Summary
Theme Hospital, Rollercoaster Tycoon, and Zoo Tycoon were all staples of my childhood. They gave me hours of enjoyment, a strange fascination with picking up guests and trying to kill them, and the inability to visit any real-world theme park or zoo (hospitals, not so much) without judging every facet of it. I can’t help but walk around thinking, ‘I’d cover that maintenance hut with decorations. There should be benches on this path. This shouldn’t be a dead end. Why isn’t there a bin in sight?’
Visiting any attraction also gives me the urge to get home and start building the theme park or zoo of my dreams. I recently visited Thorpe Park (it’s pretty good) with Frontier Developments to check outPlanet Coaster 2, and as well as scrutinising the park, my visit left me thirsty for some good old business management gaming. Good job Planet Coaster 2 is launching on November 6 then.
Planet Coaster 2 builds on its predecessor, offering familiar gameplay but with the new selling point of including water park attractions. Swimming pools, thrilling water rides, and plenty more can get your guests absolutely drenched. Planet Coaster 2 game director Richard Newbold tells me that “Waterparks have been requested by the community for a long time,” but that it was also something the team wanted to include to build on their existing foundation of rollercoasters.
As well as the addition of water park elements, there are also some much-appreciated improvements, such as a new depth to how detailed you can get with customisation. You can now add decorations to anything really, even roller coaster carts. You can literally add fire jets to rides. Would Health and Safety approve? Probably not. Does it look really cool? Absolutely.
“In the original Planet Coaster, we saw so much amazing creativity that players were taking with the systems that we had,” Newbold tells me. “Whether it’s the piece-by-piece building of the scenery pieces, taking all those theme pieces, putting them together, blueprinting them, and sharing them. In the sequel, we wanted to just build upon that, adding new themes, creativity, and functionality.”
As well as being able to add scenery pieces directly onto rides and coaster cards, Planet Coaster 2 also introduces scaling so players can change the size of scenery pieces, another highly requested feature from the community. The customisation options have been souped up, with Newbold telling me the team “can’t wait to see what people can do with those things and put them together”, like “the ability to change the colour of the objects and the new theme pieces, attaching them to rides, blueprinting flat rides for the first time, which you couldn’t do in the original one.”
For some of the rides, Newbold explains they’ve been “de-themed” from the original Planet Coaster. Removing some of the set themes around rides like the tea cups means that players can now create their own themes with the wider range of creative options at their disposal in Planet Coaster 2.
As to whether all these lovely creative options will be expanded on post-launch, Newbold emphasises that the team “looks at a number of pieces across the game that we might want to focus on, but for launch, we’ve been really focused on the management systems and the creativity systems as well. We’re making sure that when the game comes out, it’s got all those wonderful things that you can experience, whether it’s the creative side or running a successful theme park.”
Planet Coaster 2, much like the original, offers different gameplay experiences. If you favour management, you can use pre-made blueprints to create your park without having to worry about every little detail. However, if you like the depth and design of being able to pick and choose every little element of your park, it’s a designer’s dream playground.
Newbold tells me he’s more of a “management gamer”, excelling at the running of his parks rather than the finetuning of design. He will “use the creativity of other people”, looking at blueprints others have made and learn from them to create his own. He also tells me his go-to rides are flat rides as he likes creating themed areas, “[Flat rides are] more of a two-dimensional thing. It allows me to plan out my parks in a way that visually, for me, I can comprehend a bit more and plan it out.”
As someone who equally suffers from a lack of design skill, I completely agree. Nothing reminded me more of how much I failed at designing rides than during my hands-on with Planet Coaster 2, where I made a rollercoaster too scary for anyone to ride. It took me more time to fix it (with the aid of a helpful Frontier employee) than it did to build it in the first place. I was terrible. What do you mean people don’t want to experience extreme G-Force on my amazing ride?
Because Planet Coaster 2 is so in-depth, it can be a lot for players to get their head around, especially if they are new to the series, or even the genre as a whole. However, Planet Coaster 2 has a lot of features to ensure that any player can enjoy theme park building, regardless of their experience or design skill.
“The tutorials will teach you the basics of theme parks, of building a water park, [and] we have help screens as well,” Newbold tells me. “We’ve got blueprints that are there for people to very quickly just put down, so if you’re into the detail of building a rollercoaster from scratch, you can use those to just fulfil your need and get some guests really happy.
“But if you look into how it’s built or you know what you’re doing or want to just dig into it, you’ve got access to that deep management of those creative systems as well, so see what’s possible. We have a lot of basics to begin with, but for people that are experienced, they can dive straight into building something from scratch and get all the detail, but we’ve got those blueprints for people to get into it faster.”
Newbold has been a fan of business management sims since he was a kid and his own experiences have helped shape his work as a game director. “Theme Park was the first game that I played that showed how much enjoyment I can have as a player in adjusting the pricing and the minutiae of the detail of the management, making sure my guests are happy, making sure there’s enough salt on my chips, that kind of detail.”
Appreciating this level of detail himself makes him aware that a large portion of the fanbase also sweat the small stuff, so while some players might completely overlook these elements, Newbold adds “we don’t want to not have that because there’s a great audience that do like that detail.” He says it’s the same with the customisation and creativity options. For those who want them, they’re there. For those who don’t, there are blueprints.
Some of the team behind Theme Park went on to found Two Point Studios, which recently unveiled its next business sim, Two Point Museum. However, Newbold tells me there was no concern from the Frontier team of whether Two Point might release a theme park game.
“It just shows that there’s a passion for these kinds of games still, [whether] it’s developers or it’s players. It shows that for the last few decades, these games resonate. They resonated with us when we were younger, but they’re also resonating with people now still. It just shows that there’s a great passion in the development side and in the community of people buying them. For us, it’s always great to see more management games in the industry because it just shows that there’s an appetite for it and it’s great to see how people are solving the same kind of problems in different ways.”
As Frontier Developments has so many management sim games under its brand umbrella, Newbold tells me “there’s been a lot of cross-population of learnings that we have at Frontier on all the different types of management games”. Though some developers work on one project at a time, others share projects, or move from one to another during the cycles. “We bring those experiences on solving similar systems or similar problems across and we then have this conversation, this worked really well on this game but is it going to work well with this game in these systems that we have.”
One example in particular he points out is that F1 Manager is a more UI focused game, and so the team took some of those experiences into consideration when building the UI for Planet Coaster 2. “We always use the different games that we have in development at Frontier to cross-populate that learning and look at it cohesive with the game that we have in hand but also the experiences that we have.”
Whether you’re like me and like to plonk down pre-built things and get your park up and running (and making money), or you prefer to tailor each and every inch of your park to your own imaginative design, you can unleash your creativity anew when Planet Coaster 2 launches on November 6 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
