Suggestions for PZ2

Villanelle

Villanelle
Heyo Frontier! THANK YOU from the bottom of our hearts for making the best game ever!!! And for providing the best community support / engagement that I've seen from really any company, anywhere.

I am sure this sentiment will be echoed by the great majority of us on this forum, so I really hope the community can excuse me for a moment for speaking broadly on our behalf and making a couple of assumptions here, being that, if we had it our way, you would keep making DLC and updates forever and we would snap up each and every one of them. However, we anticipate that one day (hopefully not too soon) you will start development on its sequel - Planet Zoo 2. And I thought, who better to provide some ideas for it than us - your dedicated community of players? Basically this thread aims to be some free market research for the Frontier development team!

It's hard to improve on perfection but I'm sure we'll be able to come up with some ideas, so I thought I'd start a thread with suggestions from the community on what features we would hope PZ2 might include. Here are some of our initial thoughts - these come from discussions some of us have had in other threads but I hope that we can expand on them here and perhaps even come up with a meta wishlist later down the line and vote on our favourites.


1. Animal Tiers / Zoo Status progression - your zoo starts off as a small local wildlife rehabilitation centre, able to house some common local species and a few common international species that are easy to care for. As you progress, you gain reputation (/ conservation points?) and your zoo levels up, and you can start to acquire more international species, more vulnerable species and eventually those with harder needs (and higher guest appeal). This would add some gamification and challenge to Franchise mode in a way that a few of us really enjoyed about the early Zoo Tycoon games. A lot of satisfaction would be had in levelling up your zoo and unlocking higher animal tiers. It also reflects real world processes for wildlife parks and zoos to need to prove themselves on the global stage before other zoos will trade with them. It's a bit weird to open a brand new empty zoo and a top international conservation-focused zoo is going to send you some of their beloved tigers for you to Joe Exotic! Perhaps not meeting welfare needs adequately would hinder you as well and cause other zoos to choose not to trade with you until you have shown improvement.

2. Map Design - thank you for bringing in the heightmaps feature. However I personally find them quite difficult and clunky to use. It asks quite a lot of players for them to design maps in another programme first and then import them - and for me, they never turn out how I'd like them to. It would be great if this feature was built in to the game infrastructure right from the outset and if we could use simple drawing and customisation tools to design and save our maps right at the start.

3. Paths - I am sure that you are already well aware of this one! A seamless pathing mechanic in the next game seems like a must-have. Null elevated paths for bridges and raised walkways too please.

4. More depth and challenge to Franchise mode - some of us feel that it's quite easy to master Franchise mode, even on hard mode, and make a steady income. It would be fun if there were some additional features that added depth and challenge to this mode of play. Some suggestions include random scenarios or challenges that pop up that you could choose to take on - these would incur some risks and reward so it would provide some player choice about what they feel ready to handle. For example, impress a particular guest (you kind of have this with the inspector visits but they are easy to achieve and not specific / unique enough each time to maintain interest). Or, deal with a disaster of some kind (again, diseases provide this and do provide some challenge but again, could be more varied and require a bit more player attention and strategy). Rehabilitate local wildlife and have programmes set up to release it to the wild - again this is partially implemented by being able to release animals to the wild - but what if we had to set up a specific kind of habitat and hire a particular type of staff member to train them for release before we can release them to the wild? And what if they needed to be transported to another zoo in the particular country for rehabilitation? This would work well across our Franchises and provide a need to set up a zoo in say, Saharan Africa in order to release our Scimitar Oryx etc.

5. VR camera mode to walk with the animals - I'm struggling to think how your animal animations could be any better. They are so, so beautiful. The only improvement I can imagine that would take us deeper into the 21st century is a VR mode that we could enter to walk among our animals - in their habitats as a keeper or through our parks as a guest. Please keep your animals just as beautiful as they are - as time has gone on they have become more and more realistic and I am sure I speak for all of us when I say that this is one of the best aspects of Planet Zoo and what separates it from any other zoo sim out there.


Okay community, over to you! Please add your suggestions and later on I'll try to put together a meta-wishlist or seek the help from someone here who has the expertise on how to do this. Let's see what we can come up with!

I hope this isn't too presumptive and that it doesn't upset anyone who wants the focus to remain on PZ1 and the DLC/updates that I know we are still very hungry for. This is a long-term perspective and hopefully just a fun thread for us to bounce ideas around.
 

synthetase

synthetase
More intra type variety in base game and DLCs. Like Grevy's Zebra as well as Plains Zebra AND Timber and Arctic Wolf BOTH in base game. Fennec and Bat-eared Foxes occurring in a DLC together. Maybe more subspecies?
Replace Bengal Tiger with Sumatran Tiger.
Individual personalities in your animals.
Zookeeper mode.
Birds!
More ambience.
Coastal Map.
City Map.
Franchise mode offline version.
 

Orkan

Orkan
. Exhibit Scaling
. More Food/drink/souvenir stalls
. Gift shop decor
. Ride Reskins
. More SA focus
. Iconic zoo species from all areas in base game, and extras in DLCs
. Sign Editor so you can make custom signage in-game without importing images (for general and animal signs)
.
 

