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Thorpe Park 2017: DBGT: Rise of The Demon

AstroDan said:
DBGT is indeed a waste of money.

The ride will be completely out of date in 5 years in ways that traditional dark rides would never be.

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You think it will last that long? I'd give it two years tops.
 
Does anyone actually know what the budget for the ride was? I know a year or so before it opened it was rumoured to be one of Merlin biggest single ride investments with a budget somewhere between £20-£30m, however was that kind of money ever confirmed as being the budget?
 
It's definitely a much better ride this season, the story makes more sense, the VR is a lot better and more realistic and it finally has an ending! The middle bit was actually worse but I'm unsure if that was working correctly or not.

I was also impressed how the new parts of the ride fit in really well with the old parts, we could have had a typical Merlin shipping container shoved on the end.

I do worry how long it will last, I can see them having to refresh the ride every few years, and with The VR I guess that's pretty easy. But I dread to think how much the ride has cost and will cost in the fortune.
 
It's got better reviews this time round than last season anyway so a glimmer of hope there, but I doubt it will change my opinion of it. It's just not an enjoyable experience, and I don't see VR as the future of dark rides or theme park attractions at all. I can't see any theme park following suit either, VR on existing rides yes but not spending millions on a stand alone VR attraction. I can't justify where that money went, it's just a big fat Patrick Stewart face palm.
 
They really need to sort this ride out. It broke down on our second run yesterday whilst we were in the midway set piece in the fake underground tunnels. I don't like this part as it, but we were stuck in that room (and after 2 mins of a quick look around, with no effects and nothing to focus your attention on, it is very clearly just a plywood room painted black) whilst the actress with the megaphone continued to stay in part. Some nonsense was made up to get us to "look around for the code to the door" to move on whilst the "infected" bloke continued to pop in the room to administer jump scares.

This went on for around 15 minutes. After about 3 minutes we were bored and chatting amongst ourselves and the poor actors had completely lost us but had to uncomfortably stay in part when everyone in the room had given up. Eventually, with no explanation, they swung the brightly lit fire exit open and evacuated us outside at ride close giving us no time to be able to get to another ride by 5. It turned out the ride had broken down and the protocol was for the actors to stay in part to stall us.

Not only was that middle bit rubbish anyway, but surely they could have a better protocol for dealing with breakdowns like announcing it on a tannoy or something. Any kind of immersion was lost very quickly, yet the actors where expected to continue shouting at us through megaphones to put our hands on our mouths and stumble around grunting at us for a cringe worthy quarter of an hour whilst people checked their phones, chatted amongst themselves and asked in vain if we could just move on or leave the attraction.

Then you have the main issue of the rides shocking reliability. For an attraction that obviously cost an awful lot, the reliability has gone beyond the point of embarrassment now.
 
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Spent the last two days on park at Thorpe and experienced Derren Brown's Ghost Train for the first time. I actually thought it was pretty good, although clearly not worth the huge expense and not nearly as re-rideable as traditional dark rides or even something like Hex.

There were a couple of jump scares in the VR in there that were genuinely pretty scary and I thought it was pretty effective, although the middle section was only decent if you had a good view of the tunnel area. There were a few small problems such as being able to see the projector in the pre-show room (and those at the back not having a particularly good view of it at all), and also the acting in the middle section was indifferent and often ineffective; this is certainly the weakest section of the attraction. But on the whole I think it's really fun and it was certainly going down very well with those that rode it. I absolutely love the gift shop finale.

It also had no reliability issues whatsoever over the past few days, which is a lot more than can be said for most of the rest of the park with Swarm, Stealth, Inferno, Storm Surge, Samurai, Slammer (closed all day) all suffering considerable downtime over the two days. Very short queue though which is a bit of a worrying sign - longest it got to was 20 minutes despite its' poor throughput, and it was walk-on at times. This compares with maximum waits of 60 minutes for Colossus (one train), 60 for Swarm (one train) and 45 for I'm a Celebrity. I can easily see Derren Brown being the victim of budget cuts in the very near future.

I'm not sold on Thorpe Park at the minute, but Derren Brown is certainly worth a return visit for those who still haven't done it. It's decent.

Timber Tug Boat was testing for much of the day today surrounded by a group of people that looked like management types. It looks hideous.
 
To be fair, during the periods that it's working flat out, DBGT has a pretty solid capacity, so the low queue time compared to coasters operating on one train (which is still ridiculous, I might add), isn't necessarily a bad sign.
 
These figures aren't 100% official/confirmed, but it was said to be an initial £35m for the "New for 2016" ride, then another £11m for the work this year.... I just hope to god that isn't true.
 
It just goes to show how awful they are with money. They can't wait to save a couple of quid by running their coasters on 1 train whilst pouring millions into this.

This attraction will more than likely be a disaster for the park, but frustratingly NOT because it's a bad attraction and I wish Merlin would be this ambitious with the rest of their projects. I keep hitting on it, but it's actually very good. It's well themed, the opening is good, the illusion and concept of the ride system is very good, the VR experience isn't too shabby now they've redone it and the finale is excellent! It's immersive and very entertaining when it's done well.

But it's rerideability value is poor, it's reliability is wholly unacceptable, it's running costs are unsustainable in the long term, it's cost a fortune to open and then redo and it was clearly unfinished when it opened last year suggesting the whole project has run massively behind schedule.
 
Islander said:
I can't for a moment believe that the works for this year cost anywhere near £11m.
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Me either! There has been no change to the ride system, minimal change to the batching/loading process and I believe they had the "new" VR ready to go by last year anyway?

I imagine £2m MAX! It's better, but not £11m better...
 
Probably £1.1mil, but someone just didn't listen in English (or Maths).

Anyway £11mil sound better to Joe Public, until they ride it then start questioning the sanity of whoever greenlit the project...

It might have been here, or elsewhere, but I did hear Figment don't have any competition, so can charge whatever they want.
 
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