Roller Coaster Tycoon Beta

Anyone get in on this? Any thoughts from the CBuzz crowd?

Curious as to what the opinion here is.

I've been a hater and based on the reviews of the Beta...

http://store.steampowered.com/app/282560/#app_reviews_hash

• The game is not good now. The problems are such that they cannot be sufficiently addressed before the currently scheduled release date. Do not buy.
• This game is really pretty, but I honestly can't recommend it.
• Although RollerCoaster Tycoon is one of my favorite game franchies, this latest incarnation has me worried. The game ran very slowly on my machine (8gb ram), though I was one of the fortunate ones that didn't have continuous crashing problems.
• I was so excited to finally get my hands on the new coaster builder but once I actually started using it I was extremely disappointed.
• To go in depth a little: the roller coaster editor is just broken.
• Thanks for the refund!

I'll spare the "I told you so" for now. :)

I'll wait until it's really cheap. I'm sure I can grab it for 75% off one day during one of Steam's big sales. Or I can just "try it for free". For now, Parkitect is looking really good based on what you've been posting. I hope that comes out to Steam soon.

I do not have the game or anything yet, but I cannot help but wonder why the community is so negative. People's expectations are so sky-high these days that NO ONE could satisfy their every want. People complain about graphics and they upgrade it to Unity 5 and STILL find something stupid to complain about. If you want the best graphics in the world, PLAY Theme Park Studio or No Limits 2 and shut up!

Why do people expect to get a complete handle on the coaster editor the VERY first time you use it?? I was not a perfect coaster designer when I started playing RCT back in the day. This stuff takes time to learn and were you No Limits 2 players automatically able to design perfect coasters overnight?? I highly doubt it.

I just get the feeling that the community really does not know what they want out of the game. They wanted a better looking game and they gave it to us by using the Unity 5 engine. If anything, I wonder if people are using inferior computers to try to play this game. This game is going to need an advanced 3D card, which may suck for a lot of people who do not have the latest and greatest computers. Just a rant.

Not having used it yet I'm extrapolating my thoughts based on my experience with NL2 and what I've seen in videos and reviews, but...while a spline based editor is a great idea and allows for the kind of customization many have been wanting since RCT2, it can be one heck of a system to wrap your mind around. I've made about 6 coasters in NL2 so far in addition to playing around with individual track elements and I still can't come close to making any kind of inversion, and still struggle a bit with shaping airtime hills. Now, you could probably narrow down the user interface quite a bit and have a lot of prebuilt elements that the system or user can then size/reshape appropriately for each individual use, but that doesn't seem to be the direction they've taken, which is interesting. It seems like they tried to take the fully customizable NL2 system in and hack it down to be "easier" to use while not quite putting all the removed power into the AI of the system, or using it incorrectly.

To be fair, this isn't a full beta of the entire game. Much of the game is missing, they just want feedback on the coaster creator. Here is a more sensible review from a beta tester:

"The coaster creation has a very big learning curve because the game takes physics into account. Your coaster will not be able to make sharp hairpin curves, you need to bank your turns, slow the coaster down if its doing 90mph in a turn. This is why people are having issues and why it has such a higher learning curve than the other games. They should give you the option of the current system and the original piece by piece for the inpatient.

Content in the game has all but been locked out for the current beta, because they want feedback on the coaster creation system. If you are patient and enjoyed the older games, then yes I reccomend this game, I loved the wild designs I created in my coasters. But again, it has a learning curve, do not expect to just jump right in and make a great coaster, physics, speed, gravity are now factored in, you are not going to make a turn if your coaster is flying at 100+mph."

No Mac version, so... meh.

Are expectations really that high? I mean, the original two games were essentially made by one guy with sprite-based graphics. I don't think high expectations are unreasonable when you give the franchise to a company that has millions of dollars in budget and technology that is quite literally 15 years newer.

Raven-Phile said:

No Mac version, so... meh.

They intend to have one out early next spring, available thru Steam as well.

I've read up on it a little. I think Pete is right on. First, this wasn't a full beta, it was only the coaster editor. Without having tried it myself, I can't comment, but from what I've seen and read, there are a couple of performance issues, and then there are people complaining about not being able to do much with the coaster editor. Not sure if it is due to this being a buggy partial beta, or design issues.

Having said that, this isn't being developed by the same people that built RCT3. They have a game coming out as well, but this is being developed by a whole new team. I'll still buy it (And parkitecht, and Planet Coaster...).

"For those people who like to place "premade" coasters (which I also love to do when I'm not in the mood to build), there will be a slew of them according to the devs along with Steam Workshop support and mods. Besides that, I believe there will be tons of content in free DLC and updates as the devs have promised. There will also be the "old" track editor in the game like we are all used to in the old RCTs if you want to place tracks that way. The point is, you don't HAVE to use the coaster editor but I want them to keep it, just fix it."

Pete said:

They should give you the option of the current system and the original piece by piece for the inpatient.

That's only available for outpatients? Lame.

Personally I'd pay good money for a Mac port of RCT2...

http://www.rollercoastertycoon.com/rctw-blog-23-rollercoaster-tycoo...arly-2016/

So after the reaction to the Beta, they're moved the release date back...again. To an undertermined 2016 date.

Not surprising. It seems that delays are pretty much to be expected in games these days. But it's better that they are doing that than going the release now patch later route.

Game developers don't know how to control and contain scope. Worse, when they do open up to public betas, they don't know when and where to say "no" to certain things. I think this is one of those situations. I've gotta hand it to the Parkitect guys, they're pretty good at knowing the difference, and they have a fraction of the budget that RCT does. (Though I'm still going to pout about not being able to build tracks backward. :))

I think I'm going to have to invest in Parkitect this weekend...

If you don't have a half hour to listen to this dude bitch, you can check out the last 6 or 8 minutes that are specifically the suckiness of trying to build a coaster. But really, you need to spend the whole half hour to appreciate the state of this game. And yes, I'm still a hater.

"That's an infinity symbol for a reason" lol

<sarcasm>I wonder if he is saying it takes a while to load. Maybe he just has an older system, newer ones should handle it no problem. </sarcasm>

I've gotten sucked down a wormhole of watching people struggle to build coasters with the stupid system in RCTW. It really is something.

Maybe it's because I've built enough coasters in NoLimits, but to me a lot of the complaints seem to be related to trying to do too much with one node of track. Always at least 3 nodes for a lift hill from lead in to start of the drop. I'm sure the system is trying to do some things automatically to keep it much more simple than NoLimits, though, which probably complicates it a bit. I did find it hilarious that they didn't have a US flag banner in there. I really hope they come up with a way to have waterfalls in the landscape, because I did love the bit where the guy played with the water and terrain. I personally like this graphical style.

Yeah. Some of it is definitely people not understanding how to use the tools.