Now that the beta is over, can Frontier please acknowledge the time issue?

I agree elephants SHOULD be celebrated but at the moment is a massive rush to go as slow as possible including ive see 3hrs = 1 yr game play that means that a new born elephant takes 45 Hours game play to mature. 45 hrs game play is not acheivable Im doing well if I play 5 or 6 hours A WEEK so over two months. There is no point in me trying to do it so get rid of the elephants they are unachievable

The clammer at the moment is the slowest speed is two fast - the last couple of days Ive found the fastest speed to slow

I think it's important to note that no one is arguing against the ability to speed up the game as they see fit. So even if it did hypothetically change to 1 year = 3 hours, it wouldn't take you 2 months to see a young elephant grow up. I imagine if your sole focus is elephants, you will spend a lot of time with the game sped up. So if you can even 2x the speed, it will take a month at the rate you play. 3x the speed, even less.

What's being asked for is a slower speed and I think for good reason. No, I don't think it should take hundreds of real time hours to see a baby elephant grow up. But I also feel like it should definitely take more than an hour or two to see many, many other animals have several sets of offspring (or none, based on the last beta update but hopefully that changes) and live out their whole lives and die. You keep using the elephant as justification for a faster speed, but please remember there are 50+ other animal species that people love and few of them come close to the aging or breeding mechanics of tortoises and elephants. I hate that I felt like I didn't have time to enjoy my animals during the beta because they were constantly dying of old age. I'm talking ungulates, canines, felines... all the species that only live a decade or two. In a single average sitting of playing Planet Zoo, I could see a lion be born and die while never once using the time speed change. That's not fun to me. Why did Frontier bother making animals have unique patterns if they're just going to die in a couple real life hours?

I expect I'm going to enjoy the option to turn off animal aging in sandbox mode on the game's release. Not because I don't want to see any animals age, but because I want to take a full hour to build a fancy exhibit without the game paused and not seeing a fraction of my animal population die in that amount of time. I would love to see the animals live for more than one sitting of the game for me. But then, I STILL DO want to see an option for players to speed up time. I think that's an important element to skip to major events in your zoo, and to make breeding certain animals more realistic. But if given the option to choose between being able to see a baby elephant grow over 45 hours of real time and having all of my other animals live longer lives that I can also follow and enjoy or having baby elephant grow up in a third the time while I don't even have a physical option in the game to make my other animals live long enough to be fun, I'm always going to choose the former. I'd be way more excited to see a baby elephant realistically take a long time to grow up then never even get a chance to know the names of the dozens of springbok that had come and gone since it's birth. I enjoy all animals in my pretend zoos. Not just the big ones.

Just to clarify, I am pro a slower time passage but also feel strongly about having an adequate time speed up option for those who would want it.
 
\my worry about time is the clammer at the moment is to get it as slow as possible - don't do it at the expense of the longer living animals. There were 36 animal types in BETA 5 had a maturity over 10 Years. 3 game hours per year means that over 15% of the animals take 30 Hours of play at that speed

Average life span of the 36 - 30years maturity 5 years

Balancing is that - you have a base some you improve but you equally make it worse for others

AT the moment its a loud voice clambering for slower - that could kill the game play for 15% of the animals

30 hours of gamer play is over a month for me - probably 2 months - if not correctly balanced its not worth playing 15% of the animals

By the way I'm good with my numbers I transferred the zoopedia into a spreadsheet for myself
 
Though I am fully on the side of wanting the game to progress slower, we do all have to remind ourselves that this is a very high profile game company, not just some random indy devs. People have mentioned this in a few threads already, but they likely aren't even allowed to confirm or deny features any less obvious than "There will definitely be animals! :)" due to PR and ND agreements. Everyone is saying "Its bad PR not to acknowledge this!!!" But it really isn't. There's only a handful of the actual percentage of people who are going to be playing this game in these forums right now. They acknowledged us as best they could, but there's a huge difference between "ignoring" some loud forum users versus confirming they will be slowing down the game, running into backend issues following through on it, having to launch the game at the original speed, and having a million different gaming journal articles written about what huge liars they are.

I'm sure they're doing what they can, and if its an unbelievably huge issue at launch they can STILL patch in the adjusted speeds after the fact. They've got a good track record, there's no point getting out your pitchforks about it. I want it slower just as much as the next person but its not urgent, we can't even play the game anymore. We'll just have to wait and see what'll happen in November.
 
\my worry about time is the clammer at the moment is to get it as slow as possible - don't do it at the expense of the longer living animals. There were 36 animal types in BETA 5 had a maturity over 10 Years. 3 game hours per year means that over 15% of the animals take 30 Hours of play at that speed

Average life span of the 36 - 30years maturity 5 years

Balancing is that - you have a base some you improve but you equally make it worse for others

AT the moment its a loud voice clambering for slower - that could kill the game play for 15% of the animals

30 hours of gamer play is over a month for me - probably 2 months - if not correctly balanced its not worth playing 15% of the animals

By the way I'm good with my numbers I transferred the zoopedia into a spreadsheet for myself

Of course opinions differ on this matter. I for one would love to have 'only' one or two elephant families for an incredibly long time in my zoo, as this is also the case in real zoos. But of course other people might want to breed more elephants and have a more active market with elephants.

