I reached the point where playing the game is more stress than fun.

[Fortunanovesia]

On the one hand i love this game. I love the idea to be completely free building my own zoo. Having great ideas for new exhibits all the time, adding something new to my zoo and building the zoo of my dreams, i always wanted to build. Or at least trying it.

But playing the game for a while i reached a point where the game isnt giving me the feeling it did before anymore. A feeling like: "hell yeah, i wanna build on. Doing this, doing that". Because the game is getting more and more annoying in a lot of points.

My zoo reached a size (in franchise mode) now, that makes playing pretty hard, because of the lack of fps. It isnt a slideshow, but the game gets very slow and you feel that the performance is at its limits. But moving out i see theres still so much space on the map where i could build on my zoo. But its just no fun with a performance like this.

Another point: ive got around 200 animals now and all the time something is happening in my zoo, when i let the time move on. Animals fighting, animals giving birth, animals growing up, animals starving, animals inbreeding, animals getting boxed for no reason, animals getting stressed, animals walfare dropping cause of several reasons.

Playing the game becomes just stress. Sometimes i dont really enjoy my zoo or what i have created. Im just annoyed and get a bad feeling about whats gonna happen next.

All the time i need to take (grown up) animals out of the exhibits and put them into the trading center. Sometimes i have around 70/30 animals in my trading center. Problem is, i can only buy new animals/species when i get rid of them down to under 30 animals.

So i go to the market and release just all of those animals underneath a gold-genetic-level. I just let them go to get rid of them. Theres no relationship or connection to those "animals" they are just "names" i dont really have to care about - and also the game doesnt really let me take care about it. I just dont have any time for this. I put the golden ones for a cheap price into the market, cause i wanna give other players a chance. Ihave so much CC i dont really care about them anymore.

And now theres the bug/performamce issue that takes lots of clicks/time to mark an animal in the trading center and even more to click on release, trade or whatever. I have so many animals/names i have to get rid of/release and now it takes me so much time to solve this. This is really annoying too.

At the moment im at a point im not really in the mood to play on the game. I made/build so much in my recent zoo i dont wanna start a new one at the moment. Especially when i have to start with just 40k again and having to research all that facility-stuff again.

Even the community-challenes arent really flashing/attracting me. Ive got so many CC i dont really care about them anymore and also dont need a golden animal as a reward. If i want an animal like this, i can just buy it with my CC. Only problem is having enough space in my storage. And im also not the player that cares about a new hat or cargo-short for his avatar that much.

Nah. Somehow im dreaming of a chance the developers will find a way to improve at least the performance of the game/bigger zoos. But at the moment its really just...unsatisfying

 

[DeluxeGroupie]

On the one hand i love this game. I love the idea to be completely free building my own zoo. Having great ideas for new exhibits all the time, adding something new to my zoo and building the zoo of my dreams, i always wanted to build. Or at least trying it.

But playing the game for a while i reached a point where the game isnt giving me the feeling it did before anymore. A feeling like: "hell yeah, i wanna build on. Doing this, doing that". Because the game is getting more and more annoying in a lot of points.

My zoo reached a size (in franchise mode) now, that makes playing pretty hard, because of the lack of fps. It isnt a slideshow, but the game gets very slow and you feel that the performance is at its limits. But moving out i see theres still so much space on the map where i could build on my zoo. But its just no fun with a performance like this.

Another point: ive got around 200 animals now and all the time something is happening in my zoo, when i let the time move on. Animals fighting, animals giving birth, animals growing up, animals starving, animals inbreeding, animals getting boxed for no reason, animals getting stressed, animals walfare dropping cause of several reasons.

Playing the game becomes just stress. Sometimes i dont really enjoy my zoo or what i have created. Im just annoyed and get a bad feeling about whats gonna happen next.

All the time i need to take (grown up) animals out of the exhibits and put them into the trading center. Sometimes i have around 70/30 animals in my trading center. Problem is, i can only buy new animals/species when i get rid of them down to under 30 animals.

So i go to the market and release just all of those animals underneath a gold-genetic-level. I just let them go to get rid of them. Theres no relationship or connection to those "animals" they are just "names" i dont really have to care about - and also the game doesnt really let me take care about it. I just dont have any time for this. I put the golden ones for a cheap price into the market, cause i wanna give other players a chance. Ihave so much CC i dont really care about them anymore.

And now theres the bug/performamce issue that takes lots of clicks/time to mark an animal in the trading center and even more to click on release, trade or whatever. I have so many animals/names i have to get rid of/release and now it takes me so much time to solve this. This is really annoying too.

At the moment im at a point im not really in the mood to play on the game. I made/build so much in my recent zoo i dont wanna start a new one at the moment. Especially when i have to start with just 40k again and having to research all that facility-stuff again.

