The two reasons why Park Beyond has a storytelling campaign mode

Limbic Entertainment is now part of Bandai Namco as not only the German studio did show some good quality and creativity with Tropico before, but also the upcoming Park Beyond looks really promising in terms of theme park simulators.

"So, what we wanted to achieve in Park Beyond is actually show the love we have for the theme parks genre in general", creative director Johannes Reithmann tells Gamereactor, "because we are both fans of the theme park games and also going to the theme parks in person, but we wanted to give something new on top of this so we put these impossifications spice on top of it, make everything like crazy and over exaggerated and you can believe me, we had tons of fun coming up with all these ideas, so this is basically what we want to give to the players, like a way for them to build parks and then experience them also, which they couldn't experience in real life".

With simulators and tycoons it's always tricky to nail the balance between the hardcore features and the more inviting stuff for newcomers.

"We realised that there's totally different people", explains Reithmann in that regard. "People who really enjoy creating from the tiniest detail and we have them covered because you can build your own buildings out of your individual pieces and you can have fun with all the terraforming editor and this kind of things, but of course we also have players who enjoy that it looks beautiful, but they are not necessarily so deep into creating them themselves, we also want to offer stuff for them, so, on the one side we offer a lot of like pre-built building structures, decorated objects, even coasters, that you can just simply use in the park, but I think the most interesting part is that everyone who creates content can also share this with the whole community, and now we are talking from the smallest arrangement of flowers to the biggest building you've built, and you can even share your whole park with your friends and then they could continue from there and basically build their own park on top of this or build a coaster through the park of your friend, so basically for everyone who wants to create something we have enough features there and for everyone who wants to play with the content".

And speaking about welcoming features, it turns out that the brand-new story mode is not only meant for that purpose.

"There are basically two reasons", unveils the creative director about the single player campaign. "One is accessibility for newcomers because the game is on a management level extremely complex, even for the editors, there are so many things you can do and for new players can be really daunting, so we wanted to have a campaign where we introduce this step by step. On the other hand side, when working on Tropico we already loved to tell the story and had some really weird funny humorous characters, and we definitely wanted to continue this because we like telling stories and also the whole theme about dreaming big and impossification, this kind of screams for us, for like 'hey, tell a story about it'. And then, as you said, we will have these different characters and they all have different views on impossification, so like there is Blaize which is like the crazy free runner girl, and she is all like go to the totally extreme and then on the other hand side there is Izzy, for example, who is a bit scared and you need to convince her that this is also financially a good idea. Alex, for example, he is on the safety side of things, he is like 'ok, you cannot shoot people through the air, this is not safe' and then you need to convince him that how you can make it safe and that everything is in order and, as you said, they have conflictive motives and throughout the campaign you will, hopefully, learn to love them and learn to convince them".