It’s been nearly eight years since Frontier Developments launched the hugely successful Planet Coaster, which was only the beginning of a journey that’s since taken players to many exciting and creative heights with its various DLC collections. As the spiritual successor to the iconic Roller Coaster Tycoon franchise, today marks an exciting twist on that ride with the announcement of the highly-anticipated Planet Coaster 2 and its first trailer. If that wasn’t enough to get hearts racing, Planet Coaster 2 looks set to bring fans a bunch of community-requested content by enabling players to splash into water parks for the first time with pools, flumes, and much more.
At the preview event for Planet Coaster 2, Game Rant got to see around 20 minutes of pre-alpha gameplay footage of touring a combined water and coaster park. The preview began with a first look at today’s announcement trailer as revealed below, which also details a Fall 2024 release date. Following that, Planet Coaster 2’s Game Director Richard Newbold and Senior Executive Producer Adam Woods led a tour of the park, including new pool features, ride customization options, management systems, and more. Game Rant also had the opportunity to interview Newbold and Woods about what was seen after the event.
Related
Atari Now Owns the Publishing Rights to Rollercoaster Tycoon
In a deal closing at $7 million, the publishing rights to amusement park simulator Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 now belong to Atari.
Creating A Splash With Pools And Flumes In Planet Coaster 2
Planet Coaster 2‘s announcement trailer begins with a group of guests dangling over the edge of an Oblivion-style coaster before phasing into a first-person pool splash. The trailer also shows guests relaxing in pools on lilos and noodles, sliding down flumes, and snippets of its ride customizations in action. It also showcases Planet Coaster 2‘s new mascot entertainer, Queen Splash, with her delightfully fun pink rubber ring and splash crown. However, that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all the incredible new features we saw in the preview.
Newbold and Woods began by showing us some pool areas of their combined water and coaster park, but we later learned that it’s up to players if they want to make only a water park, coaster park, or a combination of both. Aside from guests enjoying pool areas, Newbold and Woods also demonstrated Planet Coaster 2‘s new pool construction tool, which lets players build classic or custom pool shapes, from square to curved designs. Players can also build flumes piece-by-piece like in the original Planet Coaster‘s roller coasters.
There were a bunch of flume construction options, including transparent sections and vertical drop pieces. Newbold and Woods also mentioned that players will have to balance excitement, fear, and nausea just like they might do with roller coasters. Excitedly, during our follow-up interview, Newbold and Woods also revealed that players will get to ride the flumes as guests just like they would roller coasters.
We also got to see different designs of Planet Coaster 2‘s water flumes, such as a six-person raft flume with a blue and white giant fly trap design. There was also another called The Boomerang with a classic pink and green striped flume design. As Newbold and Woods detailed in more depth later on in the preview, Planet Coaster 2 lets players create patterns for rides using the Tool Picker and more, taking ride customization to a whole new level.
Guest Services And Park Authenticity With Plaza-Style Paths In Planet Coaster 2
Of course, pools in Planet Coaster 2 also mean ensuring guests have a good time and keeping them safe, which is where the new lifeguard staff fit in. It’s up to players to manage their lifeguard staff and ensure guests who get into any difficulties are rescued.
There are also roles that players might expect from staff in Planet Coaster, such as Janitors to help keep the park clean, shop vendors, and ride attendants, to name a few. We also saw new types of guest services and pool facilities, including guest changing areas and buildings for them to buy pool passes before entering the pools, plus a glimpse of a new splash emporium as another type of park revenue stream.
We got to see new plaza-style paths surrounding pool areas, which are wider paths designed to more closely reflect the design of water and coaster parks in real life. Like in Planet Coaster, Newbold and Woods also pointed out that authenticity is key in Planet Coaster 2. We later saw these kinds of path designs used to create a large food court area with a California Resort theme in other parts of the park, another feature that looks to make the theme park experience more realistic than ever.
Themes And In-Depth Ride Customization Options In Planet Coaster 2
Planet Coaster 2 has a classic top-down park management view where its pools now really add a whole new dimension to the landscape. That said, Planet Coaster 2 also lets players walk around and immerse themselves in their parks as a guest. While there was a makeshift solution that made walking around parks in Planet Coaster possible, it wasn’t an in-built mechanism.
For the next part of the tour, Newbold and Woods walked around the park in a first-person camera perspective, pointing out and going in-depth on particular rides with Planet Coaster 2‘s new ride customization options. As well as changing the patterns of slides, players can do the same for other rides in their parks, including roller coasters.
For example, we saw a teacup ride with a deep-water aquatic theme and a steampunk steam train as just two examples of themes in Planet Coaster 2. Specifically, the teacups had floating giant jellyfish, rocks with coral decorations, and animated bubble effects. As brand-new additions to Planet Coaster 2, Newbold and Woods also demonstrated how to change patterns of rides and the color of patterns, such as the frame, plus the ability to add scenery pieces to the rides themselves.
For instance, players can add scenery directly onto the central pedestal of the tea cups, which could also be animated or a custom blueprint. Newbold and Woods also mentioned the new Planet Coaster object scaling features to make objects scale up and down in size according to players’ preferences.
We also saw these new coaster customization features, such as adding scenery pieces to coaster carts. For instance, players can add nautical scenery like a rubber ring to the front of an aquatic-themed coaster cart, which features tools to keep everything synched up while going around the track. Players can scale these features how they like and apply features to all coaster carts, which is a nice touch to the user experience. As before, players can ride the coasters as guests through guest-cam mode and use pre-built coaster blueprints or create their own.
Interestingly, it’s also up to players to manage the power for their rides to keep them running, as another new park management feature along with keeping pools clean. Altogether, we were incredibly excited by everything we saw in the Planet Coaster 2 preview, which looks to take the original Planet Coaster‘s exceptional level of creativity to even bigger heights while giving players numerous fan-requested features. With even more details yet to be announced, it looks like Planet Coaster fans and new players alike could be in for a real thrill when Planet Coaster 2 launches later this year.
Planet Coaster 2 is due for release in Fall 2024.
Planet Coaster
Planet Coaster is a management and construction game that gives players the dream job of building and maintaining theme parks.
The game is considered a spiritual successor to the iconic RollerCoaster Tycoon franchise. Planet Coaster was developed by Frontier Developments, a British studio that worked on multiple RollerCoaster Tycoon games.
- Released
- November 17, 2016
- Genre(s)
- Simulation
- ESRB
- E For Everyone due to Crude Humor, Mild Violence
- How Long To Beat
- 27 Hours
- Metascore
- 84
