I know it's rough for a lot of people but I still see the vision and passion for this game. I'm taking it slow and am still in process of learning all the new tools. Updates & Patches will come!

My god this sub has turned sour QUICKLY. Am I the only one actually enjoying my time with the game? I can’t wait to get home so I can boot it up and build my sandbox. Seems to me like everyone and their mom believes Frontier kicked their puppy.

I am not trying to be a corpo apologist, but it IS okay to enjoy something even if it isn’t 100% perfect (yet).

I don't know if anyone noticed since I haven't seen anyone talking about it but they got rid of the negative impact the staff buildings had on the guests. That was one of the things most players complained about in the first game and I'm glad they listened. It does make building so much easier.

Springbok animations on a red deer? Sorry but I don't care if/when they'll fix it, it's like you are paying £40 for a beta.

If you haven't got PZ2 yet and are undecided please hold off. Do not give Frontier full price for this product.

Just a load of thumb twiddling in that studio. Maybe cancel that next Planet franchise game in the works and get to making some decent animations?

My red pandas can walk on water and the toucan flies through the netting but it sure looks great! The terrapin pond in front of the tropical house might be my favorite bit.

They've decided to break the laws of physics just to see the new snake.

TLDR; game has incredible potential but not there yet

As someone who one, is an ex content creator for the game with almost 2000 hours of gametime - so many basics are missing and its coming off lazy. Let me name a few I personally have a problem with as a more relaxed player .

Wildlife Reserves:
- no way to track how many animals/ their parentage/ no real ecosystem gameplay. You can release at animals and stare at them.
- no hunting. Again this should be in the game. If you promise wildlife reserves, they need to function like one. This game is not cheap. Animals ragdolling with not even a glimpse of hunting animations is lazy, especially knowing the fact that frontier has these rigs and Potential from JWE.
- stalking animations? Where?

Genetics:
- features removed from the original game. Animals are all the same size / genetics are meh. You can’t even breed the colour morphs you want because the breeding mechanics are slowed down perpetually.

Community:
Some of you - including huge creators out there act like you’re on payroll from frontier. This is a big gaming company. It deserves critique and if I’m paying 50 to 60 bucks for a game with this much promise then those promises should be delivered when the launch happens.

And no, I do not care that people made this game of course they made this game. They are making money off of the gamers. Everyone needs to stop being such a baby and a suck up sit down and actually critique the game. And large creators defending the company instead of giving real feedback for the game to improve is appalling to me. It is one of the reasons why I quit making content for this game.

Especially when it comes to people who do not want to play this game for a building aspect and they actually just want to play animals in a wildlife park setting - the amount of bullying I’ve seen happen on this community towards this type of players is insane. And the lazy argument is always “well it needs to be kid friendly.” as if this game doesn’t have an average player of 30 years old grow up everyone. Step it up! The game is good but it leaves a lot to be desired for the price point it sets itself at. I’m hoping it will get better in the future.

I'm absolutely loving the game, and don't want to add to the complaining. However, this is one thing I was really, really hoping would be improved in the sequel and I'm surprised and disappointed that it wasn't.

The constant huddling and shivering drives me crazy. It's absurd to imagine that everyone visiting a northern zoo in winter would be completely caught off guard by the freezing weather and expect the park management to fix it for them.

For a game so focused on conservation and sustainability, it makes no sense that we should be heating outdoor spaces or building entirely indoor parks because guests insist on wearing summer clothes in winter weather.

There is simply no way anyone at Frontier thought this was okay.

Far Cry 4 came out over a DECADE ago, and isn’t even a game about animals. Sure, they’re an important part of gameplay, but they exist purely to either maul the player or fill the map. 99.9% of players are never going to see a hunt like this take place while they’re busy driving or shooting, and yet Ubisoft went to all the efforts to have the npc tiger stalk its prey to get within ambush range, the tapirs alarm calling when accosted, and a completely bespoke takedown animation to wrap everything up in a beautiful bow.

Then there’s PZ2…

Im genuinely at a loss for words. For as much of an emphasis that Frontier put on animals interacting realistically with both the environments they live in and each other, yet somehow a game about blowing up helicopters and shooting armed militia outdoes them in one of the most critical aspects of wild animal behavior.

I want to start by saying that I'm genuinely enjoying Planet Zoo 2. There are some great improvements, I find the wildlife reserves interesting, and I can absolutely see the potential here. But after playing since launch and seeing what other people have been posting, I'm surprised by how little discussion there has been about the actual state of the game, especially from some of the bigger content creators.

For weeks, so much of the conversation surrounding PZ2 has revolved around the roster. And I understand why. There are legitimate complaints about the animal selection, particularly when it comes to regional representation. But I honestly think that discussion has distracted from some much bigger problems.

The game is riddled with bugs. We've all seen the clips people are posting of broken or bizarre animal animations. Animals sometimes lose their textures entirely, the day/night cycle doesn't seem to work properly, and Franchise Mode has had some pretty serious issues since launch. Then there's the hunting mechanic in wildlife reserves, which raises its own questions about how polished and functional some of the new systems actually are.

There are also features missing from the first game that I genuinely don't understand the reasoning behind. Why can we no longer see genetic information directly in the animal management tab? Why was automatic population management for exhibit animals removed? These were useful features that already existed.

And this brings me to something that's been bothering me about the coverage of the game.

I follow and enjoy several of the bigger Planet Zoo creators, and I appreciate the work they put into their videos. But some of them had access to the game for days before launch, and I find it strange how little attention many of these issues received. Even in the first few days after release, so much of the discussion still seems to revolve around the roster, while players are discovering and documenting problems that make parts of the game feel unfinished.