NZFanatic

NZFanatic
Here are a few ideas:
  • Animals at the Species Level (e.g. Brown Bear) with specific subspecies available through a drop-down menu (e.g. grizzly bear, Eurasian brown bear).
  • More customisable exhibits. I don't care if the animals are still glorified props, but the ability to build exhibits from scratch with their own set of decor, foliage, enrichment, and so on would be good.
  • Flying birds, given how convinced I am that they're being withheld for a sequel anyway.
  • Click-and-drag prop fences. These were designed to be used in small sections, but from day one people were using them to cover large areas. They're super tedious to individually place and the fact that the centrepoint of the movement axis is in the middle of most of them makes this needlessly complicated as well. Giving us a selection of decorative fences that can be placed like barriers would be awesome.
  • Less individual building pieces, but the same amount of textures; so, you get a blank 4m wall, and apply the texture you want from a drop-down menu (red brick, dry stone, plaster, etc.). This will make the building menu easier to navigate.
  • 1000x more variety of educational materials without forcing the player to learn how to do graphic design. The billboards are great, but come on; surely Frontier has in-house artists that they could put on the job of designing new habitat education boards to fit a 1x1 billboard.
  • Custom gift shops. The way I imagine this is that you start by placing the counter where items are purchased, fill an area with shelves, racks, and so on, and then link those to the counter. Guests come in, browse, go to the counter to make their purchase.
  • Less obtuse staff paths, or Staff Only barriers and signs that prevent guest movement while allowing staff movement. The staff paths are ugly.
  • The ability to add a solid wall to the side of an elevated path instead of empty space + path supports. This would be a lot better than having to place individual pieces for a retaining wall.
  • Animal foliage preferences based on function not biome or geography. A monkey doesn't care if the tree in its habitat is from Tropical South America, it cares that it can climb it. Give animals needs like shade, scratching, climbing, resting, and so on, and translate these to foliage. When I open a Temperate Europe map I'm not planning on using trees and plants that absolutely cannot grow outdoors.
  • A much wider variety of animations. I want to see parents carrying their offspring, inter-species play and curiosity, dogs and otters sleeping in piles, and so on.
  • More variation in social structures. Design social needs and limits at the species level, not based on whatever rig the animal is made out of.
  • On that note, more unique rigs for species that need them. Looking at the orangutan as the best example, it should have had its own rig from the start, with its own animations. Recycling the gorilla rig for the orangutan simply doesn't cut it. We have the same problem with the okapi.
I probably have more but this is at the forefront of my mind just now.
 

Villanelle

Villanelle
NZFanatic said:
Here are a few ideas:
  • Animals at the Species Level (e.g. Brown Bear) with specific subspecies available through a drop-down menu (e.g. grizzly bear, Eurasian brown bear).
  • More customisable exhibits. I don't care if the animals are still glorified props, but the ability to build exhibits from scratch with their own set of decor, foliage, enrichment, and so on would be good.
  • Flying birds, given how convinced I am that they're being withheld for a sequel anyway.
  • Click-and-drag prop fences. These were designed to be used in small sections, but from day one people were using them to cover large areas. They're super tedious to individually place and the fact that the centrepoint of the movement axis is in the middle of most of them makes this needlessly complicated as well. Giving us a selection of decorative fences that can be placed like barriers would be awesome.
  • Less individual building pieces, but the same amount of textures; so, you get a blank 4m wall, and apply the texture you want from a drop-down menu (red brick, dry stone, plaster, etc.). This will make the building menu easier to navigate.
  • 1000x more variety of educational materials without forcing the player to learn how to do graphic design. The billboards are great, but come on; surely Frontier has in-house artists that they could put on the job of designing new habitat education boards to fit a 1x1 billboard.
  • Custom gift shops. The way I imagine this is that you start by placing the counter where items are purchased, fill an area with shelves, racks, and so on, and then link those to the counter. Guests come in, browse, go to the counter to make their purchase.
  • Less obtuse staff paths, or Staff Only barriers and signs that prevent guest movement while allowing staff movement. The staff paths are ugly.
  • The ability to add a solid wall to the side of an elevated path instead of empty space + path supports. This would be a lot better than having to place individual pieces for a retaining wall.
  • Animal foliage preferences based on function not biome or geography. A monkey doesn't care if the tree in its habitat is from Tropical South America, it cares that it can climb it. Give animals needs like shade, scratching, climbing, resting, and so on, and translate these to foliage. When I open a Temperate Europe map I'm not planning on using trees and plants that absolutely cannot grow outdoors.
  • A much wider variety of animations. I want to see parents carrying their offspring, inter-species play and curiosity, dogs and otters sleeping in piles, and so on.
  • More variation in social structures. Design social needs and limits at the species level, not based on whatever rig the animal is made out of.
  • On that note, more unique rigs for species that need them. Looking at the orangutan as the best example, it should have had its own rig from the start, with its own animations. Recycling the gorilla rig for the orangutan simply doesn't cut it. We have the same problem with the okapi.
I probably have more but this is at the forefront of my mind just now.
Click to expand...
Hell yes to all of these! Solid list of suggestions 👍
 
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