Planet Coaster

£20 for the full game, and a few extras like soundtrack & beta access, i'd say is fantastic value if its a genre you're into.

Not sure if you're saying the £50 is too much (it is, especially as 2/3 of that price has less than 3 of 9mo worth of access left), or £20 is and its just that thats where your interest level is at for a coaster management game, but it'll be £27 next week and £30 at release, and even with discount sales it'll be a while till its even 50% off (£15), maybe after a year?

For a new release, £20 is pretty cheap when a known studio is making the game, especially when it looks as good as this does.
 
The £20 one has beta if bought today, that goes tomorrow when it all moves to steam and the only thing available then are 2 release versions, no other perks anywhere.
Alpha alone is £30 extra, and theres 3mo till launch and a beta in that time too.

17th Nov, is the date iirc. Its been mentioned in the last weeks worth of posts if you wanna be sure.
 
Yeah, the videos they'd shown of water when they'd added waterfalls they'd faked it using the VFX stuff which looked fairly weak really. I was hoping it'd be similar to Cities Skyline where its dynamic, and i cant remember what they said on the livestream when asked about it, whether it'd be dynamic for release or not.

Im a tad concerned that looking at that image the map size might feel a little small for doing much with terrain and its obviously a fair bit smaller than even the smaller UK parks let alone the the likes of Alton Towers or the big US ones. You'd get maybe 1 'zone' of Disneyland, like frontier land, let alone all of them, forget Epcot, MGM etc for obvious reasons (Cities Skyline might even struggle even at its scale) .

Magic Kingdom (the park everyone thinks of as Disneyworld etc) - http://www.wdwinfo.com/maps/disney-magic-kingdom-map.jpg

Disney Resort - http://www.mappery.com/maps/Disney-World-Map.jpg or http://s4.thingpic.com/images/X1/y8cTof4eevtcW64BxTRYXq2K.jpeg

The novelty scaling doesnt help, but theres a 1 mile oval just randomly placed in the middle there :D From memory, i'd say the Paris park is of a similar size too. If its punishing high-end hardware then it doesnt bode well for seeing that increased at release.

Also, back onto water, i read there was 4 versions in this alpha, we saw 3 from Gamescom - still, 'wavey', and swamp water. If there is a 4th, what is it?
 
Agreed, that does look pretty fantastic.

I suspect that if you want a large park with a lot going on in there (rides), then keeping the rollercoasters compact but complex, like the purple & blue one in the middle of the screenshot, is going to be the key. The red & white on in the bottom left looks cool, but it occupies at least 1/4 of the map, while the P&B one is tiny and you could fit a dozen of them in the park (maybe 9 within the footprint of that R&W one) and still fill it with flat rides, scenery, shops etc.

How is the financial side of things? at gamescom they were -$200k etc in their videos, is the financial management something you have to role-play and enforce it yourself, or is there a mode where you cant go in debt like you'd expect v1 would?
 
This guy! This guy makes me sick!


How in the world does he make so much stuff so intricate and damn amazing looking?? So many pieces of his buildings are used inappropriately and it looks perfect. I'd seen some of his stuff before (its Silvarret btw) and its looked great, but never gone looking for his content. Now ive got 12 weeks of wait, and with every video my e-peen shrinks :(
 
I've never really had an issue with framerates, i guess it depends on the game, and fps or racing game i'd want decent frames, but something i'd play casually as long as its 20+ then it doesnt bother me one bit, i guess i dont see enough of a the difference to really care. If i can get 60fps, great. Many games (XCOM for example) i'll lock to 30 in afterburner/riva just because i dont need it cranking out extra frames.

Obviously im not in the majority (at least, the vocal majority) and it needs some attention before it gets pushed out. That'll be for beta though, alpha is for implementation of features and as long as the game is playable that should be sufficient.


@Sun - how are you finding the creation side of things, it certainly seems very capable, are there any occasions where things just dont work how you'd want them to? I've seen things like roof/floor tiles where they seem to stick out further than the wall tiles so you see its texture on the outside, any other silly little things like that?
 
Seems to be coming along nicely that. Strange to get better performance though, i could perhaps understand no impact if it was CPU throttling due to crowd numbers, but not sure how it manages better performance.

I can see its going to be a long 8-10wks for everyone else though :D
 
Yeah, Silvarret isnt human, he's a theme park mech sent from the future to destroy humanity by making anything we'll create feel extremely inferior!

Theres someone else i started following recently, a few days after Alpha 3 was released and wasnt seeing any of the regulars doing vids on it so i went looking and the first one i stumbled upon has been pretty good.


I presume most of his 1.7m followers are from minecraft creations. Its not as impressive or complex as Silvarrets stuff, but he uses stuff the obvious way and his park is coming along rather nicely. So far theres 6eps at about 30min length, he doesnt quite know the game and makes a few mistakes along the way but its really nicely themed without looking particularly tryhard and you feel you could achieve something similar too.

