Anyone who played video games in the 90s and early 00s has probably played Roller Coaster Tycoon at least once. The amusement park builder sim was one of — if not the most — popular “tycoon” games of its time, allowing players to build the amusement park of their dreams with relative ease.
The series’ glory days are long since gone. Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 saw a great divide in fans of the series thanks to long loading screens, a lack of character, and poorly designed UI. But this Wednesday, Atari is seeking to release its latest title, Roller Coaster Tycoon World — which many tycoon fans are calling an “unfinished, unpolished, hashed game”.
But what makes this any more controversial than the typical unfinished game release? The game is coming out only a day before its competition.
A little background info…
Video courtesy of OfficialNerdCubed’s YouTube channel
In the above video, Nerd3 shows off the three main competitors for the amusement park tycoon sim genre: Roller Coaster Tycoon World, Planet Coaster, and Parkitect. Parkitect has been out since May 5th, 2016, while Planet Coaster is due for release on November 17th.
As can clearly be seen in the video, both Parkitect and Planet Coaster are highly intuitive and well designed titles. The games look pretty, and building what you want is fairly easy, as the UI is very straight forward. Meanwhile Roller Coaster Tycoon World has a poorly designed UI, poor animations, and plenty of bugs. The game lacks any of the formulaic features that players are familiar with, and it rarely does what you want.
As a result of these upsets, Planet Coaster has since taken the title of Roller Coaster Tycoon 3‘s successor, as it provides many fixes for what the game did wrong. This is in great part thanks to the fact that it is developed by the same people who made that game. Parkitect, on the other hand, has been positively received by fans as an updated version of Roller Coaster Tycoon and its sequel.
To be fair to Roller Coaster Tycoon World, the footage was taken during beta, and all three games have had multiple updates and fixes since then. However, if the word of Reddit user JimmyPLove is anything to go by, then RCTW‘s updates haven’t done anything substantial in terms of fixing the abundance of technical issues with the game.
So why release it early then?
To put it plainly: Atari is trying to cash in on nostalgia as soon as possible. The release date of November 16th was announced only a few days ago, so it seems clear they know their competition has a superior product. As a result, they want to push the game early and bank on their nostalgia shares before they come crashing down.
The fans seem to know this fairly well already. Since Steam already has their new refund policy up, hopefully Atari won’t be able to get away with releasing an unfinished and unpolished product.
Roller Coaster Tycoon World is set to release on November 16th on Steam for $54.99.
But what do you think about this? Should Atari be allowed to release a faulty product for full price so early? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below!
Published: Nov 15, 2016 05:22 am