Your First Impressions

How are you finding your first day with the full release, everyone?

My thoughts/feelings are as follows:

Plus points
  • Some nice surprises in the animals list I didn't think were going to be in the game.
  • Nice to see there's a part 2 & 3 to the tutorial.
  • Scenery/building pieces are great (what you'd expect from a Planet game now)
  • Donation points spin less aggressively :p
  • Holding the mouse over incompatible plants in the animal welfare screen now highlights the plants in the habitat (sadly this isn't clickable though)
  • Menu/ui/filter tweaks make for nice QOL changes
Negative points
  • Wolves are still not right after the beta. Packs/family units are not possible.
  • Issues/bugs from the beta are still in the game.
  • Some ui elements are frustrating.
  • No family trees
  • Animals still being held in boxes without the player knowing this has happened
  • I gave my chimps an entire island in the second campaign tutorial. I fulfilled all their needs apart from space. There were four chimps living in a huge area but the game kept telling me they didn't have enough space. Perhaps this meant that they couldn't traverse all of the space I had given them - I don't know (there's no more information provided).
 
Yeah, I hear the game is still pretty buggy. I feel like they fixed all the huge bugs they could, as I doubt they had enough time to fix them all.
 

Bo Marit

Lead Community Manager
Frontier
How are you finding your first day with the full release, everyone?

My thoughts/feelings are as follows:

Plus points
  • Some nice surprises in the animals list I didn't think were going to be in the game.
  • Nice to see there's a part 2 & 3 to the tutorial.
  • Scenery/building pieces are great (what you'd expect from a Planet game now)
  • Donation points spin less aggressively :p
  • Holding the mouse over incompatible plants in the animal welfare screen now highlights the plants in the habitat (sadly this isn't clickable though)
  • Menu/ui/filter tweaks make for nice QOL changes
Negative points
  • Wolves are still not right after the beta. Packs/family units are not possible.
  • Issues/bugs from the beta are still in the game.
  • Some ui elements are frustrating.
  • No family trees
  • Animals still being held in boxes without the player knowing this has happened
  • I gave my chimps an entire island in the second campaign tutorial. I fulfilled all their needs apart from space. There were four chimps living in a huge area but the game kept telling me they didn't have enough space. Perhaps this meant that they couldn't traverse all of the space I had given them - I don't know (there's no more information provided).

Hiya! What a great first impression and glad to see you found some surprises in there too!

Just wanted to quickly address some of your negative points:
  • Have passed on the feedback about Wolves;
  • Please check the Issue Tracker for most common bugs/issues, and if you don't see yours (you haven't specified them here so couldn't check for you) please report them so we can investigate and help you :)
  • Which UI elements aren't working for you? It'd be good to see some feedback so I can pass something more concrete to the team!
  • All the other points are being looked at, so thank you for taking the time to write it down!
 
Hiya! What a great first impression and glad to see you found some surprises in there too!

Just wanted to quickly address some of your negative points:
  • Have passed on the feedback about Wolves;
  • Please check the Issue Tracker for most common bugs/issues, and if you don't see yours (you haven't specified them here so couldn't check for you) please report them so we can investigate and help you :)
  • Which UI elements aren't working for you? It'd be good to see some feedback so I can pass something more concrete to the team!
  • All the other points are being looked at, so thank you for taking the time to write it down!

Hi Bo,

I appreciate your response to my points. Thank you, as ever, for wading through all our posts.

As you asked, I will share this link with you about some of the issues I had with the ui (though not all - I will try to get onto the issue tracker for any others):
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/beta-new-issues-that-are-now-in-the-full-release.527990/

Also, it seems that anything that has an online component (in my case signing up to the newsletter and from what I've seen with other players, selecting animals in franchise mode's animal trading menu), it's not possible to click on certain buttons. I have seen a temporary fix for this is changing either from windowed to fullscreen or the other way round. I'm not worrying about this that much at the moment however as I'm playing the campaign and sandbox at the mo.

Thank you for passing on the other points to the dev team.
 
The tutorial was cool, as soon as I started my own zoo, the keepers won't refill the animals food. I can click the water trough and select call keeper, and he comes and refills the water, but when i try it with the food trough, he just comes in, stands still, and then walks out the enclosure. Animals are gonna have to eat themselves soon. Is there any other way i can feed the animals? First impressions are that it seems like a cool game, but has a pretty game-breaking bug at the moment :\
 
The tutorial was cool, as soon as I started my own zoo, the keepers won't refill the animals food. I can click the water trough and select call keeper, and he comes and refills the water, but when i try it with the food trough, he just comes in, stands still, and then walks out the enclosure. Animals are gonna have to eat themselves soon. Is there any other way i can feed the animals? First impressions are that it seems like a cool game, but has a pretty game-breaking bug at the moment :\

I'd check a few things when it comes to food:

  • Got a keeper hut nearby?
  • The right trough?
  • Any food enrichment items in the habitat?
  • Is the keeper leaving to go and prepare food to bring back?

Hope you don't lose your animals T_T
 
How are you finding your first day with the full release, everyone?

Having a ton of fun in sandbox, played for 5 hours straight. There's still a ton of management aspects in this mode like guests and animal welfare, but it lets you be a little more creative. I built 3 habitats.

