I noticed this one myself a couple of months back when I was involved in a discord conversation with a few fellow mods.
At the time we were discussing Frontier's potential future plans for Elite: Dangerous and how the work being done in Planet Coaster could be replicated and expanded upon within Elite: Dangerous being that it's the same underlying engine (crowds, first person walking, voxel terrains and beautiful atmospheric effects come to mind from Planet Coaster). Inevitably the discussion turned to "The Outsider":
[video=youtube;Glr71X-cr84]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Glr71X-cr84[/video]
For those of you not in the know this game was being developed by Frontier a few years back but Codemasters pulled the plug and cancelled the game in 2011. We were discussing how the procedural city generation tech from this canned game would be a perfect fit for when we get to land on Earthlike worlds and speculated that Frontier's next game once they complete Planet Coaster would be to revisit this canned game, perhaps under a new name if Codemasters retained any of the IP.
That lead me to look into who owned the trademark which turned out to have been originally registered to Frontier but dropped. However whilst I was there I noticed Planet Safari had been trademarked at the same time as Planet Coaster was.
It's cool someone else has posted about it because it means I can share this story without worrying about how it may be perceived. (Although I'm no more knowledgeable than anyone else here, just making assumptions on what this means like everyone else).
I also agree that Planet Safari is likely to be a Zoo Tycoon-esque game and being that Frontier did the recent Xbox One version they are familiar with the genre. I can't say I've played it myself but I know from looking at reviews that some people were disappointed to a certain extent. Mainly due to bad UI, auto-pathing and hitting an enclosure limit despite having lots of room in the park. We don't however know how much of the downsides were due to Microsoft's direction or limitations enforced by the hardware as it also needed to be compatible with the Xbox 360 which is getting on these days. I'm sure Frontier will have taken subsequent feedback onboard before they move ahead with a new IP in this genre just as they have with RCT3 in Planet Coaster.
It is actually a smart choice for Frontier to go in this direction next because Animals can play into both Planet Coaster (Wild-esque expansion) and Elite: Dangerous (procedurally generated animal life) in the future. That's one of the things with Frontier, they're always looking to expand the capabilities of their engine. Whatever they're working on now or in the future will be relatively straight forward to adapt to their other games in some shape or form.
