Game 91 - RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 - Week 174 - Apr 23

ollerCoast Tycoon 3

From the get-go it's obvious there's a new target audience in mind - the art style appealing to anyone in a family range to straight up children. It’s like if the Sims 5 changed it’s style to Chibi. But after playing Stronghold and now this - it's pretty clear in my mind that for this type of game Spritework > 3D. I wonder how successful Factorio would be if it was in 3D. Hell if StarCraft 3 released with a sprite mode, how much would that pop off? That being said there are immediately a few clear advantages to being in 3D.

The first being the Coaster Cam. You can take the POV of a passenger and watch your ride. This is absolutely a fantastic way to enjoy your ride and more city builders/sims should do this (Dungeon Keeper 3 please!). Imagine taking the POV of someone in Train Tycoon watching the scenery or Anno 2070 and seeing a day in the life of a citizen. I can understand why they don't do it as they'd need to test and polish the game from a non-isometric perspective and RC has the advantage of most its attractions being external. But how good would it be to see the defence/assault of your Stronghold walls from the POV of an archer, old handler, or offending knight, just like the OG cutscene. I do wish you could do this with a single customer from the gate and experience a day in the life of your theme park from food stalls, to the spookiest ride to vomiting after undertaking the highest thrills. Even though it would have been next level I understand why they didn’t do it – requireing internal modeling for anything with a roof over it (unlike the Coasters).

The second is terrain manipulation. You can create a lot more interesting theme parks with elevation and decreases. Not something I’ll ever really want to mess with outside of creating some kind of mountain forest theme park with lots of water rapids. In general the terrain reminds me of Unity and shitty textures when 3D games were still getting their foot on the ground in the PS1-2 era.

Starting off with the tutorial was a pain. It was very dry and way too complicated especially for its target audience of children. Like 10 mechanics to learn each with 50+ text boxes with potentially hundreds of words. 10x50x50-200(50)=25,000. That’s basically a novella and kids are meant to pay attention to this? It does a terrible job demonstrating mechanics as well. Like how to connect rides via pathways. Hold down on the path and drag up or down to elevate/decline. Or once you place use the arrows on the pathway UI to select which direction they’ll go. It's not explained like that. It felt like I was reading a procedure manual for a task at work going back and fourth when it should have just been narrated and or show a little animation. Additionally there is nothing intuitive about this UI and coming off Tropico 4 it was hard to adjust. For example when you select stuff there’s no sounds to indicate you’ve selected something instead it’ll appear in the bottom right and likely go unnoticed that you’ve done so. Everything in the menu is hard to find and stuck to the left. Between the art style, UI and tutorial the first impressions of this game was not good and by the end of the tutorial I was so drained I didn’t want to play at all.

Something that bothered me was there’s not pre-built rides. The way I want to experience this game is place a lot of rides and try to micromanage the infrastructure of my theme park and min max all the attractions to gain revenue. Then at the end build a capstone ride as the park’s Magnum Opus. That being said I did give it my best shot and built a !@#$ing phenomenal ride if I do say so myself. It took maybe 2 hours in total. I am a noob and would expect this to be significantly improved in some time. Though I will say linking up rides was an absolute bastard. It feels way harder than it should be to create rides that loop in on themselves and have epic peaks and drops, twists and turns. After finishing it and basking in it’s glory it was ready for the grand opening and... to my surprise no one came. Not a single person went on the ride except the Parking Inspector. That’s because the ride nausea and intensity is 16 but excitement is 0. First of all how can intensity but 16 and exhaustion 0 – that’s an oxymoron. Unless you’re saying nauses negates excitement entirely (which would also be ridiculous that that’s possible). When and how is this explained? I remembered I needed to add themes to the rides to make them more exciting – but for some ridiculous reason they’re not available in the first mission of the campaign. Why would you even allow custom rides then if this is the main tool (as shown in the tutorial) to get people to use them? I had a similar issue in the tutorial where you couldn't explore, only select what they wanted you to. I actually found myself enjoying building the ride. Piecing it together over existing rides and terrain was a novel kind of puzzle. But to put so much time into a custom ride and then nothing… I won’t be doing another custom ride for a while because why risk seeing no use from it. I’m not sure the simulation elements of this game should be this hardcore especially considering, as I repeat myself, it’s meant to have a childlike target audience. What child would be paying this much attention not the terrible tutorial to not waste their time like I did? The coaster sim mechanics also feel like they were poorly implemented and when they realised no one would understand them, tacking on ride events to allow people to increase excitement. I have no issue with ride events, they’re cool, but allow me to remove those mechanic’s so I can just saw them to attract people’s attention instead. It feels like there should be a difficulty slider that limits these mechanics or perhaps just implement them better (i.e. don’t allow a mechanic but not another that’s required for said mechanic to work).

If that wasn’t bad enough the ride also messed up the elevation of terrain. Somehow building the rollercoaster elevated a tile by one inch, blocking all customers from the back half of the park and breaking the park. Tried the smooth mechanic and this broke the entire park by blocking the entry way. In the end I found a tool that could let me elevate a tile on an angle and that fixed but my god is it unintuitive. I reinstalled RC2 just to see the difference – and immediately upon starting a scenario I was struck by just how much better it is. The sprites have just held up better. You might say that’s just nostalgia but I’d disagree. I played Stronghold 1 and 2 and thought the exact same thing. But aside from that there are a lot of noticeable differences. The UI is so much easier to use – so much so that a tutorial was completely unnecessary. Compare that to RC3 where I had to go back to the tutorial because I couldn’t find what I was after… You have the option for pre-built and custom by default which makes them so much simpler without having to manage the design and excitement of a ride and also gives you a reference point if you decide to build your own ride. The entrances are built into the ride and match the theme, just hook up the path and off you go. The rest of my time can be spent on micro-managing my park and spying on guests just as it should be - only as the timing or funding allows I'll bother to create a custom ride.

Sorry everyone - Mother Gaia has deemed the park closed.

I might come back to this game as I don’t feel like I properly explored it. Maybe when Gabe blesses the coasts of Australia with the almighty Steam Deck. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this remains on the shelf as I rarely crave for Tycoon games beyond the nostalgia of playing the originals.