The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
Please vote in the Forum Structure Poll. Polling will close at 2PM EST on January 21, 2025.
[Planet Zoo] More Like Planet Bugs AM I RITE?
Dirtyboy
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCgppIh1tnY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbTGel-OKdo
Posts
Bravely Default / 3DS Friend Code = 3394-3571-1609
Wow, that is a lot more impressive than my current first zoo, which is the first “from scratch” career mission that I have spent about 4 hours on and right now is basically a pen of Bison next to a pen of Wildebeests and Anelope.
Bison are apparently the ultimate easy mode animal, they just don’t give a crap. They will happily stand around and eat grass in driving snow with no shelter without even getting a welfare hit. Give them like a soccer ball and a rubbing post and and they are ecstatic.
I mean there are ostriches, peacocks, and flamingos, which are technically dinosaurs by the most broad definition, but I would really love a prehistoric pack, preferably with realistic feathered dinos. Or failing that a pliestocene pack with Mammoths, Wooly Rhinos, Terror Birds, Giant sloths, Paraceratheria (a giant hornless rhino relative that looks like a cross between a rhino and giraffe), etc.
I am holding out hope they will do a JWE2 with the improvements.
With a new Jurassic Park movie coming, there's a decent chance.
They are slowly adding more PZ like features with each update, but I don’t think they could really get to the same level of depth without a deeper level of overhaul than DLC can really do. I might be wrong though, if they went full paradox levels of dlc.
It does add something that has interesting implications - a flying dinosaur that could be a testbed for birds in PZ.
The main things I would like in JWE would probably be pretty resource intensive though - I would love a gene option for feathers but that would take some modeling work, I would love the option to make male dinosaurs and natural breeding and baby dinos but that would mean basically a new model for ever species in the game, etc.
I’d also like a bit more in the way of customization, building skins, decorations, etc but that again would require a lot of asset production.
And then with all that the management of planet zoo is still more involved and interesting.
I like the expedition system for slowly making viable Dinosaurs, the AI for the Dinosaurs and herds is neat and parks look great.
It all just feels a bit flat when the park just starts rolling in money once I hit 2 stars and I don’t have to try anymore.
Regarding the flying Dinosaurs, it feels more that the Reptile enclosures in PZ were a test for them, because they go in an enclosed Aviary.
On topic, I like what I see of PZ. I’ll wait for a few patches to smooth out the stability before I jump on it though.
Yeah I feel like I hit that point in JWE and the contract system just makes things drag on a bit. Especially since all the contracts are pretty samey. Its not a bad game with the updates and expansions though.
I feel like it was basically a testbed for the ideas that went into planet zoo.
Also, they really needed a better system for letting you visit other folks zoos rather than the steam workshop.
I haven’t played franchise, been banging out career mode, I guess you can’t release animals into the wild for free CC in franchise?
You can release them to the wild, but the amounts are quite low unless you get some truly great specimens - and then it's a matter of basically farming and mixing up the offspring. For example, an "average" gold wolf gets you about 40-60 to the wild. A good grizzly will get you a few hundred.
Right now I'm kinda contemplating taking some of the 1500 I have banked up, starting a new zoo that is only bare unstyled breeding and rearing paddocs. Run it as lean and efficient as I can to farm money and credits - which is basically what I assumed the exact opposite of franchise mode was supposed to be.
Ah, I think the article was a bit mistaken then, that just sounds like there’s a supply constraint and demand is just massively higher than supply.
They need to just decide what they think a reasonable price is for an animal, triple it, put an unlimited supply of crappy but viable animals up at that price(or put an alternative mechanism into the game that accomplishes the same thing), and that will solve it.
Yep, basically. It's just getting started that is hard and the base supply is nowhere near base demand.
What was the point of the Single player car shop then? If the player market shit the bed the game would still be playable.
That’s what they need. A “buy from private collection” option where if a panda, say is supposed to be 2500(random completely made up price here) cc, you can buy a generic, yellow statted one for 6000 cc. Also maybe throw in some random rewards, like “hey you have reached 1000 simultaneous visitors, we have gifted you a random breeding pair of animals in your animal center. Maybe its warthogs, maybe its lions, go look!”. Something to make sure at least a small stream of rare animals is entering the economy on a stochastic basis.
Part of the other problem in Franchise mode is that the animals do eventually hit a point where they can't breed, as well as die. So unlike say Forza - where if you buy a car, you keep it forever) - you have to constantly work to maintain your supply of animals. Which, really, is fine! Zoo's have to do a lot of work to keep their genetic lines clean and healthy and to maintain stock! But Franchise mode needs to maybe adjust the rate at which animals age a bit. A couple hours on slow and you've run through a Grizzly generation, for example.
Luckily in Sandbox, you can disable aging/dying completely I believe.
Yeah, thats even more reason to have a bigger flow of animals into the game and by extension the market. When you compare the number of ways you can get cars in forza (Random career rewards, event rewards, tokens, credit shop, online auction house) vs planet zoo (breeding, online auction house), AND those animals are perishable, it’s no wonder that there is a huge scarcity problem.
So now I have a pen with some very confused hyenas (and a bunch of heaters), and for some reason visitors are travelling thousands of miles to go see them wearing shorts and sandals in the middle of giant blizzards. The “entrance” is just a random tunnel coming from nowhere in the middle of a vast field of snow.
In my head now this is some apocalyptic frozen world/nuclear winter future where people live in underground vaults and someone is going Jurrassic park with DNA recovered from frozen animal carcasses at the vault entrance. “What did you find out in the frozen wastes today bob?” “Oh just some weird dog-cat thing“. “Well roll up the cloning machine and we’ll go with it.”
That is a fucking amazing idea.
Looks like an arctic theme, with a couple of new scenarios and 4 new animals... lot of free quality of life an feature updates too.
If anyone remembers the JWE dino packs they tended to contain one or two completely new animals and one or two reskins, and that seems to be the case here.
We have:
Caribou/reindeer: Nice, not much like this in game so far...
Dall sheep: Again a very nice and new animal- no wild sheep in game yet.
Polar bears: we have bears but these are such a classic they really warrant an inclusion.
Artic wolf: A simple regional variant subspecies of the timber wolf already in game, this seems to be the blatant reskin of the pack... Still gives them a chance to show off the new pack mechanics I guess...
Holy crap polar bears need 16,000 space to be happy.
That’s... realist, but on the other hand because of the way space works in this game (adding more need per animal)a family of polar bears needs about as much space as a herd of diplodocus in JWE... Like in real terms not game scale terms.
They fixed the space needed in latest patch.
Still a lot but something you could fit in a normal zoo and not like sauropod levels of space.
I wouldn’t mind them doing a realistic space challenge mode that increased everything by 2x (so polar bears back to original, elephants up to 4000, etc), along with some things binocular stands and keeper vehicles to help manage such large areas, though.
Right now I’m playing with making a dall sheep habitat. It may be me reading into it, but I put a little hill and cliff area in there (not huge, just like an 8 or 10 foot rise with a dirt ramp on one side and a drop off on the other 3) and I swear my ram just loves to climb up it and stand there looking around like he’s the king of the hill.
I also put a little pond in my bison/pronghorn enclosure because I had some extra dead space without anything in it, and my bison love jumping in and swimming around like they are hippos. Its the little bits of personality that make me love this game.