Hi, its me, the one weirdo who likes the dogs. Let me explain why i believe calling the canines cheap unnecessary filler is an unjust statement.
1. All 3 are relativly common zoo animals.
Both the dhole and arctic wolf are quite common zoo animals in zoos across all budget ranges. Even the dingo is the fifth most common habitat animal type outside of australia if we group the kangaroos species together, aswell as the wallabys, being something like 1. Wallaby, 2. Emu, 3. Kangaroo, 4. Cassowary and 5. Dingo.
2. Canines fill a very unique niche of a midsized terrestrial carnivore that lives in groups. Out of my head the only non canine fitting that describtion are lions and maybe giant otters if you disregard the terresstial.
This means, that wolflike canines have very distinct challanges when building a habitat for them and are often unlike anything else on theire biosphere.
Taking asia as an example, if i was to build a tiger, a dhole, a sloth bear and a clouded leopard habitat, all 4 of these should look different to fit the needs and challanges of each of the 4 animals, making all 4 of them a good addition from a gameplay point of view.
3. They bring diversity to the packs.
The best example of this would be the dingo. I dont argue that another animal like the wombat would have been nice, maybe even nicer but lets look at this pack and the most common animals from before. You might notice, 2 of them are very samey, being kangaroo and wallaby, as well as emu and cassowary, being both macropods and rhatites respectivly.
So they did a logical step of taking a very rare wild card thats also very unique and iconic with the koala and another iconic and the next most common animal with the dingo, both bringing very unique challanges compared to the other 3 australian animals.
The most common criticism of the australian animal selection in the game is, that we need, need, need a wallaby and an emu, but a dlc with two macropods and two rhatites would have been a bad, if not worse move by frontier for diversity in gameplay.
My take is, that there should have been the wallaby or atleast the emu in the basegame, with the emu being a perfect deluxe edition animal instead of the thompsons gazelle, but you get my point.
Even now this gameplay based assesment holds true with the inclusion of the platypus and while i still believe they should be in the game just because how common they are in zoo, from a straight up gameplay perspective the emu adds next to nothing as a less flashy cassowary and the wallabys main point of inclusion would simple be that its small, making animals like the burrowing wombat, the climbing tree kangaroo, the gracefull black swan and the small carnivore of the tassy devil a more appealing 4+1 pack then exchanging any of them for emu and wallaby.
Tdlr: Dogs are fine, gameplay wise each one was an allright decision, frontier pls oceania animal pack when?
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