Maybe I'm way off-base here, but in my estimation, if BGW wants to modify the Festhaus Park coaster plans, I think it’s more likely that they are looking to plus their previous plans rather than to downsize them. One imagines that the park’s original Project Madrid goals—to make a huge, record-breaking icon of a coaster—likely remain intact. Coronavirus has certainly shifted timelines, but I don’t actually think we’ve seen much from SEAS since March 2020 to suggest that SEAS’ ultimate game plan has really changed that much—they still seem to be on an absolute rampage pushing towards building top tier coaster collections at all of their parks.
Furthermore, the Festhaus Park site sorta requires that whatever the park constructs back there be a massive, visible, magnet of an attraction. Maverick look-a-like? An Intamin single rail? A CGI woodie? I get that enthusiasts like these things, but they ignore the reality of the site. The site requires a true monument of a coaster—something people will see looming over the tree line and that will motivate them to walk ~500 feet down around the back of Verbolten to ride it.
Plus, we got our Maverick: Pantheon. We got our woodie: InvadR. Our collection is missing a record-breaking, GP-magnet of a coaster. That is what Drachen Spire (and Project Madrid before it!) was going to be—and until shown otherwise, my estimation is that the park is unlikely to stray too terribly far from that goal.
Another thing to keep in mind: pursuing a huge redesign means another enormous investment of capital. It’s very likely that the cheapest path to a substantial new coaster at this point really would have been to just build Drachen Spire, no? If the park is going to throw out all of that already-completed development and design work, surely there’s a really compelling reason to do it, yeah? The same goes for the regulatory hurdles—the park would be throwing away all of the time, money, and political capital invested into getting their waivers and plans approved.
That would all be reasonable if this were an act of desperation—if the park just couldn’t afford a big new coaster and needed to abandon the project. If the park really was just trying to cut their losses though, they wouldn’t be designing another new coaster for Festhaus Park. Basically, in my estimation, given how far along things were, there has to be a real driving force behind potentially scraping the Drachen Spire plans—and given that the new rumor is that a new project for the site is being designed, it seems that this driving force is unlikely to be purely financial.
If we rule out financial ruin, a breakdown in the BGW/Intamin relationship, and some sort of enormous change in the park’s goals, it seems to me that the most likely reason for a Drachen Spire redesign would be that the park sees an opportunity to create a coaster that is even more exciting and marketable than Drachen Spire was.
