Focusing on radial menus, this demo started off by introducing a few new characters.
#Planet coaster demo Pc#
Headed to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, as well as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, could the team capture a completely new audience with their coaster theme park creator?įocusing on the PlayStation 4 version (which looked essentially like the PC version, from what I could tell from the stream all the way to Cambridge, England anyway), the demo kicked off with a brand new tutorial designed to introduce new players (and double-dipping PC players) to the new control scheme built specifically for the console versions of the game.
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Recently we met up with the Frontier Developments team and got to go hands-on with the console version of the game, cleverly named Planet Coaster: Console Edition. So it’s a good thing that Planet Zoo's virtual animals are about the most convincing we’ve ever seen.įor more features like the one you've just read, be sure to check out the Edge magazine channel page here on GamesRadar or visit MyFavouriteMagazines to check out the latest subscription offers.If you’ve been reading the site for a while you know my love of sim games, and there is one I love above all others - Planet Coaster (you can read my review here). It's the natural divide between the two halves of the park-sim sub-genre, but in both cases, a major part of the pleasure is just sitting back and enjoying the fruits of your labour. While theme parks are all about interaction and thrills, zoos are by their nature more passive. This, ultimately, is what the development team is trying to achieve. (Literally, in the latter case, with respiration being another procedural animation applied to each species.) The studio isn’t denying that nature is red in tooth and claw, but realises this isn't what people want to see on a nice family day out at the zoo. This reaction is indicative, perhaps, of Frontier's dedication to making these feel like living, breathing animals.
![planet coaster demo planet coaster demo](https://spielen-pc.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Planet-Coaster-free.jpg)
The answer is that, yes, predators will eat their cohabitants – but it comes with an implied question of why anyone would even want to do that. When we ask what happens if you were to put carnivores and their prey in the same enclosure, the team seem taken aback at our bloodthirstiness. Planet Zoo is as much about amazing creatures as it is about education, conservation and animal welfare, as we discovered in our Planet Zoo preview out of E3 2019. The game will model alpha hierarchies inside a species, and fights can break out – we’re shown a remarkable dynamic scarring system – but these are unlikely to be fatal. Forget to complete the wall around an enclosure and, while animals will escape, they won’t then starting chomping on visitors. It shines through in the overall feel of the game, which is relatively gentle – certainly in comparison to Jurassic World Evolution. Conservation and education will be as much a part of the management game as maximising profits, we’re told, although how players will be incentivised to be good zookeepers remains a little unclear. While management sims can lead players to ruthlessly min-max in the pursuit of efficiency, the emphasis here is on creating a “modern zoo” – a phrase we hear multiple times during our visit to Frontier’s new HQ. The space needed for each animal’s habitat is based on government guidelines. This side of the game is founded in reality: Frontier has commissioned research on each species’ needs and behaviour, and interviewed zookeepers about their processes.
![planet coaster demo planet coaster demo](https://bleedingcool.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Planet-Coaster-Worlds-Fair-4-900x900.jpg)
They’ll need to have their habitat and nutrition needs met, and be paired up carefully to avoid inbreeding. The suggestion seems to be that Planet Zoo will stick fairly close to its theme-park predecessor, albeit with an extra layer of management in keeping animals happy and healthy. "Layer on these little shakes, eye twitches and ear flickers," says Powell, "and if they're out of phase with each other, you get all of this variety emerging." Combined with procedural systems such as foot planting, headlook and ragdoll, the game can summon a menagerie of believable creatures relatively quickly, and "free up animators to do the bespoke lovely stuff." With a couple of tweaks to the posing of the camel’s underlying skeleton – the neck raised a little, the head held just a tad higher – the two animals quickly feel distinctive, even walking alongside one another. Powell and Marsh show us how a zebra’s walking animation can be carried across to a camel, then slowed down to give it a more deliberate gait. This might sound like it would result in a zoo filled to bursting with lions, tigers and bears all marching in perfect step, but the key is the tweaking. "When we ask what happens if you were to put carnivores and their prey in the same enclosure, the team seem taken aback at our bloodthirstiness" Image Credit: Frontier (Image credit: Frontier Developments)