Can't help but consistently revisit this subject. I have never once felt satisfied with my past suggestions or those others have proposed. We all agree there is a problem here and dinosaur welfare in general is pretty shallow, but how do we fix it? In my mind these thoughts have stirred for months, so I am going to examine three subject areas and what Frontier has done in service of this goal from JWE - JWE2 and what can be done to finally resolve the matter.
As a quick recap, let's put JWE's dinosaur welfare into context before we examine what JWE2 has done. For starters, dinosaur welfare was part of your dinosaur rating which together with your Facilities basically made your star rating. Pretty simple, but what that actually entailed more often than not just amounted to sickness, dead dinosaurs, and low health species irritated by their comfort needs not being met. However, even when broken down its deceptive what is actually done to maintain or lower dinosaur welfare. Disease pretty much just reduces health of an animal until its dead and it jumps to other species seemingly at random and illogically over great distances at time. Doesn't matter what the disease is, does the same thing just with a different name and is mitigated by a research item altogether eliminating it. The Ranger Team is responsible for using medicated darts to heal the animals, you can do this manually for more visceral impact, but 99% of the time you are just going to queue up all the sick animals on a team and send them on their way.
Taking that into consideration, what does the gameplay really look like? As noted, it becomes pretty 1-dimensional, there isn't really any thought, preparation, or concern with dinosaur welfare. In fact, the only range from my experience is a couple of unsatisfying clicks to just an outright nuisance as the stupid thing just keeps jumping faster than the Ranger Teams can medicate them. Occasionally, this frustration would occur because the AI of the Ranger Team acts up and the disease spreads unnecessarily. There is just never any real reason why you need to think about researching cures, the research is usually quick, cheap, and you have so much money you generally just get them all immediately without being forced to make a choice. Same thing with corpses spreading disease, there is literally no reason whatsoever to leave one alone, there is no penalty or difficulty whatsoever to removing a corpse, and you'll be punished for not removing it, it becomes no choice at all, its just a matter of click and forget.
However, in Claire's Sanctuary we began to see Frontier taking notice of the issue, and did something interesting with Respiratory Malaise they made it incurable and there was pressure to act before all the animals died. It might have been a campaign-only condition, but the groundwork for improvement was at hand.
Here we come to JWE2 and the number of improvements is fairly substantial and marginally deeper, but continuing in a much better direction.
Disease
The table might be a bit of a simplification, but it gets the point across. JWE2 has greatly improved upon JWE and made dinosaur welfare more important. The new research tree mitigates the last minute rush to research cures for disease that was one of the leading causes of the system being trivial in JWE. The other being the economy, both factors have been addressed to varying degrees in JWE2. However, some of the diseases pre-requisites are incredibly vague or entirely too easy to unlock from no deviation from the usual gameplay interactions. This will require some balancing to influence a change in player behavior, so that disease is less click and forget.
Like the research tree, disease also appears to spread more logically, so quarantining a species is much more viable. However, these two items are little more than balancing touches, JWE2 shines more with the new additions that gives me much more hope for where things can go. Disease is much more varied and less homogenous in JWE2, certain diseases have sources they are more likely if not exclusive to spreading from such as E. Coli or Salmonella coming from an infected carnivore feeder. Weather-specific diseases like Silicosis and Frostbite help create more variety and the common cold becoming incurable and being able to morph into Pneumonia makes it not only unique, but helps shape disease into something more interesting.
Finally, vaccinations help give more tools to the player to control certain disease outbreaks, this is a first as its a mitigation tool. However, though all these improvements are fantastic and enrich the game, all we have really done is delay the usual click and forget solution and offloaded work onto the new MVU which identifies new conditions.
