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Planet Coaster 2 has been quietly expanding its virtual theme parks since the sequel launched last November. Just before Christmas, the game’s first major update enhanced the simulation of its new flume rides, and improved the user interface—one of the main sources of criticism from the community on launch. Now, a second update has splashed down into Planet Coaster 2’s glittering pools, letting you create your own video billboards for your park, as well as the advertisements played on them.
These billboards can be placed anywhere around your park, and they come with numerous pre-created advertisements for existing rides, food and drink brands, and mascots. Yet PC players can also upload custom images and videos to the billboards, though you’ll need to ensure the latter are in .webm format to be compatible.
In a video accompanying the update, game director Rich Newbold explains some of the billboards’ other features. “The billboards in your park will be playing the audio from your videos out into the park,” Newbold says. “But you have the ability to connect existing speakers [in the game] to the billboard so that it will actually play through the speaker itself.” These speakers can also play custom audio, so if you want to blast your guests’ eardrums with your favourite albums from every corner of the park, you’re free to do that.
Update two also brings the ability to synchronise rides, which includes coasters and flumes, so that they set off at the same time, and adds “de-themed” variants of some of the existing coasters, meaning you’ll be able to place the rides in their existing layout, but customise them more easily to fit any park.
Alongside these new additions are a bunch of game tweaks and a long list of bug fixes. Regarding the former, Planet Coaster now provides greater control over user notifications, and adds filters to the multi-select tool. The most significant change, however, is to the path and pool tool. This now has a preview “which shows the path or pools style choice when using the tool.” This is extremely welcome, as I spent far too long deleting paths I’d just laid out because they were the wrong style.
I’m not going to delve too deeply into the bug fixes, else you’d be reading this article all day. But there are a couple of amusing ones from the “Guests” section of the changelog. Guests now “get changed before leaving the park when it has been manually closed”, meaning they no longer leg it out in their swimwear, and when you close a ride for repairs, they’ll now quietly leave the queue instead of “getting stuck and becoming ‘desperate’.” My favourite fix, though, is “Guests no longer become stuck in a panicked ‘struck by an object’ state after being struck by another guest from a flume”. To be entirely fair, if I was hit by a person flying off a waterslide at 40 mph, I would probably remain in a panicked state for quite a while.
I thoroughly enjoyed splashing around Planet Coaster 2’s waterparks during my review, although Steam’s users liked it slightly less than I did, citing the fiddly creation controls as one of the main bones of contention. Planet Coaster 2’s commercial performance is a topic of some debate. A report by Zeus capital suggested that the game wasn’t the success Frontier needed. Yet other reports indicate the game helped the company swing back into profit in the first half the financial year, bolstered by the studio’s “third-highest festive sales performance”. In any case, both reports cite a figure of 400,000 copies sold, which doesn’t seem enormous. But it’s an improvement over Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin, which flopped to the point Frontier revised its business strategy.
You can read the full changelog for today’s update here
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Kurt Indovina
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