Frontier Developments, the British developer-publishers behind Elite Dangerous, Planet Zoo and Warhammer games including Warhammer 40,000 XCOM-a-like Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters and last year’s Age of Sigmar RTS Realms of Ruin, will host a new monthly developer showcase starting next week.
]]>Frontier Developments are doubling down on their success in management sim games, following weak sales for recent Warhammer RTS Realms of Ruin and a lack of success in attempting to break into other genres.
]]>Snow leopards are my absolute favourite animals in the world. I would die happy if I ever got the chance to see one in real life (from a great distance of course, lest it de-grundle me). Alas, the closest that most of us will get in our lives is to play Planet Zoo - easily the best zoo simulator out there right now.
]]>Nerves have been sufficiently jangled as of late, not least thanks to the slew of action packed games that have landed in recent months. I crave an altogether more sedate beginning to next year, and so my mind turns to games in which violence, reflex or any other kind of unblinking attentiveness takes a back seat.
]]>Planet Zoo is celebrating its two-year anniversary with a free update that adds black and white ruffed lemurs, and a new cake shop. I'm very excited, lemurs are my favourites! I went to the IRL zoo last month and the lemur walkthrough was closed, which was absolutely gutting. But if I can't have real lemurs, you can be damn sure I'm adding some of these fluffy fellas to my virtual enclosures.
]]>If you keep even half an eye on delightful construction game Planet Zoo, you’ll know that developers Frontier tend to release a DLC pack for it every quarter, bringing a bunch of fresh animals into the game from a particular region of the globe. Whenever that happens, I tend to make what could charitably be called a concept zoo, in order to show off the new arrivals in the best possible light.
Since this week’s DLC introduces an octet of animals from North America, there was only one conceivable way to exhibit them: an awkward combination of zoo, performance art and poundshop Westworld, displaying the majesty of nature alongside recreations of sets from the legendary TV show Deadwood. Let’s have a little walk around town, shall we?
]]>The man you behold in the picture above is Dominic Myers, professional money git and, somehow, zoo owner. Dominic is the antagonist of the campaign mode in my beloved Planet Zoo, and he comes as a bit of a surprise. In the campaign, you play as a trainee zoo manager taking his first jobs under the mentorship of warm-hearted, chuckly old geezer Bernie Goodwin. A few missions in, however, Myers comes out of nowhere, buys out Goodwin's zoo franchise from under him, and abruptly becomes your boss.
Myers is a hedge fund director, and an utter sod, obviously. He'd sell a truckload of tiger willies if it made him a tenner, and laugh about it afterwards. He'd make a crocodile eat a big hot anvil made of poison, while people threw pennies into a hat. He doesn't care about animals. Far worse, he has no interest in them. But despite this, as I've been pottering along with the campaign during quiet evenings in recent weeks, I've come to find him a strangely welcome, refreshing presence.
]]>The best part about going to the zoo is seeing the meerkats. Sometimes you get to watch them play and hunt for food, plus both the babies and adults are exceptionally cute - there's always a gran making comments like "ooh I could take one home in my purse". But stop, gran! You can now have your own virtual meerkats in Planet Zoo, because they're included in the Africa Pack which came out today. You can also look after fennec foxes, African penguins, Southern white rhinos and sacred scarab beetles. What a delight.
]]>There was a brief and special period, just after the launch of delightful menagerie management game Planet Zoo, during which the game’s simulated global economy went deeply and deliciously wrong. The theory was beautiful. In order to buy into breeding programmes for high-profile endangered species, players first had to prove their credentials with the husbandry of more mundane beasts. By trading healthy, happy animals with other player zoos, it was supposed, folks could work their way gradually towards the purchase of prestigious creatures like pandas, gorillas and ‘phants.
Inevitably, however, players gamed the living crikey out of the market, and - as I documented at the time - the wheels fell off with a resounding clang. Early birds hoarded orangutans and the like in vast sheds from the word go, driving most animals into stratospheric price positions, and trapping the vast majority of the playerbase in a reeking purgatory of ostriches, warthogs and peafowl. The only way out of this monotony was through quite literal brute force: by creating zoos that were little more than sprawling factories, churning out hundreds of inbred, genetically bungled animals in the desperate hope of one day being able to afford a mediocre crocodile.
]]>Planet Zoo is a deeply warm-hearted game. While it’s set up to give you as much freedom as possible in every aspect of your zoo’s design, it still steers you firmly towards being good to the animals which live there. Unlike Frontier’s other animal husbandry game, Jurassic World Evolution, where everyone knows the management layer is just a way of killing time until the inevitable monster deathmatches, Planet Zoo does absolutely nothing to signpost “nightmare animal supermax” as a valid playstyle. Personally, I think that’s a good decision.
