Running a successful theme park can get stressful and these loathsome mechanics don’t help matters.
open/close all folders
RollerCoaster Tycoon 1/2/Classic
- Trees. You'd have to manually remove every tree that gets in your way during ride construction, and trees actually cost money to remove, unlike statues, fountains, and other scenery items. RCT2 added the remove scenery tool that enables removal of multiple scenery pieces at once and automatically removes scenery objects in the way during ride construction.
- The rather infamous (station) brake failures. It's a type of roller coaster failure where the station brakes don't work, and if your cars are coming in at high speeds, a crash will very likely occur due to this. If you hadn't designed a coaster with this failure in mind, you would generally get interrupted sometime later on in the scenario with a sudden message showing your coaster crashing. There are multiple workarounds, but of course that didn't stop the developers from failing to design several coasters with this in mind (Agoraphobia and Runaway Plumber are perfect examples of this). Considering how frustrating it is to see a coaster you built, which you were sure was working just fine, crash out of complete nowhere, it's no wonder this type of failure was made much more rare in the second installment (and especially in the third game, and even then it's impossible for trains to crash when colliding with each other in RCT3, regardless of the speed one of the trains is traveling at).
- Grass tiles are the only terrain that handyman can perform maintenance on, yet whether the grass is unkempt or mown makes no gameplay difference whatsoever. The hated part about this is that in RCT1, "Mowing Grass" is checked by default on a Handyman's to-do list. This means you have to manually uncheck it on a Handyman's to-do list each time you hire one, which comes off as a major annoyance. Keeping the lawn fresh is a much lower priority than keeping the paths clear of trash and vomit, yet the Handymen will always walk off the path to forever mow the grass squares if "Mowing Grass" is checked, even if the long grass hasn't appeared yet. Thankfully, RCT2 changes it around so that "Mowing Grass" unchecked by default and OpenRCT allows the player to choose whether "Mowing Grass" is checked or unchecked by default. What makes this function even more useless is that the player can make grass normal again by simply painting new grass for free. RCT3, meanwhile, solves the problem by getting rid of grass maintenance altogether.
- The Artificial Stupidity of the park guests, period. They are too stupid to get through the simplest of mazes, get lost easily on even small footpath constructions more than a single unit wide, or with multiple paths leading the same direction, give up way too easily when it comes to finding rides they want to go on, and can't even swim. But the stupidity is worst when it comes to their stay in the park, after they have spent most or all of their money. They wander around, trying to get into attractions or getting hungry and thirsty, but incapable of doing anything about it, because they have no more money. This causes their happiness to drop until they are so mad that they leave the park in a bad mood, which influences the amount of incoming guests. Fortunately, the money issue was resolved in the second game by adding in an ATM, where guests can withdraw more money.
- Your staff's AI. Your workers (especially Handymen) will wander in queue lines. Unless they're Entertainers, there's no reason for them to be there. You're often forced to pick them up with the pincers to divert them. Staff will also bypass No Entry banners, so managing pathways becomes a lot harder that way. Using the patrol function is no help either as it’s placed in 4 by 4 squares. If a queue line overlaps that area, they will still enter it.
- Not being able to charge guests for both ride and park tickets in RCT2. Parks that charge for rides result in guests that don't pay a cent when they leave, making it difficult to get a return on investment early in scenarios. Parks that charge for the park entry results in guests who practically never leave your park due to rides being free to ride, limiting the potential money acquired for each guest. OpenRCT2 brings back this option and will apply it on RCT1 scenarios that allowed it, but it also modified the calculations for the price guests are willing to pay for a ride in such a way that if you charge any park entrance fee, the amount of money that can be charged for rides drops significantly.
- Building a ride underground makes it count as an "indoor" ride, which means guests will still ride it when it's raining. However, there are two annoying exceptions to this rule. One, flat rides which aren't "indoor" rides to begin with such as the Twist or the Pirate Ship will not count as "indoor" rides even if they are built underground since the programming never accounted for this. Two, certain tracked rides (namely the transport rides except the Elevator/Lift, and the Go-Karts) get a heavy penalty to their Excitement rating if too much of the track is sheltered. While this is not too bad for the transport rides since almost all of them are already covered to begin with, it's very annoying with the Go-Karts as the way the amount of sheltered track gets calculated makes it very hard to create a track that will not lose popularity in the rain and have decent stats. The gory details
- Land-for-Sale wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for one really annoying mishap; the problem being that within a large area of buy-able land, one or two of the terrain tiles would NOT have a "for sale" flag. You would end up buying large areas of new land to extend your park... only to realize that there is a hole punched in the middle of the park that you still technically can't build on. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about it! Fortunately, at least one of the RCT2 recreations of the RCT1 parks fills in those annoying holes, and OpenRCT2 will do so automatically when importing the actual RCT1 scenarios.