Injuries
Arguably the largest addition to dinosaur welfare, the MVU really demonstrates how new things really are because of this prolific new addition. Now disease isn't the only threat to your animals, but they are threats to one another thanks to injuries and their new dominance and territorial systems that enable them. Together with disease we have really pieced together the missing half that welfare really needed in JWE. The fact your animals can injure themselves in failed escape attempts makes the dynamic more engaging during gameplay; however, there is no worse balanced feature in the game even post-patch. The MVU in many regards paid dearly because of the frequency of injuries being so overtuned it begs the question if there was any QA testing occurring prior to launch.
In general, balance is the only bad thing I have to say about injuries, they offer fresh variety and they come in two variations. Minor injuries which are more frequent, but usually harmless and Major injuries which require the afflicted animal be transported to the medical facility for treatment. I also appreciate the information gathering component introduced by the addition of the MVU which also better defines the role of the Ranger Team in narrowing its scope.
Scars
Wish I could say more about scars, but they are very vague and nebulous. I can only presume the game factors scars in as some form of dominance multiplier as part of the Infamy system, but I confess its so unnoticeable that in its current iteration it might as well not exist. Scars feel like a last second addition and is in dire need of fleshing out, right now its just a number on a spread sheet with no noticeable difference from other dominance generating variables.
Injury Improvements
Now that we have taken a glimpse back and acknowledged the strides JWE2 made over its predecessor, I feel more comfortable in the following proposals to reinforce the strengths and mitigating the repetitive and boring click & forget gameplay loop.
To this point I have spoken pretty minimally about the MVU despite what a large change it brings to the game. Partially this is since the subject has been covered extensively already, and because I feel a good portion of the blame actually lies with the balance of injuries rather than the MVU. Still, the correction Frontier employed in Update 1 really did more harm than good. The way the MVU originally worked was more ideal, and I think Frontier moved to change the MVU too early and instead simplified its function to the game's detriment.
I propose some changes to the frequency of injuries (50% chance Minor Injury; 25% chance Major Injury) and the reclassification of certain injuries to accommodate the reversion of the MVU to its original state. One caveat being that the MVU will heal Minor Injuries if identified during a welfare check automatically. The reduction in the probability of Major Injuries and reclassification of other conditions such as Concussions would make the relocating of a severely injured animal far more special and less like an expensive and vexing chore. Speaking of concussions they either need to be downgraded to a Minor Injury, or advance like the Common Cold to a worse condition that can result in death such as Comatose. The Common Cold in its current incarnation is actually one of the best diseases, I think Concussions have that same potential, but not as it presently exists.
I think an escalation of a Surface Wounds to an Infected Wound similar to how a Broken Claw can escalate into an Ingrown Claw serves as another example of an escalation that is easy to cope with early, but a pain later. This would allow you to ignore most Minor Injuries as they are fairly frequent while a small number of them having escalation potential if ignored. Certain species being more prone to certain conditions like a Broken Claw or Wing like dromaeosaurs or pterosaurs means they have a higher probability of injuries escalating than other species as well, so there is a lot to think about when making an enclosure.
Disease Improvements
Additionally, Frontier has done great by introducing new sources of disease, the solutions, however, failed to evolve with them. An infected feeder is no issue whatsoever, in fact, it is arguably even easier now that herbivores no longer have feeders at all. It's about as click and forget as one can get. You get a large notification on your UI and then just assign a Ranger Team and the infected feeder is gone, at most you also have to send the MVU if an animal got infected. The feeder having certain diseases and being susceptible to infection in itself is a great idea still, but the gameplay comes from how you interact with it rather than it simply existing.
A good first step is to prevent the deletion of an infected feeder this will force a gameplay response rather than an easy solution. Next, get rid of the notification on the UI altogether, there is absolutely no reason the game should handhold you so much about every potential problem. The Ranger Teams perform status checks at Ranger Posts to collect information for you about your animals as it is, this is completely redundant and unnecessary. You can even assign Capture Teams & MVUs, for added utility, the game has provided sufficient tools without the notification. The Ranger Team & MVU will be able to identify a problem with an animal and the ailment. Then using the Database or your memory, you can then identify the issue as stemming from a feeder because a condition like E. Coli sources from them. Finally, you'll need a research that branches off the main tree on the cures menu, this means you will need to invest some effort to address it, and if you haven't done so, you need to work around it until your long term solution is in place.
