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Today’s Thematic Update
For the first time that I’ve heard, the unload audio now includes Frau Hexel saying:

“Enjoy your day at Busch Gardens, Auf Wiedersehen!!!”

A good amount of people in the station were chuckling and repeating it, and honestly, it’s awesome to see. Small touches like that go a long way.

That, along with quite a few other audio improvements, most importantly in the block zones before the tree and after the drop track section, really stood out. There’s now some atmospheric woods audio before the tree, and the after-drop-track spiel has been turned up noticeably.

While some audio and lighting things still need a little more work, I’m really impressed with how many changes and adjustments have already been made on that side of the attraction. The unload spiels are completely different, and the spiels in general have mostly been turned up.

I still think the video screen audio could use a little more volume. I could actually hear the Frau Hexel and Broom lore audio this time, and it was honestly pretty funny, just still a little too quiet to fully land.

After hearing more of the video screen audio, I actually dislike the “give me 5 stars” line a little less. There’s a lot of humor happening before the ride even starts, but the queue audio is just too quiet right now to properly set the tone. The station is definitely better, but could still come up just a bit more.

Thank you BGW for taking feedback for what it is and making real-time changes for the better. I definitely noticed the improvements today, and they genuinely elevated my opinion of the attraction.


The bad: There are still a few things that need attention. The billboard was not working today, with no audio or arrow direction change. There was also no fog effect at the entrance, and the big drop still remains without audio. The Broom room in the queue still needs some work as well.

That said, there have been a lot of big improvements, and it’s awesome to see the attraction continue to get refined.
 
I still think the video screen audio could use a little more volume. I could actually hear the Frau Hexel and Broom lore audio this time, and it was honestly pretty funny, just still a little too quiet to fully land.

After hearing more of the video screen audio, I actually dislike the “give me 5 stars” line a little less. There’s a lot of humor happening before the ride even starts, but the queue audio is just too quiet right now to properly set the tone. The station is definitely better, but could still come up just a bit more.
that's funny- on opening day the queue screen audio was so loud that despite sticking my ear to the cage i could barely hear the animatronic. I could hear the queue video from the italy bridge and the load station at almost the same volume. I guess they turned it down like crazy in response and they turned it down too much
 
Told you guys those new JBL speakers were gonna be extremely loud LOL
But yes, it was clear when they added the massive speaker to the billboard that there was SUPPOSED to be audio playing. I remember testing footage showing that exact speaker playing the beginning beats to the rock song, which is supposed to be synced to the now working tree audio, but it appears it’s broken again.

Hate saying this over and over again, but they really did not have to touch the speakers on the bridge. Because the only change we currently see is the speakers turned off with no audio playing. Maybe these speakers were connected to the controller and/or amp that housed all of the original audio effects before the wipe which explains the absence of the bridge audio.

Gerta’s original queue line tape being repurposed behind the anamitronic is proof they still have archived files somewhere. Couldn’t they just bring the wind audio back for the bridge? I don’t see how that could cost much money to do lol especially because the bridge audio is looped.

Finally, maybe they DO have new thematic audio for the bridge, kind of like in the show building. I would assume so CAs the rest of the ride being complete silence is awkward. Thinking about it more I’m convinced that might be the case.

My confidence on any audio playing on the launch out is NEAR ZERO. As the entire catwalk contains nothing but the original low quality 📢 loudspeakers only meant to play spiels. The only viable spot to play HQ audio from 28T’s would be the bridge.
 
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Rode Forbidden Turn for the first time yesterday, and I loved it. The animatronics are awesome. All the new scenery looks great, and I think they did a great job on the ride. Much better than the nothing that was in the indoor section previously. I do kinda wish the station was repainted like shown in the concept art, but that's not a big deal.
The green train has been completely stripped. Not sure if that's a regular teardown or whatever but they had all the other trains running which was good.
The only thing I thought was weird was they were playing like, pop-punk music right out front of Verbolten? Strange choice for sure.
 

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The effects are already starting to break or go out of sync.........