- Any and all instances of parks forbidding landscape changes, scenery removal, or building above tree height. Despite the first game having only two parks that do any of these things, Rainbow Valley and Harmonic Hills, there is a good reason they're both listed under That One Level. (Thank your lucky stars that no such parks show up in Loopy Landscapes, though that pack comes with its own problems.) Rainbow Summit in the second game shares Harmonic Hills's "tree height" restriction and forbids advertising, but thankfully lets you change the land and remove trees, allowing you to build underground as an advantage.
- Pickle Park and Fiasco Forest from Corkscrew Follies and Rainbow Summit from RCT2 forbid any advertising campaigns. This can be hard to get used to if you've been counting on advertising and makes Fisaco Forest that much more difficult. While this restriction is disclosed in the objective description for Pickle Park, it isn't in the other two parks, which can lead to a nasty surprise if you procrastinated on attracting guests and thought you could just do some advertising campaigns a few months before the deadline to catch up.
- Certain scenarios have a handicap that will either make guests harder to attract, the park rating harder to raise, or both. These are never mentioned in the objective descriptions, making it a huge Guide Dang It! as it isn't immediately obvious why the guest count or the park rating is harder to raise than usual. In "harder guest generation" parks, the number of guests you can attract naturally is capped at 1,000 unless you build roller coasters with at least 6.00 Excitement and 600m (1,969ft) length, forcing the player to spam either big coasters or advertising campaigns to attract more guests (fortunately no scenarios with that handicap also prohibit advertising campaigns). In "harder rating" parks, you have a constant -100 penalty to the park rating, but due to the way it's calculated you can still eventually reach a 999 rating.
- The mountain tool was removed in RCT2 outside of the scenario editor and in Classic altogether, making landscaping that much more tedious as each land tile must be modified individually when creating mountains. Thankfully, OpenRCT2 brings it back in scenario play and makes it even better by making it available at any selection size.
- The scream library for the guests on water rides, for several roller coasters (Steel Twister, Air Powered Vertical Coaster, Hyper Twister Coaster, Vertical Drop Roller Coaster, Flying Coaster, and Reverse Freefall Coaster) and on the Roto Drop and Launched Freefall rides in the second game are limited to two files, with the singular, shrill one being the one that plays far more. The result is the same scream playing over and over and over if you're currently in range of that ride. This never happened in the first game, where guests used the stock library, which is far more diverse.
- Security Guards. Their job is to prevent vandalism within a certain range of their current location. However, this range is rather small, so you'll need to hire a lot of them to completely cover a park, especially in large ones. Additionally, guests only become vandals if they're unhappy and see too much litter and vomit, so a much more effective way to prevent vandalism is to keep your guests happy and your paths clean. For these reasons, experienced players will rarely, if ever, hire security guards, as a park can function fine without them.
- Guests can sometimes straight up leave the park mere minutes after they've entered it before they ridden on any rides or brought any merchandise. Regardless of if you charge for the park or ride tickets (or both), guests who leave without going on any rides means that you have one missing guest who is needed to reach the guest goal in many scenarios, and any money that they have with them will be gone, which results in lost potential profits.
RollerCoaster Tycoon 3
- Construction in 3 is very stiff and tedious, despite being a 3D game. Worse is terrain and how paths can be separated even on perfectly flat tiles, preventing peeps from crossing them and requiring the player to go in and do terrain surgery on each individual tile in an area so the paths will connect.
- Themed areas and attractions in 3, mainly the fuzzy and somewhat arbitrary qualifications involved in building them. Just how many palm trees and animatronic pirates do you need to place around a roller coaster to make it "Adventure" themed? Who knows! They're required for a number of scenario objectives and challenges, too, so no luck avoiding them outside Sandbox.
- 3 no longer make you able to color individual vehicles unlike the first two games, including go-karts, which makes all the racing cars the same color. This carries over its spiritual successor Planet Coaster, although go-karts (except for the DLC karts) and bumper cars are given different colors per car automatically.
RollerCoaster Tycoon World
- For players that like to jump into the sandbox mode, they’ll be disappointed to learn that unlocking new rides requires beating the optional objectives in career mode.
- Influencers. In order to increase the maximum amount of guests that come in your park, you need to increase your fame rank. To do that, you need an influencer to enter your park and complete their personal objective. Due to the buggy nature of the game, influencers can sometimes wander around forever without doing their objective or even not show up at all. If they don’t appear, nothing else will make more peeps come to the park beyond the hard cap.
