pointless as most of an elaborate queue will be empty cause the guest won't enter it cause "I am not queuing that long to ride...". This removes a large component of the "Planning and creating a theme park"-Experience cause even IRL the parks have to plan and engineer and design methods to entertain witing crowds with beautiful themed queues. Think about the new coaster "Voltron" at Europa Park where there are tesla coils playing the theme of the ride, an animatronic of Nicola Tesla, cool water tunnels and all that. This is a giant component of theme park theming and planning. And it doesn't make any sense to do that in PlanCo2 cause 90% of the queues will be empty.
- The staff AI reacts too late, expecially the mechanics. You can work with work zones but still the mechanics and ride attendants react too late. I had a park with 3 rides and one staff building complex and I alway got messages about the service badges running out and the ride loosing conditions. 1 minute later it was serviced. The park was very small so it was just one work zone. I had 11 mechanics at the time. I think the staff just need to be programmed to react earlier to expiring service badges and other staff breaks and all that.
- Pathfinding: The crowds are a problem. The pathfinding needs to get better. If a path is stuffed with people but there are alternative paths, why can't the peeps take them? Maybe introduce a variable for choosing different paths to a destination?
- This is a Planet Coaster Game. And now there are pools. This is great. But what if you want to ignore the pool side of the equation because you are only interested in building a theme park? I think this should be a viable playstyle. But the guests think "I wish this place had a pool!" which makes this playstyle less fun.
- I know why Z-Fighting exists. But can't you somehow fix the problem by implementing a thing that the mod "FreeBuild" used? Use a hotkey combination to move selected pieces one pixel to or from the camera? That would fix the problem without having to use a mod like in Zoo.
- There is Z-Fighting in some gridded pieces. That is just bad and shouldn't be the case cause you can't move them slightly to remove the Z-Fighting. That shouldn't be a thing.
- Where are the restaurants, the souvenier shops, the hotels? They were in PC1/Zoo?
- We need more gentle transport, tracked, flat rides and older rides.
- We need more junior and family coasters cause your coasters can't change the trains. Where is the Zierer Tivoli Ladybug trains? Vekoma family boomerang anyone? Straddle Coasters?
- Where is the Intamin Multilaunch?
- Why are there some senseless restictions? You couldn't build (for example) Chiapas from Phantasialand because the only log flume doesn't have steep enough drops.
- Why are the good terrain options from Zoo just mssing? The terrain stamps are just gone. Why?
- We can dress up ride vehicles now but hardly have many pieces to do it with. We really need more props for that. Animals/Stickers/Shapes (and still be able to select them). For example, just import all animal signs from Zoo. You have the assets!
- Custom billboards/music/video! They are really important to be creative in the game.
- Why can't we not remove kerbs on paths or queues? Zoo and Coaster 1 could do it after community feedback.
- Glass pieces anyone?
- With Planet Zoo, you introduced something groundbreaking. The animals "know" where pieces are and see if they can traverse them. You have the tech to do that. Why are peeps still walking through scenery. Too much processing to introduce this tech there? And if you are afraid to have peeps not through terrain so doors and stuff don't work, then make it a checkbox. "Block movement" to switch on and off for the pieces. Ir give us back the barriers.
- Barriers. It may be weird to ask for barriers here but think about how fast we could do some fences with the barrier tech. Instead of placing piece after piece, we could just create a fence like we created a barrier in Zoo.
- Security guards are missing.
- Ride attendants do nothing. And this is quite boring. Why don't they check restraints or help people into the ride.
- Why is the education for staff gone? It was a nice system and speeding up operations and stuff can be a nice bonus.
- Vista points are missing. That is quite sad.
- The research progression doesn't make sense in some places. Many parks begin with a family coaster. But you can't build one at first, but you can build an Arrow Hyper. But at that time you can't build an Arrow Looper which is really puzzling. The progression in rides is really weird cause you develop much more modern rides or technically more advanced rides before you develop older and simplers rides and so on.
- The Junior Coaster only fills up the first 5 cars of a train. I've tried everything, waiting to full loead, setting the interval and the minimun waiting time quite high. Even with minimum 5 minutes waiting time, the first 5 rows get filled and the train sits with open rows for 5 minutes.
- The lapping on a junior coaster doesn't work. When I set it to two laps, it always resets itself to one lap and as such doesn't do the two laps.
- I love that the guests actually want to leave at the end of the day. But they don't. The guests leave at random times. Or am I just not getting how it is meant to be? If I am not getting it, maybe an explanation would be good? Like... a tooltip in the loading screen or something?
These are the things that came to my mind. I will add/edit this when I find more stuff.
I hope, Frontier is listening cause a "mixed" reaction on steam for my favorite game franchise is just sad...
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