The billboard wasn't working yesterday.

The drop track sequence was out of sync with Frau Hexel's talking (ex. The track dropping either well before she even talks or in the middle after she says "Fine I'll save you" and then drops. It's supposed to be "Fine I'll save you, but you have to give me 5 stars!" *Drops*)

The awesome new rock music in the building will sometimes start correctly and then reset itself while a train is in building. There is an obvious loop cut and once that happens, the music for that show is messed up.

The window screens in the station were off a couple of days ago.
 
The five stars reference is extremely bad. It's not a pun or a corny line, it's a pop culture reference at the climax of the show scene. It's cheap and it kinda ruins what I otherwise believe is a strong retheme.

The comment about Ludwig potentially saying, "This brings new meaning to doom scrolling" is spot on.

It's not a pearl clutching moment. No one is offended. Thinking something is anachronistic or out of place on a themed attraction set in a specific era and location is a completely reasonable criticism.

The last thing I want to be doing as I'm dropped on Verbolten is roll my eyes...
 
I don’t like the five stars line either, it kills the whole horror theme same with the odd music choice. Windy creeping effects are good enough. I’m starting to wonder if the effects are braking because the system is too old. But yet again Nessie is old and the effects(besides the screens) are working
 
I’m beating a dead horse, but I absolutely hate this re theme. I hate saying that because looking at the plans, it looked very promising. The theme is completely sterile, safe, and boring, and I swear they slowed it down. That airtime hill and helix doesn’t even hit anymore.
 
I really wish they'd stuck with 3 distinct show scenes like original Verbolten had. I think the current theme would be much more forgivable if it had two more "scary" ones to accompany it, and it was just a humorous one to offset the other two. I came up with these three shows as something they could do by mainly just creating new soundtracks and changing the color of lights, without needing new props:

Show 1. The first show format can be the "5 stars" theme, AKA the one we currently have.

Show 2. Revamp of the Storm show from OG Verbolten; You could easily reuse some of the original audio with the lightning sounds while only changing the audio at the block brake and drop track sections where the lighting changed significantly and where the original audio wouldn't make as much sense. A lot of the new lights could also have their colors changed during this theme since the current "5 stars" theme has a lot of red and blues, whereas the Storm theme was always mainly green.

Show 3. Some way of Gerta/Gunter making a voice-only appearance in the third show would be cool, it really doesn't make sense to me why Gerta is on the TV in the queue when her and Gunter aren't involved in the new theme in any other way, it also hasn't been explained what happened to her or Gunter beyond just "the tours are under new management". Maybe have this one be the "darkest" theme of the three, where you see the bad side of Frau and Brum, and sort of the antithesis to the "5 stars" show. This version shows that Frau Hexel's "takeover" of the Black Forest Motor Tours is more sinister than it seems, and she has trapped both Gerta and Gunter in the Black Forest. The audio has them calling out to you and asking for help, warning you about Frau, telling you to save yourselves, etc... The old Spirit theme had Gerta (or it may have been a different woman) calling out to you in a ghostly sort of voice, I like the idea of keeping that same sort of effect for their new lines I described above. For the Frau Hexel animatronic just before the drop, her movements and stuff can stay the same, but instead of her saving you, she is about to "get" you. She could say something about how you're going to join Gerta and Gunter (feel like this sounds a little corny but BGW entertainment can come up with something better), just as the track drops and you escape.

I don't think either of these new shows are really that far-fetched, the only difficult thing would be getting the original actress back to record new lines for Gerta for show 3. I doubt 99% of guests have any clue what Gunter's voice sounds like (I can't even remember) since he wasn't featured much in OG Verbolten, so any guy that can do a German accent would work for him, but Gerta's voice is too iconic to use a random fill-in. Both of these would only use existing props too so all they would need is lights which can change colors (the existing lights may already have this functionality), and the new soundtracks themselves.
 