But as I already mentioned, it puts a genuinely phenomenal range of construction tools at your disposal: if you can think of a habitat concept, the chances are you can build it. And inevitably, when a game gives me that much freedom to do my own thing, it’s only a matter of time before I move things into deeply unsettling territory. This week, I had Planet Zoo’s new Southeast Asia DLC pack to play with, featuring eight new beasts and a huge bundle of new construction assets. I made a new zoo, in sandbox mode. And while it was pleasant enough for the animals which lived in it, I did everything I could to inflict profound psychic damage on the visiting public. Come take a tour with me.
]]>From our first years we know what it means to build. As babies we're given clacky wooden blocks and colourful Duplo bricks. We are architects long before we are capable eaters of raw carrot. If you're anything like the staff of RPS, you've not outgrown the habit of child-like town planning. Yes, building games often take a managerial approach (at least many on this list do), but a sense of play is always present. It's there when you draw out a road in Cities Skylines, just to watch it populate with toy-like traffic. When you brick up another hole in your mighty Stronghold to fend off enemy swordsmen. When you painstakingly dig a trench for water to flow in Timberborn, just like you did all those years ago on the beach, in an effort to stop the tide washing away your sandcastles. You'll find all these games and more on our list. So here you go: the best building games on PC.
]]>Was only a matter of time before Planet Zoo went to Oz, eh? They've got all the cool animals down there, and some of them won't even kill you for a bad look. Next week's Australia update brings a small selection of Aussie fauna into Frontier Development's zoo sim, along with a warehouse packed with down-under doodads and a host of free goodies for zookeepers who'd rather stay at home.
]]>When Noah was faced with the task of stocking the ark, it was a fairly simple business: “two of everything, mate, and don’t bother with the unicorns.” In fact, considering Noah was most likely a hapless Bronze Age farmer trying to survive a regional flood, it was probably even simpler. The situation more likely boiled down to “as many goats as you can force on board, plus a couple of cows and maybe a donkey if it’ll fit.” Easy. By contrast, Frontier Developments’ task, in choosing what animals to include in Planet Zoo, seems daunting - even if it did involve less in the way of physically manoeuvring goats onto a raft.
There are, after all, very very many types of animal in the world. Species totals between one and two million get chucked around all the time, but these come with a big caveat: however you choose to slice things, a big chunk of these totals will always comprise beetles that only an expert could distinguish from other, very similar beetles. So with that in mind, let's slash the total right down to just the number of species currently kept in zoos and aquariums, and only in the US. Alas, we still end up with 6,000+, according to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. That's a lot of animals. To find out how Frontier got from here, to the list of 76 animals in Planet Zoo at launch (there are 80 now), I had a bit of a duck-billed chatypus with PZ’s senior artist Lisa Bauwens, and game director Piers Jackson.
]]>2019 was a great year for PC games - aren't they all? - but you might not yet know what the very best PC games of 2019 were. Let us help you.
]]>Planet Zoo already got Rock Paper Shotgun's "bestest best" stamp when it released in November. If possible, it is now even bestier than before with its first DLC which adds arctic animals to your zoo's list of potential inhabitants. There are two new scenarios, new buildings, foliage, and—most importantly—polar bears.
]]>Winter brings out a part of me that immediately seeks a mountain of blankets in which to burrow. Even in my seasonally confused state of Texas, the weather has tended towards the chilly and left me with little excuse not to have a kettle boiling interminably as I layer on socks and pull the biggest comforter from the top of the closet. But this presents a problem likely familiar to other cozy connoisseurs: how does one game while properly bundled?
I will admit it does limit possibilities considerably. That's why I've curated a small selection of games perfectly playable while your other hand keeps coffee or tea always within sipping range.
]]>This is, really and truly, the last ever Steam Charts.
Which, I realise, is something I've said before. More than once. But this time it's really true!
Erk, I'm not really sure how to convince anyone of this. I'm the boy who cried last ever Steam Charts.
]]>Something has... gone wrong with Planet Zoo. I think it'll be fixed easily enough, possibly even today, and I'm still having fun with it as it is. But, in the game's franchise mode at least, the promise of "build your own zoo, with whatever you like in it" has quietly been phased out for "in the grim darkness of the international animal trade, there is only warthogs".