At the moment, im preferring this Keralis guys way of starting, create a theme and then introduce the park side. Not sure how viable it is with 10k starting money though, but seems like the better way for sandbox. I've seen videos where people have plonked down 6+ rides and paths all over the map and then themed it, but it just looks so lonely and sad without any scenary - probably easier for income though.

The game looked good from the first few screenshots, but i think i was sold the moment i saw how you build the scenery and fit everything into that, rather than having burger bun shaped food stalls etc. Dont think theres any doubt about its creative capability, but im still unsure about the actual gameplay beyond a sandbox purely because we havent seen much, the old RCT games had missions as well as letting you build your own park from scratch and sandbox, wouldnt say im concerned, just seems odd that it isnt implemented for the last alpha when they've given it a release date.
 
It was well known before the cut-off that it this was happening, they were adding the game to steam and transferring the whole process to that platform rather than their own, and its probably more hassle than its worth to give us the standard version, also sell a deluxe version, and add a £3 upgrade option for early backers. Im also sure they'd always said it'd be £30 on release... its £27 for basic, £30 for deluxe, so it could be argued that the expected saving wasnt what they'd promised, but i cant imagine anyone noticed and cared, we're still getting a great deal.

I hadnt heard the beta was starting next week though, bit poor that its such a short timeframe IMO, could understand if they were having 2 betas but not sure what reason there is not to make it a week long thing at least, theres 7wk till release, 6 when this happens, so not like its being launched a couple weeks later. I've not heard of it including new features, ie v4, but i'd assume it must be more than taking 'alpha 3' and just renaming it 'beta', but it'd be nice if there was more of the core game in there, the creation stuff is amazing, but it still seems the core management aspect is missing meaning a key aspect cant be evaluated. Sandbox looks fantastic though, can imagine spending a lot of time in there, but the 'game' element, the challenge, we've not seen yet, so i really hope thats on show.
 
robj20 said:
Will this run on a 2600k, gtx 670 and 8GB RAM? Might be the first game that pushes me to upgrade in a long time. Used to spend way too much time on Roller Coaster Tycoon.
Click to expand...

I'd imagine so, but you'd likely need to keep the parks relatively sensible, and not Silvarret degrees of complexity. Steam will have the minimum specs, just to be sure, but of course minimum doesnt mean you'll be able to go mad with details and get 60fps on high etc.

I also found out that this 'beta' on 6th to 10th is just an unexpected *alpha* access, with the beta coming early in November, so this version wont be any different to the current build.
 
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Yeah, sounds about right, personally 60fps isnt essential to me in many games, if theres not a competitive element to it then i can happily live with less, in Ark (PvE) ive locked my frames at 20fps just to keep temps lower than at 30fps (think i get about 45-50fps otherwise). It shouldnt excuse the fact that a decent system should be capable of filling up a map to a reasonable degree of intricacy while maintaining a stable 60fps, but its one i can imagine i'd lock to 30fps regardless of future optimisation.
 
^ Its also a different title on the steam library, so you'll have 'Planet Coaster' from when you added the key, as well as 'Planet Coaster Alpha'.
Confused me for a while, restarted steam and still didnt let me download it, and it was only when i tried to install it on my tablet that it wasnt there in my favourites, and when i scrolled down there was 2 titles. Could have been there a while on that one :D :o
 
Hows everyone getting on then?

I've spent about 3hrs in there and ive barely done anything. I feel like its something thats user friendly, anyone can pick it up and build a pretty park, but trying to make complex parks its quite deep and fiddly at the same time.

At the moment im finding that some pieces want to snap in the half-way points of where all the other pieces are snapped to, and its at the lowest setting (0.25), sometimes if i re-do 'select grid' it'll behave, but i cant understand why its doing this, i only have 1 building so nothing to confuse it, yet it keep doing stuff then realise its landing in this middle slot.
 
I've not really built all that much, mostly scenery and the basics of a entrance so not really done much building so far, but i know what you mean, the flickering of textures fighting to be on top, i've seen it in the youtube channels i follow.

The high vs low, thats pretty common with alpha stuff, the different quality grades of assets etc, specifically anything but high quality simply wont exist until its locked down and they'll produce the LODs and stuff to improve performance. Right now it might be considered done, but not final, so rather than spend time faffing a few times for everything, its more or less raw.

Paths... yeah, i knew they werent popular but yeah its quite horrible and inconsistent. I had my main entrance path down the middle of the park, did a pair of 90° paths. Then i saw i was able to add a path at the 45° angle which created like a webbed-food type path connecting to the existing paths, and it looked really nice for sending ppl different directions. Went to put it on the other side, it just didnt want to know, where right side had a few variations of what i liked, the left had nothing.
Deleting paths is horrible, making bridges is a real PITA as the pieces of path are so large it just doesnt work how you want it to. There might be tricks so you can do things exactly how you want without the back n forth, but its not user friendly.

