Microsoft’s launch line-up for the Xbox One is awfully stabby. At a preview event in London last week, I wandered from stall to stall, checking off hands-ons and interviews with the triple-A titles like Dead Rising 3 and Ryse, but on the list of interviewees there was a game that I’m now quite embarrassed to say I’d never heard of. Zoo Tycoon? What’s that, a game about stabbing lemurs? Kicking penguins? Pulling the wings off an eagle?
None of the above, it turns out. It’s a lovely game about building a great big zoo, filling it with all sorts of exotic animals and feeding them apples with the Kinect. No-one gets pushed into an enclosure and ripped apart by Kodiaks, no-one ragdollises on the front of a zoo buggy and leaves bloody tyre tracks on the paths. The most violent thing I could do was use a water hose to spray an elephant in the face – which it turns out elephants love, the masochists.
After chopping up the enemies of Rome and ploughing through the undead on a motorbike-cum-steamroller, Zoo Tycoon was a breath of fresh air I didn’t know I needed. It’s a complete reversal of pervading wisdom on this generation that making things nastier – more realistically gory, more wincingly violent – will make me like a game more. Games like Ryse want me to like them because they’re horrible – loud, crass, swaggering things dripping blood and machismo. Zoo Tycoon wants me to like it because it’s nice.
One of the first things Microsoft Studios Studio Manager Jorg Neumann told me as I sat plonking down enclosures for my park was that the team at Frontier Developments were focussed on getting the “most beautiful animals in gaming” (has there ever been a nicer mission statement than that?). We zoomed in on a giraffe to have a closer look at its mane, all bristly and shiny in 1080p, and the giraffe twitched its ears. “We spent hundreds of hours watching YouTube videos to get the animations just right,” says Neumann. “We really geeked out.”
The team also put in the hours with animal charities and National Geographic, so that each animal’s bio correctly reflected what it eats, how it lives and how much mankind is tarmacing over its habitat – just like in a real zoo. It’s like directing your own Attenborough documentary, but all the animals get along and never die from exposure.
Finally, Neumann and his team want to use the game as tool to protect nature. “Zoos are about two things,” he says, “education and conservation.” That’s why the developers have an agreement in place whereby once a set number of players complete challenges in the game (like releasing a certain number of rhinos into the virtual wild, for example), Microsoft will make a real-world donation to the relevant animal charity or zoo. Which, as far as I know, doesn’t happen in Dead Rising.
The sad thing is, Zoo Tycoon will probably suffer from launching alongside its bigger, bloodier Day One cousins. Even at the preview event, while the triple-A titles had multiple screens and consoles set up so people could play in waves, Zoo Tycoon had a single, lonely booth. Seen on a shelf or a pre-order list, it’d be easy to assume that it was the token ‘family-friendly’ launch game – something for the kids to have a go on before they go to bed and mum and dad can get back to the grown-up business of sticking swords through people’s faces. It made me think: when did being nice become something juvenile?
It also made me wonder if I’ve ever played a ‘nice’ big budget game before. Certainly on this generation the pickings are slim: even the Lego games use death as a fail state, albeit a temporary, cartoonish one. LittleBigPlanet has spike traps. I run people off the road in racers. Even going back to childhood and my Sega Mega Drive, Simba got trampled to death in The Lion King and Aladdin could tumble into bottomless pits. I thought I had a winner with SimCity, but the only reason my ten-year-old self played that was to build a sprawling Utopia then bring on an alien apocalypse. That’s practically genocide.
That makes Zoo Tycoon the nicest (non-indie) game I’ve ever played – winner by default, champion in a one-horse race. I hope it sets a precedent. For months we have, as gamers, been asking what’s new about next-gen, and the answers we’ve had have unanimously fallen somewhere on the (slightly dull and predictable) spectrum of bigger-prettier-and-online-ier. But wouldn’t it be great if the answer was ‘it’s going to be nicer’? Not less fun or less challenging, just a bit less ‘do-this-or-you’ll-die’ and a bit more ‘do-this-because-it’s-lovely’. More fur, less dismemberment. 1080p is a hot topic for Xbox One at the minute – but what developers do with it is every bit as important as hitting the milestone in the first place.
Zoo Tycoon looks set to launch alongside the Xbox One as an exclusive.
The post Could the next-gen be the nice-gen? If so, Zoo Tycoon is a good start appeared first on Edge Online.
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