- Tropical should have been an animal pack, a tropical theme with no monkey or bird is so weird. The Indonesia jungle them is super cool though. The animals picked were fantastic, the issue is just I think the pack needed more. Also Frontier picked “the wrong” sloth, would have preferred two toed, but honestly not pressed about it.
- Arid, I don’t need to say much, but I’ll say it anyway. Every animal is modeled and animated beautifully, easily some of the best looking hoofstock in the game. Honestly I think the sandcat was great, and the cape porcupine is just perfect. Why the viper though? Beautiful animal, just the weirdest exhibit choice in the game. But yeah it’s the ungulate thing. Each animal 100% deserves to be in game. I know everyone hated on it at the time, the dama gazelle is so pretty. But yes, too many ungulates is overkill. I like them in game now, but we could have picked one to be a Baboon or Secretary Bird.
- The only thing with Oceania for me personally is the stream really made me think we were gonna get the lorikeet, then we got the bat. Don’t hate the bat, but the lorikeet seemed so real at the time….
- Eurasia was also very ungulate heavy, but we didn’t double up on one group. Also for Europeans the wisent and the boar was way too important not to include. If I had to have one complaint I would have swapped the sloth bear and the siaga antelope. Obviously I’m happy in game now that they are here, but I won’t lie and say I think they should have been something else. Also swan carries hard here.
So maybe me it isn’t that Frontier picks too wrong all that often, it’s just they give us what they want but not exactly how we would want it. Granted that can have repercussions for the game.
I agree with most of this. A tropical animal pack would have been
really great and could have alleviated some of the current "we need more South American animals" discourse. But then again... I'm super glad we got that Indonesian theme. I was
stoked for all of the habitat animals but this was the first pack where I was even
more excited for the scenery! Hah.
Arid I still kinda feel like the reason we got so many ungulates was because of the detailing that went into the key picks...
What I find interesting about the Eurasia pack is that it's ungulate heavy but it didn't bug me! I think because they all felt fairly "unique." Which is a stark contrast to Arid where it just bummed me out. LOL
My theory: things would have been different, but not necessarily better. I’m sure we would have got the same number of birds and monkeys, but we wouldn’t have got all the other amazing animals we got. The meta wishlist was a fantastic tool for everyone to gage community interest and for frontier to make decisions about what animals to add.
There's a few animals we would have undoubtedly gotten regardless. But there's other species that found their way into the game because of that wishlist. I'm convinced of that. I feel corny saying it but it really does feel cool to have been a part of it all inn a very, very small way.
But TBH one of the really cool things about the game in general is how much the fans got to "shape" it. People can say Frontier makes mistakes or doesn't listen all they want but the reality is... Most of that first BroNation feature wishlist wound up in the game. They updated their DLC strategy based on fan feedback (animal packs). They've implemented other features nobody asked for. They've twisted their own vision to incorporate animals into the game that people wanted (e.g., sloths). And so on.
Internal_01 on SteamDB has updated — is that a DLC sign?
Either that or the outsource_lqa, more often we lean onto the lqa file. But more and more files are getting updated which is good news at least for the spring dlc.
If I recall, that's a version for testing. Take that with a grain of salt but... That's just what I'm remembering and I can't find any evidence to back that up but yeah it's probably a good sign!
Also kind of a LOL at what I said earlier about SteamDB getting updated the second we decided it wasn't trustworthy this time around. LOL
I actually forgot about that, what's your prediction for the dlc release magical fortune teller?
