Roller Coaster Tycoon 1, 2, and 3 were all extremely popular, well loved games - and then we had a drought of over ten years on amusement park management sims for no apparent reason. There have been a few games with somewhat similar subject matter, but none so loved as the RCT games.
And now, suddenly, in 2016 we’re going to get several.
The best of the bunch will almost certainly be Planet Coaster, made by Frontier, using the same engine they used to make Elite: Dangerous, which I hope it means it’ll get really good VR support. Frontier actually made RCT 3 in 2004, and this game is basically a spiritual successor to that. So 3d, ride your own rides, build your own coasters, manage the park (prices, concessions, staff, etc). View your park through the eyes of your customers and see the park as they would.
They kept the cartoony art style which really fits the game, but added a ton of detail compared to RCT3. Guests are much more detailed and expressive now. The scenery and ride models are very detailed, even to the point of modelling nuts and bolts so everything looks plausibly authentic. The design system is very modular and very flexible. Build your own buildings and scenery, even doing things like designing the structure and look of your own shops, adding any sort of prop to anything else. Effort was made to make stuff like supports for rides build/behave accurately.
They’re going to have some sort of in-game ability to share the rides and buildings and scenery you design, which is great. I hope they design it well, because user generated content is huge in games like these.
They released an alpha a few days ago, so we’re getting videos of where it’s at right now. It has a limited feature set and very limited coasters so far, but there’s a lot of promise in there.
I don’t recommend buying it - it’s $75 compared to the $30 preorder price. I think they just want to get a limited number of super-enthusiasts in there for feedback. It’s due out towards the end of this year.
Here’s a Nerd^3 video from yesterday. If you prefer something less… enthusiastic, here’s one from someone else.
Here is the first of a series of dev blog videos that give insight into what they want the game to be.
Next up is Roller Coaster Tycoon World. This is the official sequel to the RCT series, in that it’s produced by Atari who owns the name. But there’s a lot to be cautious about in this one. It’s basically going after the same gameply as Planet Coaster, and was supposed to come out a year before it, but it’s been through a development mess. The original plan was to develop it from the poor RCT4Mobile game from 2014, but that was much too technically primitive. They ended up scrapping that and handing it off to another developer. When they release some footage that indicated it was actually more primitive than RCT3 from 10 years ago, that second team was fired and replaced with another one. And I think at some point, a fourth developer was brought in.
They delayed it instead of releasing it as shovelware, so there’s hope they’re actually going to do something decent with it, but given that it’s going to come out around the same time as planet coaster and seems to have less promise. It may be the odd man out, but I’m hoping it’ll have some sort of unique feature or different take that makes it a worthwhile game.
If you prefer RCT1/2 to 3 (2d, isometric, more focused on running the business aspects and less focused on riding your own rides), there’s Theme Parkitect. It’s much more technically primitive - a clear indie game - but has a different sort of focus. A lot of people prefer RCT1/2 to 3, so this may appeal to them. Preorders/early access is $15.
In looking into these things, I just discovered OpenRCT, which rewrites and modernizes RCT2. It lets the game run better on modern system, fixes bugs, adds features - I haven’t looked into it too much yet but I may play around with it to hold me over until Planet Coaster comes out.
There’s also Theme Park Studio which I’ve kept an eye on a little bit. It’s not a game so much as a sandbox where you can design a real park in detail, including designing your own rides in a physics-based way. It’s been in early access for 2 years and I don’t know how far it’s come. If Planet Coaster’s design process is as good as it looks, it looks like it may superscede this game (unless you wanted a realistic aesthetic or designed your own rides from scratch), but it was worth mentioning.