Some players would be able to solve this as easily as now if they have the research based on the decisions they make for how to build their park, many won't, so infected feeders would still be an involved challenge and importantly, it creates organic gameplay that is highly replayable.
While on the subject of disease sources, there is also the matter of corpses. Naturally, there isn't much in terms of incentive for keeping corpses, after all, they do already provide some minimal food for carnivores. I will continue to die on the hill of free-roaming Compy scavengers as corpses could be beneficial for feeding Compies at no expense and raising a new hygiene park mechanic. That aside, I think the process of corpse removal being so easy is the actual problem. The bloody helicopter has always been the game's go-to for inconvenient problems, so simply requiring a ground team be dispatched on a cooldown to remove the corpse increases the odds of them causing disease and taxing resources, so that they have a more realistic opportunity of contributing in some way rather than being this mythical feature no one ever sees without intentional testing.
Scar Improvements
Scars in the grand scheme of things shouldn't ever really be anything more than a minor system that adds some flavor and personality to your dinosaurs. Right away, a clear improvement would be permanent and sensible scarring, the only time you see them are during dinosaur combat and they appear over the entire body. This is more of a long term improvement as its so low priority, yet a high workload that I have opted to talk about these improvements last.
Beyond that, I think it is feasible for there to be some variable when calculating injuries for there to be a scar chance. A scar chance itself is a fraction of a fraction of a chance of occurring; that is to say a Minor (lesser chance) or Major (greater chance) injury has a chance of leaving behind a scar. Each scar then adds a nice bump in dominance for the animal, meaning an animal with many scars is as its visual indicates, a seasoned combatant. This is another way of viewing a dinosaur's Infamy level at a glance and just adds a lot more flavor to the game. Right now, its basically impossible to tell what animal has a scar without checking its details.
This is truly an aspirational improvement and also one I feel is much less important, but can still be somewhat integrated into the wider dinosaur welfare system.
I am open to hearing some more ideas. However, we really need to get away from the handholding, the game provides way too much information to the point it trivializes itself. No more click & forget gameplay, we can add things all day long, but if they never have any depth or variety in gameplay response from the player, it will age like milk. Then before we know it we will be right back here writing more forum posts scratching our heads and wondering why doesn't this game feel as compelling to revisit and play through than the feeling many people get from JPOG.
As a quick recap, let's put JWE's dinosaur welfare into context before we examine what JWE2 has done. For starters, dinosaur welfare was part of your dinosaur rating which together with your Facilities basically made your star rating. Pretty simple, but what that actually entailed more often than not just amounted to sickness, dead dinosaurs, and low health species irritated by their comfort needs not being met. However, even when broken down its deceptive what is actually done to maintain or lower dinosaur welfare. Disease pretty much just reduces health of an animal until its dead and it jumps to other species seemingly at random and illogically over great distances at time. Doesn't matter what the disease is, does the same thing just with a different name and is mitigated by a research item altogether eliminating it. The Ranger Team is responsible for using medicated darts to heal the animals, you can do this manually for more visceral impact, but 99% of the time you are just going to queue up all the sick animals on a team and send them on their way.
Taking that into consideration, what does the gameplay really look like? As noted, it becomes pretty 1-dimensional, there isn't really any thought, preparation, or concern with dinosaur welfare. In fact, the only range from my experience is a couple of unsatisfying clicks to just an outright nuisance as the stupid thing just keeps jumping faster than the Ranger Teams can medicate them. Occasionally, this frustration would occur because the AI of the Ranger Team acts up and the disease spreads unnecessarily. There is just never any real reason why you need to think about researching cures, the research is usually quick, cheap, and you have so much money you generally just get them all immediately without being forced to make a choice. Same thing with corpses spreading disease, there is literally no reason whatsoever to leave one alone, there is no penalty or difficulty whatsoever to removing a corpse, and you'll be punished for not removing it, it becomes no choice at all, its just a matter of click and forget.