However as it is now, time is too fast for a lot of people and you can only speed it up even more in game. You keep bringing up the 30 hours of gameplay for an elephant to reach maturity, without mentioning that you can speed up time. If time is slowed, sped up time will have a real good purpose. For the reasons you mentioned and more.

Also saying slowing down time kills gameplay for roughly 15% of the animals is plain untrue in my opinion. Just because they aren't born and die as fast as they do now, doesn't mean they won't serve a purpose. Elephants (and other comparable animals) will still be great animals for your zoo and have extremely high appeal for guests, it just takes a little longer which makes sense.

Again, not saying your opinion is wrong, just stating why I personally disagree with it.
 
The real problem is, 30 hours of gameplay is different for everybody. I can easily play that in a week (yes, even with a job and family and real animals). For some people, that's impossible. So there is no perfect argument to exactly how many hours it should or should not take for something to happen in a game. Who should set the pace? Casual gamers or career gamers?

But yes, balance is critical either way. The problem with a game going for realism is you can't perfectly compare animals with a lifespan of 10 years to animals with a lifespan of 60+ years. If time is too fast, the overwhelming majority of species die too fast. If it's too long, breeding animals that take a while to mature is time consuming (which I would argue isn't even a bad thing...). Like you said, you can't fix one side of the argument without hurting the other. You say a faster game would make 15% of the species not worth it. Not worth it for what? It's a zoo game, not a breeding game. I'm sure improving genetics and breeding will be a goal for many people, but it's not the only goal. Having great exhibits, great welfare, and happy guests are also all goals in a zoo game. My goal is just to build a great looking zoo, and have animals whom I can enjoy. I don't enjoy most animals in the game's current state because they are just expendable as the guests. They come and they go quickly. I don't enjoy that, and that loud clammering voice obviously doesn't either. I didn't even bother to rename my animals in the beta. Why should I? They'll be dead in an hour and I'll have to come up with a slew of new names anyway.

Based on your argument, and my different play-style and personal goals for the game, I'd argue the remaining 85% of the animals you're referring to are "not worth playing" because they die too quickly to be fun. It's a two sided coin. That's why I would argue for both slower time passage overall and the option to speed time up further. This could benefit players of both styles. The alternative is to remove some of the realism and make, say, elephants mature younger or breed sooner. So the question is do we want realism or not? And if we choose realism, how do you find balance? I think the game as it stands right now favors one side more than the other. There's a speed up option to make your elephants breed sooner. There's no button to make my lions live longer then one game sitting for me. And maybe that's why the clammer is so loud. We shouldn't make extreme changes, and I hope FD treads lightly. But something about the game now is off and it's frustrating many people, that's why they're loud.
 
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\my worry about time is the clammer at the moment is to get it as slow as possible - don't do it at the expense of the longer living animals. There were 36 animal types in BETA 5 had a maturity over 10 Years. 3 game hours per year means that over 15% of the animals take 30 Hours of play at that speed

Average life span of the 36 - 30years maturity 5 years

Balancing is that - you have a base some you improve but you equally make it worse for others

AT the moment its a loud voice clambering for slower - that could kill the game play for 15% of the animals

30 hours of gamer play is over a month for me - probably 2 months - if not correctly balanced its not worth playing 15% of the animals

By the way I'm good with my numbers I transferred the zoopedia into a spreadsheet for myself
We don't want that they cancel the current fast ones... we know they are important for people with less time or other goals in the game (like fast exchange of animals and making profit)... but the current state is bad for many people (like you see) to really enjoy their animals. You could play 3 times forward if that's the prefered speed to you (or 4 or 5 times quicker)... but (to be fair) there has to be slower ones to enjoy the game relaxed with the goal to get attached, to build while time passes. The most of us play mostly paused and I think you understand that it shouldn't be like that for us. That's our opinion... and again, we don't want to cancel the actual modes, maybe we would use them from time to time too... but I for example never had the feeling to press the second or third mode, because in the first mode everything went crazy already and I was already stressed out with 6 habitats and 4 vivariums... the bigger the zoo gets, the more you can't get attached to animals in the zoo and you more and more just patch up problems (which occur 5 minutes later and massive again)...so you patch up again...in paused mode, because your whole zoo dies out if you don't. That isn't fun for many people, like you see here... we would love to observe the animals, to build an attractive park, to optimise habitats because of things we observed and so on... .
 
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I agree that I would like options to control the timescale/speed of the game, I don't like the idea of animals being born and dying within the span of two gaming sessions but I'm aware some people from the beta liked the timescale as it was so I'd just like for there to be options so everyone can have their best experience :) There's a lot of posts mentioning this in the feedback section and I hope the devs take notice and do something before launch :D Fingers crossed!
 
Honestly, even tho slower baseline time for gameplay would be nice, I feel current speed worked for me, I had over 100 hours of gameplay in the beta and I had some of my animals live the entire beta due to the way I managed them using the trade centre, technically if time were to be increased even in the slightest my animals would basically be immortal, they would never die... and death is a part of the gameplay, we are not supposed to have immortal animals... I could keep a 100% stat animal forever, if I just brought him out to breed then stored him away when done...
 