Tomorrow i might try and take a look at some built parks and draw inspiration, cos i stopped playing when i realised what i was trying to do was poop and didnt know what to do, i dont want to just plop coasters in till ive got some basics in, so its feeling a bit boring and frustrating.
What i really hoped Frontier would do is have multiple skins for each ride, so a single ride could be styled for pirate, sci-fi, medieval, fantasy etc. Right now, the rides are themed and simply dont fit many park themes. So if you've started a sci-fi zone, you cant go sticking a whirly-rig (iirc) in there with its barrels & squids theme, but if they were rockets, the same ride now fits 2 settings. It just feels very restricted because they've given many of the flat rides a theme. Also, a lot of the rides just feel huge, so tall and out of place. I wish they were modular like earlier RCT titles where you added what height you wanted them to be.
 
I havent touched it since posting, planned on playing it most of the weekend and instead just havent bothered.
I really cant imagine them making huge changes to the paths though, hopefully they at least address the things that cause the issues, like it leaving path holes where paths used to be, and insisting that to fix it, you've got to delete perfectly good paths so its cleaned up what IT left behind. Also, i thought they said plazas were possible about 10 days after alpha3 went up, via an update. Didnt seem to be able to figure that out, they just dont work how you'd expect them, they seem to have different quirks in seemingly identical situations.

What really concerns me now is that the creative aspect, as much as i love it, and enjoy watching creative people use, right now not feeling particularly creative with it (or wanting to use workshop buildings etc) is making me not want to bother playing it, and theres nothing else here at the moment, so without the management side properly integrated and scenarios too, i cant even assess if this is going to be the same issue i have at launch.
 
Theres another livestream tonight, at 7pm. They've said that the beta is basically the feature complete game just lacking some of the scenarios, which is pretty much what you'd expect from a beta - final aside from tweaks and minor/circumstantial bugs. Tonights livestream should essentially show us the stuff they've been holding back on, like additional themes & rides etc

This coming Thursday marks 1yr since i started this thread, im not sure how long it'd been announced for but it wouldnt have been too much earlier and all we had were a couple of screenshots (whats on the first post, really) and an announcement trailer showing nothing really.

In that timeframe, RCTW has skipped past its announced release date, decided its going into Early Access (!?!?) and still doesnt have a release date (supposedly close to release though) or a community that thinks its even close to being release worthy. From what i understand, Planet Coaster exists because Atari/whatever wanted something different to Frontier, and tasked a different studio (now plural) with the job, and so we have 2 contenders.
Planet Coaster seems like its the game the community wanted.
RCTW seems like a game created because a successful franchise exists, that alone will make it successful.


My concerns have only really been whether the 'game' aspect of Planet Coaster is there, the management & simulation sort of stuff, and to a degree whether *I* have the creativity to really do the building tools justice, because theres been plenty of evidence to show amazing stuff is possible since the first alpha, its just down to user creativity. Even then, theres the workshop to access tons of stuff others have created with base content and plop it in and modify it if you want, break it down to see how they did it and try to learn and replicate it.

Beyond that, i think its just a matter of whether or not you its worth it to you personally at that price. Thats always going to be subjective, but beyond the price vs interest in this sort of game, the hype seems justified, with around 8mo of alpha access to support it and provide feedback, its just whether it all comes together nicely as a finished product thats left uncertain really, and we'll be better placed to tell in a few days time.

As for best price, with it being steam-based, i dont see how really cheap keys will be knocking about, so unless you can see it being sold somewhere cheap now (ie GMG for example) i wouldnt expect bargain deals. I'd expect say 10% off (as we have now) around Xmas steam sales, and 20-25% off by Easter, thats fairly standard practice. That goes back to the price vs interest argument.
 
It might be worth pointing out that if you go to the game in your library and untick the sketchbook and soundtrack the download drops to 5.0gb saving ~700mb, and you can obviously get them later on, your just prioritising the core game itself.
 
Completed the first campaign type mission a few hours ago, didnt really do too much building beyond what the goals asked and adding scenery. Figured i'd try challenge mode, but after loading in i didnt even do anything before giving up. It just felt exactly like the free alpha weekend and the little bit of creative building i tried on the pirate campaign map i scrapped pretty quick, and im just not feeling remotely creative. I'll do the desert mission tomorrow, i just didnt want to do both in a single sitting and then be in the situation im in now.

I think what the issue is is that the blank maps are just that, they're just flat plots of land, and it'd be nice if we had some mild landscape to build around, to inspire creativity. Basically something between sandboxes blank canvas and the campaign stuff being partially populated. Likewise if the campaign missions werent restricted rides, shops, props etc it might be fun, but 6 flat-rides, 2 coasters, 3 shops and limited props is not much fun.

Certainly enjoyed doing that one mission, and i'd hope theres maps and not just blank plots (though it doesnt look like it for release), and I also dont hold much hope for using shared savegames to get custom made maps, because i dont see a way around doing terrain editing and mild scenery without starting with unlimited funds... and i dont want that either.

Sadly its another build where im left feeling slightly disappointed having enjoyed watching lots of YT videos of others playing it, and not being able to get the same enjoyment when playing it myself. Im hoping that playing the full game with its missions will be fun and at the end of it hopefully i'll have made more of an effort to be creative and make use of the other modes.
I basically want a landscape, unrestricted items (rides, shops, props etc), basic starting funds and research to unlock 75% of those items.
 
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