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Idk I think it’s important to remember that this retheme was essentially BGWs way of paying for a refurb. They aren’t Disney with a dedicated refurbishment schedule and budget. Verbolten needed a major overhaul and corporate would only give it to them if it could be marketed as new.

I think criticism of specifics are fair but it’s important not to compare this to 2012 Bolt as if that or this were the options. It was between 2026 Bolt and 2025 Bolt, not 2026 and 2012. Looking at what the alternative would be, this is miles better
 
Idk I think it’s important to remember that this retheme was essentially BGWs way of paying for a refurb. They aren’t Disney with a dedicated refurbishment schedule and budget. Verbolten needed a major overhaul and corporate would only give it to them if it could be marketed as new.

I think criticism of specifics are fair but it’s important not to compare this to 2012 Bolt as if that or this were the options. It was between 2026 Bolt and 2025 Bolt, not 2026 and 2012. Looking at what the alternative would be, this is miles better

I completely agree with this, but a lot of the complaints come down to a poor utilization of the money spent. The price to formulate and implement creepy forest noises and convincing witch dialogue is the same as the cost to formulate and implement rock music and a stupid Uber joke.

Beyond what I believe are just poor creative decisions, I do think there are some reasonable complaints about the allocation of funds too. I like scene one, but the false track (which is hardly noticeable at all on-ride due to it's horrendous placement) and the rotating sign (which, even when fully functional, is a minor, very easy-to-miss effect) added substantial cost with very little upside in my assessment. Same with the relocation and mounting for the VW Beetle—you hardly see it if you're looking for it. Meanwhile, it's evident that lighting and sound design in the building is/was VERY underbaked—assuming that is a cost issue and not just an expertise/creative issue, I think money would have been better spent ensuring the in-building show experience was top-notch rather than expensive nice-to-haves like the dispatch screens in the station or the tunnel entrance fog (which still doesn't work as far as I know?).

It feels to me like BGW spent a lot—but it also feels to me like those dollars were poorly optimized and often put towards sub-par ideas, unfortunately.
 
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I feel like it would've been good to run at least some sort of cost-benefit analysis for this stuff. I feel like if the money had been really well utilized and effects actually all worked, it would've improved my perception of the ride.
 
Finally got to ride the refurbed Verbolten, and for the most part I think it was a positive update for the ride. Not perfect, but not as bad as I expected based on the feedback here.

The queue and station are strong. I miss the creepiness and storytelling of Gunter’s shed (with the luggage, vines, and phones ringing with people leaving voice messages — varying degrees of horror in their voice — about strange things happening in the forest), but the Frau Hexel storyline is well communicated. I like the fairytale angle they’ve given the story, and I think it’s inherently a better fit for BGW than the original tourist theme, which always felt a little tacky and cartoonish very “early 2010s” to me in the way it was presented; a fairytale theme, by contrast, feels more timeless and “Old Country” if done right. The animatronic is impressive, and I love the projected shadow of Frau Hexel doing things behind the window blinds in the station.

Starting the ride, the fake track and spinning sign are brief, but they’re a really clever detail that help further convey that we shouldn’t go into the forest. It’s a simple, effective use of storytelling.

As for the show building, I also miss the more dramatic and creepy tone the ride had before, but I don’t hate the new tone. The music feels purposely chaotic and high-energy, so it feels like an intentional artistic direction, not just that someone stuck a random song into the building without thinking about it. I can’t get too mad if someone had a different artistic vision for how the ride should feel, and I think the quirky, progressive beat of the music works for what they’re trying to accomplish.

The building felt emptier than I expected, which is a shame because the realistic tree limbs we saw during construction looked promising. It seems like those all went after the MCBR and around the drop track, not the first half of the show building. Bummer, because I liked how Verbolten in its early days really made you feel surrounded by the leaves and limbs of the “forest” in the first half of the building, but I never liked how they were cartoony cutouts; I was hoping this version would fix that with more realistic versions of the leaves and branches, but the beginning of the show building is still pretty empty like last year.