That's a bit of an exploit, so not what I was referring to. My ideal game wouldn't have me storing animals to keep them alive forever. Perhaps they should continue to age while in the trade center, to prevent exactly that scenario. Someone could definitely exploit things in franchise mode by storing gold stud animals. I also don't want immortal animals in the game. I just don't want to see animals born and die in the same gameplay session. I don't like one extreme, so I certainly don't want the other either.
 
Honestly, even tho slower baseline time for gameplay would be nice, I feel current speed worked for me, I had over 100 hours of gameplay in the beta and I had some of my animals live the entire beta due to the way I managed them using the trade centre, technically if time were to be increased even in the slightest my animals would basically be immortal, they would never die... and death is a part of the gameplay, we are not supposed to have immortal animals... I could keep a 100% stat animal forever, if I just brought him out to breed then stored him away when done...
At that point you're definitely not playing the game "as intended" : P Nothing wrong with that, but I think optimizing the game with exploits in mind would be a bad idea for everyone. I'd imagine if this were an actually widely used exploit that they may just add aging into stored animals once they ever get released onto your zoo. I think part of the reason there's so many people vocally advocating for slower in game speed is because they advertised the fact that you were meant to bond to your animals and that they weren't just mindless throwaways.

Still, I am a fan of options and accessibility. Even though I want slower game speed, I'd prefer it were optional. Everyone should have the right to play their games how they want to.
 
Yeah, I understand but it was a feature and I did not feel like I was exploiting the game as it was not unnoticed or a secret, my point being, if time were to be slowed, in franchise mode, it would have to take into consideration a lot more than just the speed, a lot of other things would need to be considered in order for that one thing to be accomplished, not saying it is not possible, just saying it's not as easy as as making the time longer... If time is longer, then they might need to adjust all animals lifespans in the Wikipedia, they will have to change the rate of food decay, they will need to make the staff work according to the time scale and the diseases and what not that will come into play will have to be scaled to the new time and what not also...

I enjoy focusing mostly on the breeding aspect of the game, one of my favorite things to do was to go into the live mode camera and watch my tigers go about their day, I would follow my tiger around on normal game speed, and on normal speed my game would never have 100 issues, i mainly followed my tigers around to wait for them to initiate breeding animations so I would be able to swap out to another female for my male to breed to, if i had to fast forward time it would be less fun to watch... I guess it could be a bit longer, it took me half an hour of real life time to breed 6 female tigers on normal game speed without fast forwarding time.
But how long is long enough for someone who plays like I do, how long should we have to spend waiting for animals to get pregnant, what is the correct balance for breeding.
Just a lot of stuff needs to be taken into consideration, I agree current time feels a little fast, but I think when managed correctly it is perfect for franchise... And when the game officially comes out we will have offline franchise and sandbox and the scenario mode so there will be plenty of alternatives to the too fast speed, I just kind of feel like now that I am thinking more about the whole that the speed of franchise mode fits, but maybe in scenario mode it could be slower and in sandbox its determined via player... so it feels like maybe it all works out to appeal to everyone?
 
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It's just not a "normal" speed and you didn't really understand... we don't want changes on lifetime, birthrates or something... we just want more time, so we have more time with our animals. And no... the keepers and all don't need to be adjusted eigther, they just would have more time to complete their tasks... because animals get slower hungry and everything - it's still a month until they feed again. We want longer days, weeks and years... not the a whole another structure.
In the end of your thinking we would have slower passing days, with the same amount of notifications and other stuff... just the calender on the right bottom would be slower - everything else would be the same as in currently fast modes... that don't even makes sense 😂 why would we asking for the slower mode then?
Think about the logic!
We have complete different playstyles... you are more the breeding and sale manager, we like to spend time with the animals before they breed, while they are a social family, get older and die. I'm happy you had time to observe your tigers, everytime I wanted to do this,my zoo switched into a notification horror - births, deads, hunger, broken fences and so on... I had at least 15 notifications in just 1-3 minutes all the time! So I didn't have time, not even 1-3 minutes... instead I needed to pause 1000 times to save my zoo before it ruins itself somehow.
I would have understand the argument of conversation points... but even that, is not so much important for us, because we enjoy completly different and you got something wrong why we ask for it.
 
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I'm fine with adding a slower timepace for this game... As long as the normal speed (as in the beta) is still present.. I had no issues with it.

I think people should be vocal about both sides of this time discussion.. I was silent when a lot of people started complaining about the fertility/birth rates before the first tweak, they changed it and then a lot of people complained about the sudden lack of births (including me)

Just formulating my earlier opinion a bit better, i was wrong with that 'short' statement about using the buttons (currently stress at work, have to read most posts at least 2 times):
I do think some people need to learn using the speed/time buttons properly in this game. But for people who want to be connected with their (certain) animals, the normal speed doesn't offer enough, adding 2 slower options would work (I guess).. I won't be using it, but I don't think it harms anyone :p
 
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