I want this game to be difficult

[salmonmarine]

Obviously there will be a variety of difficulties, as well as sandbox, infinite money, and so on. That's great, but I want a really difficult mode where I'm stretched for cash and have to really make tough planning decisions to succeed.

All the marketing for this game has done a great job showing off gorgeous animals, but for management and planning its always 'oh the water is dirty...build a water filter!' and 'the animal is unhappy...change the soil type!' and I'm glad to see these mechanics, but I want my gameplay experience to be dominated by these decisions. I want the amount of money I have to be a really powerful factor for what I can build. I want random accidents and escapes that I can minimize the effect of with good planning. If I get to easily fill a zoo with gorgeous animals and tend to their same 5 needs and just farm gobs of cash I'll be bored to tears.

I want to know if this game will offer a truly challenging management and planning experience before I spend full price on it. If anyone has any insight on this I'd be happy to hear it.
Thanks!

 

[breezerHOG]

Planet Coaster was very easy in terms of Scenario Objectives and Challenge mode, I beat the original scenarios in less than a month. Not counting DLC it only had like 15-20 scenarios (way less than Classic RCT). I assume Planet Zoo will be slightly more engaging for "management" features but, I don't think Frontier puts much effort into the business or financial side of things. This series is more of a creative construction game than it is a strategy or business sim.

Almost every scenario had the same repetitive goals, like "Collect 500 guests", or "Collect 1000 guests" or "Collect $5,000", or "Collect $10,000" lol zzz boring... The best scenario in Planco was a park that was broken up into 4 areas with a monorail taking guests to each area, it made the strategy a little more engaging having to make use of the monorail to get guests around. I hope the Scenarios are better in Plazoo, but I dont like how they call it "Career" mode when its really just a bunch of scenarios. I also wish scenarios came in different shapes (for the park borders) instead of just large open squares

In Planco, they added "Challenge" mode which was just a blank empty park. It would have been a lot better if any scenario could be turned into a challenge park, since Challenge mode actually allowed players to increase the difficulty, but scenarios only had 1 difficulty. I never understood why they had to be separate playmodes.

 

[salmonmarine]

Planet Coaster was very easy in terms of Scenario Objectives and Challenge mode

I've heard that a lot and that's why I'm a bit concerned. My friend who plays JWE says that they patched in some kind of late-game mechanic that involves spending a lot of money but past that it seems like it has the same problem.

I also really like Cities: Skylines, and in that game money becomes irrelevant after like an hour of playing. However the rate you get money at becomes the standard measure of success, and traffic flow provides great mid and late game difficulty. I wouldn't mind if Planet Zoo was similar, where you get enough money to do what you want, but making your zoo run more efficiently has a high skill ceiling.

 

[eulemur]

It seems to be reasonably difficult with managing your park's electricity, staff (especially keeper) work zones and duties etc. in the long term - meaning it's not necessarily a matter of put down an enclosure and it's done forever, you have to keep on top of your staff happiness as in PC and making them work efficiently would likely depend on how you organise your staff buildings in relation to enclosures and other facilities (like water filters, for example). I don't think I explained that too well though

I think if you set the bar as "is this easier or harder than already existing zoo simulation games", most of which are basically a decade old at this point, then yes it is probably going to be harder than them generally. Since the most expensive part of running your zoo will probably be the staff and animals moreso than the facilities you have more of an incentive to be strategic with your enclosure planning to maximise animal happiness and get higher donations. At least, that's what I'd predict. Especially later in the game where you may want to be breeding for certain traits without causing inbreeding, we'll have to learn more about that system to get a good idea of what the benefits could be.

 

[Kwolf]

I've recently seen a video that, among other things, mentions random events coming that the player will have to deal with. Such as power outages, bad weather, etc.
The recently detailed dev journal about Franchise mode appears to me to create a level of difficulty you might really enjoy too.

Edit:
Dev Journal: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/developer-journal-franchise-mode.521074/

Video (time: 09:31):

Source: https://youtu.be/HDAaGYILbvc?t=571

 

[Joozik2]

Yop I am hoping for more zoo tycoon type challenging scenarios like here is a barely nothing cash and your goal is to build a park with animal from the each of the continents, breed and release to the wild, savannah sanctuary etc. But I think frontier is aware of this, hence the JWE challenge mode where the Jurrasic difficulty gives you nightmares

 

[shabani]

Honestly this time they really have material already for good management game just question is whether they will balance things in proper manner or not. Basically the only thing they need to do is to make players to really try hard to have nice, popular and functional zoo.