However, in Claire's Sanctuary we began to see Frontier taking notice of the issue, and did something interesting with Respiratory Malaise they made it incurable and there was pressure to act before all the animals died. It might have been a campaign-only condition, but the groundwork for improvement was at hand.
Here we come to JWE2 and the number of improvements is fairly substantial and marginally deeper, but continuing in a much better direction.
Jurassic World Evolution | Jurassic World Evolution 2 |
Disease
| Disease
|
N/A | Injuries
|
N/A | Scars
|
Disease
The table might be a bit of a simplification, but it gets the point across. JWE2 has greatly improved upon JWE and made dinosaur welfare more important. The new research tree mitigates the last minute rush to research cures for disease that was one of the leading causes of the system being trivial in JWE. The other being the economy, both factors have been addressed to varying degrees in JWE2. However, some of the diseases pre-requisites are incredibly vague or entirely too easy to unlock from no deviation from the usual gameplay interactions. This will require some balancing to influence a change in player behavior, so that disease is less click and forget.
Like the research tree, disease also appears to spread more logically, so quarantining a species is much more viable. However, these two items are little more than balancing touches, JWE2 shines more with the new additions that gives me much more hope for where things can go. Disease is much more varied and less homogenous in JWE2, certain diseases have sources they are more likely if not exclusive to spreading from such as E. Coli or Salmonella coming from an infected carnivore feeder. Weather-specific diseases like Silicosis and Frostbite help create more variety and the common cold becoming incurable and being able to morph into Pneumonia makes it not only unique, but helps shape disease into something more interesting.
Finally, vaccinations help give more tools to the player to control certain disease outbreaks, this is a first as its a mitigation tool. However, though all these improvements are fantastic and enrich the game, all we have really done is delay the usual click and forget solution and offloaded work onto the new MVU which identifies new conditions.
Injuries
Arguably the largest addition to dinosaur welfare, the MVU really demonstrates how new things really are because of this prolific new addition. Now disease isn't the only threat to your animals, but they are threats to one another thanks to injuries and their new dominance and territorial systems that enable them. Together with disease we have really pieced together the missing half that welfare really needed in JWE. The fact your animals can injure themselves in failed escape attempts makes the dynamic more engaging during gameplay; however, there is no worse balanced feature in the game even post-patch. The MVU in many regards paid dearly because of the frequency of injuries being so overtuned it begs the question if there was any QA testing occurring prior to launch.
In general, balance is the only bad thing I have to say about injuries, they offer fresh variety and they come in two variations. Minor injuries which are more frequent, but usually harmless and Major injuries which require the afflicted animal be transported to the medical facility for treatment. I also appreciate the information gathering component introduced by the addition of the MVU which also better defines the role of the Ranger Team in narrowing its scope.
Scars
Wish I could say more about scars, but they are very vague and nebulous. I can only presume the game factors scars in as some form of dominance multiplier as part of the Infamy system, but I confess its so unnoticeable that in its current iteration it might as well not exist. Scars feel like a last second addition and is in dire need of fleshing out, right now its just a number on a spread sheet with no noticeable difference from other dominance generating variables.
Injury Improvements
Now that we have taken a glimpse back and acknowledged the strides JWE2 made over its predecessor, I feel more comfortable in the following proposals to reinforce the strengths and mitigating the repetitive and boring click & forget gameplay loop.
To this point I have spoken pretty minimally about the MVU despite what a large change it brings to the game. Partially this is since the subject has been covered extensively already, and because I feel a good portion of the blame actually lies with the balance of injuries rather than the MVU. Still, the correction Frontier employed in Update 1 really did more harm than good. The way the MVU originally worked was more ideal, and I think Frontier moved to change the MVU too early and instead simplified its function to the game's detriment.
