Planet Zoo

Frontier turns its tech to lions and tigers and bears, oh my

There’s a moment in our demo of Planet Zoo, the follow-up to Frontier Developments’ theme-park sim Planet Coaster, that captures perfectly the fantasy the studio is shooting for. The camera floats above the clouds, overseeing all creation, before plummeting with all the sudden gravity of a rollercoaster drop, into an enclosure filled with lions. Each member of this small pride roams around with convincing independence, one clambering down a slope to paddle around their player-constructed pool. The camera pushes in further still, until we can pick out every strand of fur in their manes. What makes it truly remarkable is the scale, and the contrast between the bird’s- and worm’s-eye views. The demo repeats the trick, zooming out and whizzing across the zoo, past large constructions and a closed-loop railway, to pick out a family of African elephants, where one calf is in the water using its trunk as a snorkel. Then it’s onto the zebras, the grizzly bears, the peacocks…

A single zoo can contain hundreds of animals, across dozens of species, and Frontier wants them all to be equally believable and engaging to watch. “We never wanted any animal to feel like a reskin of another one,” lead animator Chris Marsh tells us. “One thing we found with Jurassic World Evolution is that everybody has their favourite dinosaur, their favourite animal – and if the player feels like their favourite hasn’t been given as much love as another species, that would be a shame.”