First Impressions
  • I visited my own zoo twice, which was pretty funny!
  • While it would be fun to have longer life spans to get to know the animals, I kind of don't want them because I want to breed animals too. So I think it's perfect now.
  • Game gets laggy for me in high guest areas, no surprise.
  • Surprisingly haven't encountered any bugs yet. Keepers are all working as intended for me.They're filling enrichment > feeders and the animals are always at a 100% nutrition. (I am setting work zones and have plenty of keepers)
 
My first impressions aren't as high as I expected they might be.

  • Only 6 animals were available on the market to start the game (If I restart maybe there would be more). Of the six there was only 1 male/female pair (Baird Tapir).
  • Breeding seems next to non-existent. It took 8 in game years for the Baird Tapirs to have their first cub. They had a second before they both died of old age. A springbok gave birth to one baby then immediately died. After 13 game years Gemsbok and Flamingos are yet to give birth to a single offspring. I feel like all I'm doing is waiting for the animals to die.
  • Finding mates for some animals also seems non-existent. Some species only females are available in the market.
  • UI bugs include having to hit the filter button in the market a dozen times before it registers. The lone animal that I have been able to place in the market I also had to click the trade button repeatedly before it registered.
  • The game feels like it has to be played in a fast speed in order to accomplish anything at all (except when building). Even then it still feels like it will take hours (I've played for six hours already and only placed a single animal in the market.
  • When it rains it seems as if it's night time. Things become too dark to see. Adjusting the brightness of the game took away from the graphics as it gave a glare look to everything.
Unfortunately and surprisingly I liked the beta much better than how the game stands currently. Even with the bugs.
 
ok, well, it's maybe not for me, might not be the games fault, could be just me.
The career tutorial, got the bit where you have to raise the wall height to 3.7meters, did that, nothing happens.......
Double checked that the whole wall was selected, everything above 3.7, yep, still nothing.
Restarted the game, got to the same bit, same problem :( so i can't progress at all from there, it just doesnt register i raised the wall height.
Also, i couldn't click the bears right at the start of the tutorial, one was impaled up in a tree and would only register the tree click, another was somehow merged into a log and again, wouldnt register a click. It was ok the second time around, but given that these two weird bugs hit me right at the start, i just lost interest.

Finally, silly things like the menu covering some details, the camera being a pain when moving, it's just fiddly, and animals walking through rocks, it feels unfinished.
It does look great, i like the sound, and there's a lot of nice things but i might wait and try again in a month or so and see if it feels less buggy.
 
Something that did instantly bug me, in the 'Animal' list, I don't want to read the Hippo can be up to 100cm tall, and 175cm in length, and Weighs 275Kg, all that Metric crap means absolutely nothing to me, come on Frontier, it's basic setting to apply an 'Imperial' option, you've done it with Speed/Distance, why not here too.
 
i like it though i did get a problem where my power surge protector activated for some random reason though i do have more than enough power witch appears to be fixed then got a crash twice when starting first tutorial witch i reported first time as i got a pop up to do so other than that it seemed to stop after and i enjoyed making my first enclosure for my grizzle bears i also love the music that plays when playing the game.
149687
 
I think there is still work to be done. Increasing the positive animal interactions (they are there, just not often at least for bonobos) would make me much happier. I'm going to stick with the game because it has a ton of potential and my hope is that since the devs already went through so much effort they will keep working on it. The game could have benefited from being delayed a month or two and more testing but fortunately modern games can be easily patched :) Overall, I am hopeful and will enjoy the game.
 
Love the sand box mode - played that for about 30mins with my son, so he could go straight for the animals he wanted! Perfect for kids!,

Then played about 90mins on the challenge mode (can't get franchise to work!). This was like franchise, and seemed enjoyable - sensible prices and wide array of animals available to buy for cash and cc.

Realmpositive I did notice was that is started with 300 cc, now have over 500 without trading, increase is quite quick.

Animals breeding - no problem with any of the 3 species I had once they were happy.
 
I've barely gotten to play today, but I'm curious why the overweight avatar has so many fewer options than the thin one? There's no reason for that.
But that's not super important, though.
 
My first impressions aren't as high as I expected they might be.

  • When it rains it seems as if it's night time. Things become too dark to see. Adjusting the brightness of the game took away from the graphics as it gave a glare look to everything.
Unfortunately and surprisingly I liked the beta much better than how the game stands currently. Even with the bugs.

Very this. I was on the third tutorial campaign stage and when it was raining or snowing I had to squint, hold my hand over my eyes and lean into my PC monitor to see what was going on (as you can't change the time of day in that stage and I forgot I could press L or place some lights down, hehe)
 
The game feels a bit lackluster to me.
Al the animals do is walk around and occasionally play with toys.
I don't have as much freedom as I'd want in sandbox mode. Why not have the ability to place animals down like you can with staff? I want to place a billion gazelles in an open range.
I am constantly frustrated by the paths and fences. I can never get them to work for me. There are always tiny gaps or slightly risen terrain.
I feel kind of empty whilst playing the game.

I think I need to warm up to it, I'll give it some time.
 
Your second tutorial is broken. Can you please fix it? When it's time to place the research station there's an obstruction. Turns out the path obstructs you adding the research station to its shell. Clearing the path obstruction breaks the entire tutorial as in. It stops and won't continue.
 
Back
Top Bottom