Even the community-challenes arent really flashing/attracting me. Ive got so many CC i dont really care about them anymore and also dont need a golden animal as a reward. If i want an animal like this, i can just buy it with my CC. Only problem is having enough space in my storage. And im also not the player that cares about a new hat or cargo-short for his avatar that much.

Nah. Somehow im dreaming of a chance the developers will find a way to improve at least the performance of the game/bigger zoos. But at the moment its really just...unsatisfying

I'm at this point as well, or let's say I sensed that I would be there soon and stopped playing. What I'd like to add to the point you made about things happening all the time when one unpauses the game..I find it sad that most things happening are related to the animals breeding and growing up. The game starts to feel quite one-dimensional pretty soon, as it is right now. It's more like a breeding manager with a lot of missing features right now. I still can't wrap my head around the fact that they implemented inbreeding, but no pedigree. I mean, who thought that out? It's ridiculous.

 

[shirandhak]

It's a breeding- & guest-manager-game with some nice animal-animations plus very nice building possibilities (at least in sandbox). Animals as such are quite a minor matter, just nice to look at (if you've got the time )

 

[Johnny Friedl]

Yes, I’m starting to feel similarly.
What would resolve much of this is TIME BEING SLOWED DOWN. I can’t connect with what I’ve created, I don’t have time to. Things move too quickly.
Frontier, address this issue because you’re losing your player base quickly.

 

[FediSinter]

Same here, I have a medium zoo that I’ve build in every little detail since the game was released. I did it slowly because I wanted it to function well before moving to another enclosure and because I wanted to add a lot of little details and step my building skills up. But now it’s not enjoyable. My animals are constantly breeding and it’s impossibile to keep track of all of them, especially animals that breed often. My animals keep fighting as well and I have tons of notifications of animals that are injured. My animals keep getting stressed, even if they were never stressed before and nothing really has changed so drastically, non even the guests number. But as it is for now I keep getting protester other my lions cause they are getting stressed and they wealfare goest down to 0%. The game doesn’t really have the freedom they flashed out, you should make all the habitats look the same cause as soon as you make a raised viewing platform or a bridge that looks over the habitat, you can be sure that at some point, all the animals are gonna be stressed for no apparent reasons.

 

[Aiste]

Yes, I wrote about stressed gameplay a long time ago. I do not play PZ anymore. I have a lot of places where to be stressed. I need a game to relax. Watched today video with famous PZ youtuber getting in the same all kinds of problems. If we cannot be heard, maybe they are lucky.

Slow Down Time Please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Today I've done an experiment. Played 10 hours without pausing a game (for me pausing a game is not an option). Franchise mode, 9 species, 80 animals, 67 game years. I've managed to build one tiny habitat for tortoises, redo one old habitat and build four or five guest facilities (using...

forums.frontier.co.uk

 

[FediSinter]

We all know that every little or big problem with this game is a consequence of the time scale that is ridiculously fast, but as long as the devs don’t realise it, this game will only remain a half baked thing.

 

[monsterparty]

I already gave up on this it not fun play with all problems and speed to actually enjoy it at this time, so it sits in my steam library as regret buying.

 

[jrolson]

Yup time moves way to fast... animals die to quickly from old age...

 

[NZFanatic]

In one of the recent update threads, one of the Frontier staff mentioned that slowing down the game time is no easy thing to do but it is being seriously looked at. It isn't something they can just churn out - programming a game is more than just pressing a button or deleting a single line of code. When people work on something like this, fixing one thing often breaks something else, and the time-speed of the game is supposedly tied into a few different features. Think of it this way - your staff tend to an exhibit on a certain schedule, which is when they go in and clean, feed, etc. That schedule is tied into the game's passage of time. Therefore, everything about the animals is tied into the passage of time. When they start to starve, when their exhibits get dirty, and so on and so forth. So all of that needs to be adjusted in every single animal for the game to be slowed down.

It's a long, difficult process.

To be honest the main problems of the game seem to exist primarily in franchise-mode. Personally I don't see the appeal of franchise-mode at all, and given the problems people are facing I feel reaffirmed in that belief. Everything is just so much simpler in sandbox. The bugs are there, but they're a lot easier to manage.

 

[NL_Mutso]

Somehow im dreaming of a chance the developers will find a way to improve at least the performance of the game/bigger zoos

Reason why i started a new zoo again. Hate to research everything.. Playing this one on normal speed only and taking it slowly - but already have 13 habitats and 600k.
Also for experiment reasons, I just let the game run for 1.5-2 hours (had to leave the house).
If you set up your zoo properly, you shouldn't encounter many problems.. The inbreeding/fighting did cause some problems. But heavily depends on your species.
Putting some of my animals (reptiles) on contraceptives was necessary for this..