I mean there is already sandbox mode where you can express your creativity, other modes should be much much harder then it was in Planet Coaster e.g.

 

[Bo Marit]

If this helps in any way; we've definitely listened to the feedback we've received on Planet Coaster, and there's a much higher learning curve in Planet Zoo - hence the need for tutorials (which are now part of the story in Career Mode)! In my humble opinion there's a lot to Planet Zoo (and Planet Coaster too, if you dive deeper into the simulation), and you can get quite nitty-gritty with the management - there's many animals to take care of (not just well-being, but also enrichment - which the animals will get bored of - (in)breeding, habitat space and quality, social groups, clean water, stress, etc.), there's facilities that need to be powered, you have to take your guests into account in terms of building placement, entertainment, and education...

I think Career Mode is, aside from a beautiful and compelling story, the best way to get to grips with all those management functions as it will set you up slowly for being able to deal with all the aspects of running a successful zoo! Then you can take all of that knowledge and challenge yourself in Franchise Mode, or jump in Sandbox and build the zoo your way.

❤

 

[shabani]

Whoever wants difficult game he means mostly on financial aspects in the game and how hard it will be to handle it. We already saw animal management and it is definitelly interesting, but game needs that tycoon money hard tasks to feel complete and to have reply value more then just a creative, building beauty and treat.

 

[HouweTrouwe]

Maybe they can put in a few difficulty levels as some other simulation games do, ex. the amount of cash you start with and how much everything costs (the higher the difficulty, the higher the prices for everything), longer research times etc.. Also Guest Needs may be more picky than on more easier levels.

 

[Greekgods]

I really liked the campaigns in zoo tycoon 2. They were a nice switch when I wanted to do something different from building my own zoo and obligated me to also play with some ‘neglected’ animals. They might not have been hard (I don’t really remember much details of any of the campaigns) but some were time consuming and took time to work towards a goal (like you had to work towards maybe getting an expensive animal). And there were quite a lot I think. So hoping from something similar here. Maybe trying to get an animal but it’ll only be available through conservation currency so you’ll have to work on releasing animals. I don’t think they have to be that difficult but they need to keep you busy working on it (and not some timer counting down like on JWE, which gets a bit tedious after 10 times).

 

[m2wester]

Whoever wants difficult game he means mostly on financial aspects in the game and how hard it will be to handle it. We already saw animal management and it is definitelly interesting, but game needs that tycoon money hard tasks to feel complete and to have reply value more then just a creative, building beauty and treat.

I don't think it's easy or even possible to properly combine a free form design sim with a challenging economic sim - interesting layouts are never optimal from a money perspective. At this point it's pretty much clear that the main selling point of the game will be the ability to design exhibits, money will come second by necessity. I do think it should possible to achieve some level of economic challenge despite the heavy design focus, but I'm pretty sure they won't make it really difficult, at least not if you design for economy and not for beauty.

But money really isn't the only way to make a sim challenging. For cities skylines (and most or all iterations of sim city), it's really traffic management that's difficult, not money. For planet zoo, breeding animals with high level genes could potencially be an interesting challenge. We'll have to see how difficult and interesting that part of the game will be.

 

[salmonmarine]

If this helps in any way; we've definitely listened to the feedback we've received on Planet Coaster, and there's a much higher learning curve in Planet Zoo - hence the need for tutorials (which are now part of the story in Career Mode)! In my humble opinion there's a lot to Planet Zoo (and Planet Coaster too, if you dive deeper into the simulation), and you can get quite nitty-gritty with the management - there's many animals to take care of (not just well-being, but also enrichment - which the animals will get bored of - (in)breeding, habitat space and quality, social groups, clean water, stress, etc.), there's facilities that need to be powered, you have to take your guests into account in terms of building placement, entertainment, and education...

