The improvements of this Complete edition are stated as follows on the steam page: "Play RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 in widescreen for the first time with full 1080p resolution and increased compatibility for new PC hardware." But there was already support for widescreen and resolutions higher than 1080p in the old version of the game (but the UI didn't scale very well). But ok, for this you had to do a simple edit of a file (
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/RollerCoaster_Tycoon_3#Widescreen_resolution) to get both of these things. Aside for some compatibility fixes, which hopefully also fixes this bug (crashing of the game when you try to run it) that plagues almost anyone who freshly installs the game:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/RollerCoaster_Tycoon_3#Generic_crash_issues But aside from this resolution-thingy and maybe some compatibility-fixes, did anything else get improved? Because this seems to be just a re-release of a old game (after the big lawsuit with Atari and RCT3 going off the market as a result of that), which isn't a bad thing of course
Keep up the good work Frontier and awesome that you managed to aquire the publishing rights to RCT3.
Better question... What about those of us who already own RTC 3 Platinum? Can we get it activated on our Steam accounts? Is there at least a discount?
They won't offer an upgrade or discount for this reason:
Source: https://twitter.com/frontierdev/status/1303349691535560708
Which sounds like a very sad but valid reason for Frontier to do this. They seem to have fully cut ties with Atari (and the other way around) after the lawsuits in the past. They don't even have, never had actually, access to the RCT3 Platinum Steam page; they probably can't implement a check to see if you bought a version of the game that they didn't publish.
But I think Frontier is gonna have a bit of a marketing-problem: I would mention on the Steam page why you guys can't offer Platinum owners a discount or upgrade to avoid people complaining about that/get confused by it. Also, the "Enhanced for PC" description on the Steam page seems to disappoint many people when they look at the announcement video. Maybe you could describe in more detail in what aspects you improved the game for widescreen support and 1080p support? Maybe even make a promotional video about it? That would avoid a lot of unhappy people as you see a lot of questions floating around about the differences between the Complete Edition and Platinum. Did you add 64-bit support for the game or is that only for the MacOS-release? If you did that, maybe also mention that with the note that you can now thus build bigger parks because of that. That would be a good marketing-push. Overall: I'm afraid that this well-meant intention to put this game back on the storefronts will blow up in your face (on Steam at least, the Switch release is awesome!) if you guys don't adjust some of the marketing...
Hopefully you guys can do something with this feedback
Edit: When I looked at the announcement trailer for this complete edition, I saw the video should be of 1080p (double-checked and I was watching the 1080p version), but it seemed to be of quite low quality/bitrate. It almost looks like 720p or even lower. It looks like it was upscaled from a much lower resolution than 1080p... This makes the game look much worse than it really is. Hopefully you guys could make a new version of this announcement trailer that is of higher quality and thus shows the game in its full glory.
Edit2: I see that the price of the Complete Edition on the Switch is 29.99 euros for pre-purchase. This is not that much luckily, although it is also not that cheap as the much newer Jurassic World Evolution on Switch is 60 bucks; I think it is almost the perfect balance in price for the Switch. But I hope the PC-release will be quite a bit lower, like half that price (15 or 20 euros), as otherwise a lot of people will probably complain about this; they know that a lot more work went into the Switch port than the new PC-version + it is a very old game now. I don't think people will wanna pay 30 euros for this game on Steam.