The bigger zoo (300+ animals/8k visitors) becomes slow after a while, still really good manageable but very laggy..

We all know that every little or big problem with this game is a consequence of the time scale that is ridiculously fast, but as long as the devs don’t realise it, this game will only remain a half baked thing.

No we don't .. A lot of people don't experience time as an issue.
Maybe for a group, it's actually the opposite. The issue with the time scale is a consequence of the bugs/problems/unbalanced features..

I feel sorry for people who think the speed is too fast (I really do, it feels like you wasted money/real life time)
I don't mind a slower speed if they keep the same speed options as well
But when I see people struggling with 6 habitat zoos and blame speed, I think you don't understand the game enough..

Like NZfanatic commented, It's a long, difficult process.

If they don't balance enough, the online franchise/market could be ruined
During beta they lowered the breeding rates - which caused more complaints than before.

 

[SaltySweetRen]

I don't mind a slower speed if they keep the same speed options as well

Yes, I feel like this would be good for both sides of the speed discussion. Personally, I would love a slower default speed due to my own anxiety issues and preferred play style, but for those who enjoy the faster speeds, they should still keep the option to speed up the game to their satisfaction.

 

[Kai]

To be honest the main problems of the game seem to exist primarily in franchise-mode. Personally I don't see the appeal of franchise-mode at all, and given the problems people are facing I feel reaffirmed in that belief. Everything is just so much simpler in sandbox. The bugs are there, but they're a lot easier to manage.

I mean, normally in these type of games I would work my way through campaign, to unlock the cosmetics rewards/items to use in other modes - sadly this game doesn't have any rewards for completing campaign so that entire modes pointless for me. That was the first major disappointment compared to ZT2 and it cuts a huge amount of playtime from the game.

Sandbox was tempting because I HATE the guests being so needy, but I actually like being able to trade animals and get albinos. Can you even let your animals breed in sandbox without having enabling aging? Even if you could you'd probably need to breed hundreds maybe even thousands of babies to luck out on albino (too much work to do it for every species). Maybe they could somehow let us one-way trade animals from franchise into sandbox zoos? If that were possible, I would breed & perfect animals in franchise, then move them over to sandbox to play between events. Would be nice to name and get attached to some of my animals - they just die too fast to want to get involved in normal gameplay.

Not to mention you're not allowed to participate in the (albeit terrible) community events unless you play franchise, so it almost feels like even the devs only want you play franchise.

 

[Indiglow]

This is why I stopped playing. Until they fix the game time speed, then playing with a big zoo becomes Planet Caretaker and Planet Keeper instead of Planet Zoo.

It's absolutely ridiculous.

 

[NZFanatic]

I mean, normally in these type of games I would work my way through campaign, to unlock the cosmetics rewards/items to use in other modes - sadly this game doesn't have any rewards for completing campaign so that entire modes pointless for me. That was the first major disappointment compared to ZT2 and it cuts a huge amount of playtime from the game.

Sandbox was tempting because I HATE the guests being so needy, but I actually like being able to trade animals and get albinos. Can you even let your animals breed in sandbox without having enabling aging? Even if you could you'd probably need to breed hundreds maybe even thousands of babies to luck out on albino (too much work to do it for every species). Maybe they could somehow let us one-way trade animals from franchise into sandbox zoos? If that were possible, I would breed & perfect animals in franchise, then move them over to sandbox to play between events. Would be nice to name and get attached to some of my animals - they just die too fast to want to get involved in normal gameplay.

Not to mention you're not allowed to participate in the (albeit terrible) community events unless you play franchise, so it almost feels like even the devs only want you play franchise.

I agree that there ought to have been some kind of reward for completing the campaigns (like a bonus animal, or a bonus theme or something). Sandbox is the only mode I've touched because the others hold no interest to me - I don't really care about "community" as such and I don't necessarily want to play to be challenged, I want to play for fun.

As for breeding, all my animals are immortal and breed. Once they get too old you can send them to a hospice to kick-start breeding again. So far I haven't bred any albinos, but I did manage to score a boa constrictor in the market place out of pure luck. I'm trying to breed my boas constantly now to get another one in a new zoo, but so far no luck (which is a shame - I'd love to make a white tiger the centrepiece of my zoo, though I wouldn't deliberately breed it, as I find that unethical).

I'm also finding that the issues of attachment aren't as big in sandbox - I'm very much attached to my non-breeding female panda. She arrived with injuries and has a unique set of scars, but her fertility is terrible and she hasn't produced any offspring. The other female has, but this one (I think her name is Zhu) has become pretty special to me.