I think Career Mode is, aside from a beautiful and compelling story, the best way to get to grips with all those management functions as it will set you up slowly for being able to deal with all the aspects of running a successful zoo! Then you can take all of that knowledge and challenge yourself in Franchise Mode, or jump in Sandbox and build the zoo your way.

❤

Whoops, looks like I missed this, thank you so much for responding! I'm happy to hear that there's a steep learning curve - as somebody with 500 hours in Elite Dangerous I'm no stranger to that :3 and it tells me that there will be a lot of gameplay systems to learn about and master which is always fun.

Again, I appreciate you taking the time to get back to me on this. I'll definitely keep an eye on franchise mode, that seems like a good challenge
o7

 

[VioletGrey]

As long as there are multiple difficulty levels. There needs to be an easy mode as well. (Thinking of my 11-year-old, here.) Although, it would also be great to have a difficult mode for older players.

 

[NeedPlanetZoo]

Different difficulty levels could feel very weird in the franchise mode though given the shared animal market.
It makes sense in the campaign but having to in- or decrease the difficulty by switching to franchise mode is strange again.
It will be hard to find a suitable difficulty for all. I personally want at least access to a medium difficulty where I have to pay some attention but don't need to optimize everything in order to get some income in.

Honestly an 'offline franchise' mode without public animal market and playable in offline modus would be great to allow different difficulties.

 

[Imagin]

Franchise Mode is the style of gameplay I'm most looking forward to but as I hear more about the game from the devs I realize that there is a learning curve - which is great because that means depth! So I've decided to play the Career Mode in the beta just to learn how everything works. Then during the days between beta and official launch (only 51 days away now!), I will plan the zoos I want to create in Franchise mode when everything starts up for real.

 

[Mister Toad]

I want difficulty levels for sure. Like, in JWE, we have challenge mode levels, but it should be applied to campaigns as well... also, even Jurassic mode in JWE is bit too easy for me. You just need to know that one build you need to use in every single challenge (well, except Sorna and new Nublar, there you have second build, which is even easier!), manage responsibly and save and reload each time you get bad contract and even without the last part, you will survive with ease. You can make it below timer with this way. That should not be an option in my opinion, it is just easy and after dealing with jurassic difficulty once, I am just too lazy not to reload game every time i get messed up contract. Btw. people complain about Claire's Sanctuary, that it is hard. Trust me, as a Starcraft, Age of Empires and Warcraft (not WoW but W1, W2 and W3) player (a bad player, but still!) I find this kind of games (zoo) too easy. Zoo Tycoon 1? Done. Wildlife Park 2? Done. Zoo Tycoon 2? Done. Dino Island? Done (easiest one probably so far). JWE? Done, but still too lazy to finish every single challenge mode, also lacking like 7 achievements out of laziness...

The thing is, I am not complaining. I just see, that this kind of games is just easy and they are supposed to be relaxing most of time. But some of us love this type of games and still, would like them to be a challenge. Now, I will probably play 500-1000 hours (nearly 700 on JWE already) of this game, even if it is v. easy. But I would like to get like 5-7 difficulty modes and the last one should be nightmarish (you can call it "Planetary difficulty" or something like that, so only really good players would say "yeah, I beat it on "planetary difficulty"" (bad joke, I know). This probably won't be done, as I am probably one of few, who want it this way and it really doesn't pay off, but I would love if they did this. Well, you can dream

Much love for the team making this game, I waited for it really long time.

 

[NikolaP]

I guess when people say for Frontier games bad management they thinking on tycoon impact rather then management. In Planet Zoo management is very present and as we could saw already it's literally everything about management but not tycoon, business, making money aspect but taking care of animals and run your zoo. I mean that is still some kind of management right.

I don't have nothing against hard tycoon mechanics and challenging management in Planet Zoo, actually I would like that to see, but still I think the focus will be mostly on creativity and utilization of piece by piece building mechanics. And those who wasn't happy with JWE and Planet Coaster won't be happy with Planet Zoo too.

Again I'm not criticizing the game, I love what I have seen so far, just my toughts about this management and tycoon hot subject.

 

[perafilozof]

Considering the three game modes, I would expect the online and persistent one, Franchise, to be the hardest. While the career mode is a prolonged tutorial and the Sandbox mode is a free play mode to experiment.