The tree around the MCBR is impressive. I wish the sound effect here was more dramatic, because this is a truly intense thematic moment if they played their cards right. The ensnared VW Beetle right after it is also cool, but I think it should’ve been placed somewhere else because it’s extremely hard to see if you’re not looking for it.

Now, the drop track. I love the realistic tree limbs. The Frau Hexel animatronic is impressive. All the bones of a perfect section are there. Where they dropped the ball — and where the original Verbolten shined — is the tone of this section. This is arguably the climatic moment of the entire ride. It’s thrilling, unexpected, and ominous, and the mechanics of the ride (pausing for a few seconds to get everything lined up) naturally force it to be suspenseful as you anticipate the drop. OG Verbolten really played into this, using creepy sounds that crescendoed right at the moment of the drop; it was a genuinely tense buildup.

5-star Uber joke aside, I think the reason the new version’s drop doesn’t work as well is that the drop’s role has been reframed. With Frau Hexel saying “Fine I’ll save you,” the drop now represents her helping us. It’s no longer contextualized as this sinister, unknown, bad thing that’s happening to us. Now, Frau Hexel (who apparently isn’t evil after all but actually wants to help us) has the situation under control. As a result, the dramatic tension — and ensuing catharsis — of this moment is gone. It reminds me a lot of how on Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, the old lady uses her magic to send you over the big drop as a “shortcut to the party” — which similarly removes the foreboding buildup to the drop as something scary like the original Splash Mountain had. In short, I think they watered down the key dramatic moment on the ride. And yes, the 5-star joke does further signal that we’re not in real danger.

I think a better approach would have been making Frau Hexel turn out to be actually evil, with the “Don’t turn right” reminders having been reverse psychology to lure us right into her trap. At the drop track, right as she’s revealed to be evil and tries to cast a spell on us (to eat us or whatever), you start to hear ominous snapping and cracking sounds. The vines and branches she’d ensnared us in snap, and we fall out of her reach, just in time.

The rest of the ride is mostly the same, so I’ll call out a few other things I noticed. I saw that they’ve added some forest-like backdrop to the walls in the show building, which I really liked and thought it added a lot of depth to the setting instead of bare warehouse walls. I also haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, but in the launch tunnel out of the building (after the drop track), they’ve covered the previously bare green warehouse walls with faux brick siding — a huge improvement. The spooky, hanging eyes after the drop track are really cool too. Oh, and I love that they finally extended the facade at the entrance to the show building so it’s no longer “floating.”

I also think story-wise, the broken bridge now feels like an afterthought. It almost feels like the storyline has resolved itself with Frau Hexel saving us, so the bridge seems random. It would’ve been cool if they put some fake track right where the actual track veers right to climb up to the bridge, with the fake track veering left but something (maybe the VW Beetle?) is blocking it. Then they should have a “Bridge out! Road closed” sign telling you not to go right to the bridge. It would’ve made the bridge feel more connected to the story. (Although having Frau Hexel be evil would also help explain why we’re driving to a broken bridge, like in the OG Verbolten. The idea is that we’re so frantically trying to escape the forest that we miss the signs and plunge off a broken bridge. That makes less sense if Frau Hexel has already saved us and we’re not in danger anymore.)

All in all, the new Verbolten is not perfect, and I miss its old creepy tone, but the new version has merit and I think a strong artistic vision was behind it. I just think a few more improvements are needed to finally transform Verbolten into the world-class attraction it’s always been close to being.
 
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Although having Frau Hexel be evil would also help explain why we’re driving to a broken bridge, like in the OG Verbolten. The idea is that we’re so frantically trying to escape the forest that we miss the signs and plunge off a broken bridge. That makes less sense if Frau Hexel has already saved us and we’re not in danger anymore.
As I was reading your post this is where my mind went when you brought up the evil Frau Hexel angle.

And I don't think your ideas here take much to implement. Re-recorded dialogue for the drop track, add some dialogue for at the bridge. And I really think the trying to escape the forest idea really works if they replant some trees along that section of track to help the feeling of still being in the forest.
 
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