Planet Coaster Alpha Questions

[Bicceh]

Hi All,

I've been looking at grabbing the pre-order for Planet Coaster for some time. After years upon years of playing the RCT franchise (ignoring the obvious mobile failure) I can't wait to get stuck in, and in truth it's a choice between this and Parkitect, however there are a couple of questions that i have and would appreciate peoples advise.

1. I've seen a few videos (not many) but would like to know just how much is in the alpha right now? I've dug around looking at the Parkitect early access, but it doesn't look like there's much in there at the moment and I'm a bit hesitant to splash out £40 on something. I understand that this will also give me the final game if i do, but i could wait for that if the game is currently small in terms of what you can do.

2. Specs. I'm always worried about PC specs and how the game actually runs. I know it's an alpha, but would like advise on if the below could run it at a decent pace. I'm pretty obsessed with good framerate (it doesn't have to be perfect) so if the game runs terribly it would be a waste of my money. Specs below:

RAM: 8GB
GFX: Nvidia GTX 780 3GB
CPU: I5-2500k (Overclocked to 3.7ghz)

If you could let me know that would be great. Birthday tomorrow so I'd consider it a gift to myself!

 

[xyphic]

Spec-wise, you should be fine.

As for what's in the game, at the moment we're on Alpha 1 which is intended for testing of pathing and modular building. To that effect, it currently has a bunch of scenery and building elements in two themes (vanilla and pirate), a small number of flat rides and the pathing tools available. There are a few shop kiosks (burger, milkshake, hats) and toilets. You can unlock an early version of the coaster builder through a cheat code, but it's very rough around the edges. There's no management simulation yet, so if that's what you're interested in it's probably worth waiting. But if you're interested in using the modular building tools to get creative, you can have a lot of fun with the game.

In just under two weeks Frontier will be releasing Alpha 2 which should improve the coaster editor, and unlocks the terrain editor. The terrain editor is voxel based, so fully deformable. There should be fixes to paths, more control over scenery elements (we're currently limited to rotation around a single axis; the next alpha will allow rotation/movement in all three axes), more scenery and building elements in the two themes as well as some visual effects (flames, smoke, etc.). Again there's unlikely to be much in the way of management. We've been told there will be some more cheat codes but don't yet know what they'll be unlocking.

The other thing you get with the Early Bird is the chance to feed back to the developers at an early stage.

 

[Bicceh]

I'd be focussed more on creation so the management side wouldn't bother me too much.

What about specs? I've heard things about it performing badly after a set amount has been laid down on screen but i'm not too sure what to trust