Well, warthogs, ostriches and Indian peafowl, to be precise. Because, for anyone starting a game right now, that's pretty much all you can expect to see in your zoo for a good, long while. And you'll be seeing a lot of them, too, because grinding out millions of them is currently the best hope of you've got of getting other animals. It's very much a case of Go Pig or Go Home, and here's why.
]]>The results are in! The links between the longevity of Steam Charts and the decreases in violent crime, the improvement of sanitary water supplies, and sudden global drops in serious health issues, are no coincidence at all!
To quote from the paper recently published in Nature, "Causal links have been shown connecting Rock Paper Shotgun's Steam Charts articles to a remarkably number of positive worldwide trends, with strong suggestion that a global dependence on the column has been established, such that its weekly appearance is vital to humanity."
]]>Planet Zoo is a game where you can build your own zoo. It’s buggy, intermittently opaque, frequently saccharine, and - barring an eleventh hour miracle - it’s my undisputed game of the year. Because here’s the thing: it’s a game where you can build your own zoo. And by thunder, it delivers on that promise.
Usually, by the time I review a game - especially one as savagely time-guzzling as this one - I’m burned out on packing so many hours of play into a few days, and I’m ready to say my piece and move on. This time, my instinct is just to nod distractedly, tell you it’s good, and get back to playing. But here, for the sake of professional responsibility, is wot I think.
]]>Has your account been hacked? Have your favourite game's servers been compromised, revealing private data about you and your family? Are your bank details at risk?
]]>Following feedback from Planet Zoo beta players who were unhappy that its fancy Franchise Mode was only playable while online, Frontier Developments have announced they'll add a similar mode supporting offline play. Franchise Mode is one of three modes originally planned, giving players more to manage while running multiple zoos around the world. But it ties in online system like trading animals with other players (to ensure genetic diversity in breeding programmes, obvs) and it's just not playable offline. So hooray that Frontier now plan to make a fourth mode which offers a lot of Franchise mode's features without the online bits.
]]>As planet Earth continues its inexorable trajectory toward the encroaching black hole, and ever more aspects of our daily lives are being affected, even the weekly Steam Charts are feeling its affliction.
This may seem a more trivial aspect of our final months, but I believe it's vital to recognise the severity of the impact here to better understand the wider implications for how deeply calamitous this situation really is.
]]>Planet Zoo is Frontier's latest game in with "Planet" in the name. It takes all of what was great about Planet Coaster and replaces the rollercoasters and queues with animals and habitats. It's cute, it's fun, and it has had a lot of love poured into it. Myself and Alice Bee got the chance to have some hands-on time with the alpha at this year's Gamescom, and I had a right good time giving baths to Tapirs and hiring dedicated poo cleaners, as you can see in the video below.
]]>Over in LA, Frontier Developments have just shown the latest trailer for their upcoming menagerie-’em-up Planet Zoo, as well as setting a launch date for November 5th - and it’s looking very powerful indeed.
I’ll be straightforward with you here: with the exception of the extremely relaxing Megaquarium, I’ve always been disappointed by zoo games. And that’s not because I’m not into the concept. I spent a good slice of my childhood making zoos for toy animals out of tupperware and wooden blocks, and more of my teens than is normal drawing designs for reptile houses on graph paper. I even worked in a couple of zoos (although that’s a story for another time), and I’ve been to loads of the good ones.
]]>Trying to keep up with E3 2019 is a fool's errand, and the foaming river of content streaming down the internet's face doesn't always make it easier. So here's a round-up of every news story from the show we think matters to you, with links to our full stories (and bantful liveblogs) where relevant. We'll be updating this hourly, so keep coming back.
]]>They say you should never ask how the sausage is made, but in the case of Frontier's Planet Zoo, knowing how the game's creatures were created makes all the difference. Specifically, it's the difference between two kinds of game. On the one hand, a handsome, top-down management sim in which players breed and nurture pleasingly unruly animals for the delight and education of a rosy-cheeked NPC horde. And on the other, a wrenching Lynchian allegory for the ways in which animals are warped, faked, duplicated and optimised within systems of capital. All of which is quite a lot to swallow just before dinner time, I know. So let's start with something relatively easygoing: the humble hippo.
]]>After having us build theme parks to house dinosaurs in Jurassic World: Evolution and for mechanical snakes in Planet Coaster, Frontier Developments are focusing on cuddlier lifeforms in their next management sim. Today they announced Planet Zoo, which will let us build and run zoos with lions and tigers and bears, oh my! We saw a preview version and will have more to say about that sssoon. For now, here's word that Planet Zoo is due this autumn.
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