I'm not suggesting anyone deliberately concealed anything, and I understand that creators have different priorities and limited time. But when you're given early access to a game and your coverage helps shape people's expectations before release, I think it's fair to question how accurately that coverage represented the experience players were about to have.

Frontier is already working on patches, and I'm sure the game will improve considerably over time. But why did it launch like this in the first place? At what point did we become comfortable with paying full price for games that need weeks or months of fixes? Sometimes it genuinely feels like we're being treated as unpaid beta testers.

I want PZ2 to succeed. I loved the original, and I already enjoy a lot about the sequel. But I think we can appreciate what's good about it while also being more critical of how unfinished certain aspects feel.

The male wolf has no interest in breaking the laws of physics just her.

Celebrating the launch of Planet Zoo 2 with three amazing animals brought to life in my own illustration style: the Sumatran tiger, the hawksbill sea turtle, and the toco toucan!

Which one is your favorite? 👀
Illustration by me

Naturally my penguins were quite wary of this one.

I finally finished KCD2 recently, can you tell?

It's been very hard to watch the discourse about this game in the past two days since it's been out. I am NOT saying that you can't be disappointed or annoyed with aspects of the game. I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to complain about them on this forum. I just think that a lot of people unfairly assume that the problems are a result of devs being lazy or not caring.

It is evident how much care and hard work has gone into this game, and because it has so much more realism than what we had before, I think it's even easier to notice where the game falls short in terms of that realism. But it's important to remember that just because something makes logical sense to us doesn't mean that it's easy to translate into programming or quick to implement.

Do I think the game should've had more testing and bug fixing before release? Definitely. Do I think the devs are responsible? Absolutely not.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect anything close to perfect realism given the scope of this game. One example that I'm seeing a lot of complaints about is the climbing, and how animals clip into or don't appear to fully stand on certain objects. It's a fair complaint, but it's not as simple a situation as "lazy devs couldn't be bothered to make it look good". Think about how many different climbable objects there are in the game, and add to that the fact that the player can assemble them in any orientation and configuration, and even resize them. The level of complexity this adds for just one animal (let alone the whole roster) is potentially massive from a programming and animation standpoint.

tl;dr: it's fine to be annoyed or upset about the problems and bugs in the game, but it's not fair to call the devs lazy or careless because of it

I do think Frontier will actually fix most of them unlike the Sims which is built on spaghetti code 😂😂

So annoying to see the whole Zoo still walking around shivering, while wearing shorts and t-shirts 🥲

I want my zoo to be in a medieval style so I created this little building for the workers as a start

I was looking at the mammal evolution info board when I noticed that it has human and elephants branching from the same ancestor which is so wrong it hurts, so much so i have to question why the person who did this graphic didn't look it up before putting it into a semi-education adjacent game. It wouldn't have taken them more than a second to see the real relations between the mammal tree.

note: humans would be under the Anthropoidea branch.

Also it starts at Marsupialia and not Monotremata (IE. Platypus and echidnas) So just add the monotrematas as the first branch. So the right order going left to right should be platypus to the tree kangaroo(?), then to elephant, rat, human, cat, seal (which could be switched with cat because they come from two branches of Carnivora), horse, then deer, then last whale.

I've been wanting (and I've seen other players and content creators mention as well) the ability to use more than one keeper gate to habitats all the way back in PZ1 even. Building a large habitat often means keepers struggle to traverse to the farther points of the enclosures but a second gate could allow for them to more easily and quickly access the other side. It's also useful for realistic habitats that have "partitioned" areas for the animals, like a backstage and guest facing areas, or enclosures that have animal tunnels over a guest path too small for keepers to traverse to a separate areas.

And now in PZ2 we need multiple gates more than ever as it would MASSIVELY simplify making mixed habitat/aquarium enclosures rather than using unintuitive and janky workarounds to make them.

Speaking of mixed habitats and a bit on a tangent, but I noticed as well that keepers exit and enter aquariums in their wetsuits and take a few steps in flippers and all before/after doing their quick changes. This gave me the thought of... why do we absolutely HAVE to use an aquarium gate for fish and other aquatics?

It's no secret that especially with the exiting addition of koi, many would love to build naturalistic looking ponds for them, and again it is somewhat doable with janky workarounds by buying the aquarium gate and making the keeper entrance below the ground level, but once again it's not very intuitive or a simple setup (it also takes a lot of real-estate to setup so it's not always viable in tight spaces).

Why can't a keeper enter through a normal, land based habitat gates, walk towards the shoreline, and then do their quick change animation into their wetsuit there and simply wade into the water like a semiaquatic animal would? Not only would this make fish ponds far easier to build, but would also have the sie benefit of also allowing us to build more realistic aquarium setups where divers enter large aquariums from a diving platform above the waterline instead of an airlock!

Please Frontier! Perhaps there's some engine limitation that prevents these ideas from working, but it seems at least likely possible since they basically use existing systems already present! It would really open up a whole new world of creative habitat designs and functionality in Planet Zoo 2!

Haven’t seen this brought up, but can we talk about the absolute death trap that is the new fire salamander exhibit? The old one was literally perfect, not really sure why they decided to change it, but especially changing it to THIS??? Adult fire salamanders are really awful at swimming, they’re exclusively terrestrial forest dwellers. Short of throwing one in a saltwater reef, you couldn’t design a worse exhibit for the species if you tried. They clearly already knew what their care was based on the exhibit in the first game so what convinced them to completely go against very common knowledge?