I propose some changes to the frequency of injuries (50% chance Minor Injury; 25% chance Major Injury) and the reclassification of certain injuries to accommodate the reversion of the MVU to its original state. One caveat being that the MVU will heal Minor Injuries if identified during a welfare check automatically. The reduction in the probability of Major Injuries and reclassification of other conditions such as Concussions would make the relocating of a severely injured animal far more special and less like an expensive and vexing chore. Speaking of concussions they either need to be downgraded to a Minor Injury, or advance like the Common Cold to a worse condition that can result in death such as Comatose. The Common Cold in its current incarnation is actually one of the best diseases, I think Concussions have that same potential, but not as it presently exists.
I think an escalation of a Surface Wounds to an Infected Wound similar to how a Broken Claw can escalate into an Ingrown Claw serves as another example of an escalation that is easy to cope with early, but a pain later. This would allow you to ignore most Minor Injuries as they are fairly frequent while a small number of them having escalation potential if ignored. Certain species being more prone to certain conditions like a Broken Claw or Wing like dromaeosaurs or pterosaurs means they have a higher probability of injuries escalating than other species as well, so there is a lot to think about when making an enclosure.
- MVU reverted to launch functions
- MVU treats Minor Injuries from welfare checks automatically
- Injury % Chance reduced to 50% Minor Injury | 25% Major Injury
- Concussion reclassified to Minor Injury; escalates to Comatose
- Surface Wounds can escalate to an Infected Wound (Example)
Disease Improvements
Additionally, Frontier has done great by introducing new sources of disease, the solutions, however, failed to evolve with them. An infected feeder is no issue whatsoever, in fact, it is arguably even easier now that herbivores no longer have feeders at all. It's about as click and forget as one can get. You get a large notification on your UI and then just assign a Ranger Team and the infected feeder is gone, at most you also have to send the MVU if an animal got infected. The feeder having certain diseases and being susceptible to infection in itself is a great idea still, but the gameplay comes from how you interact with it rather than it simply existing.
A good first step is to prevent the deletion of an infected feeder this will force a gameplay response rather than an easy solution. Next, get rid of the notification on the UI altogether, there is absolutely no reason the game should handhold you so much about every potential problem. The Ranger Teams perform status checks at Ranger Posts to collect information for you about your animals as it is, this is completely redundant and unnecessary. You can even assign Capture Teams & MVUs, for added utility, the game has provided sufficient tools without the notification. The Ranger Team & MVU will be able to identify a problem with an animal and the ailment. Then using the Database or your memory, you can then identify the issue as stemming from a feeder because a condition like E. Coli sources from them. Finally, you'll need a research that branches off the main tree on the cures menu, this means you will need to invest some effort to address it, and if you haven't done so, you need to work around it until your long term solution is in place.
Some players would be able to solve this as easily as now if they have the research based on the decisions they make for how to build their park, many won't, so infected feeders would still be an involved challenge and importantly, it creates organic gameplay that is highly replayable.
While on the subject of disease sources, there is also the matter of corpses. Naturally, there isn't much in terms of incentive for keeping corpses, after all, they do already provide some minimal food for carnivores. I will continue to die on the hill of free-roaming Compy scavengers as corpses could be beneficial for feeding Compies at no expense and raising a new hygiene park mechanic. That aside, I think the process of corpse removal being so easy is the actual problem. The bloody helicopter has always been the game's go-to for inconvenient problems, so simply requiring a ground team be dispatched on a cooldown to remove the corpse increases the odds of them causing disease and taxing resources, so that they have a more realistic opportunity of contributing in some way rather than being this mythical feature no one ever sees without intentional testing.
- Infected feeders cannot be deleted
- No UI notification for infected feeders
- More disease exclusive source occurrences (Ex: weather, feeder, etc.)
- More progressive disease escalations
- New alternative research tree branches for treatments/cures
- Ranger Team cooldown for corpse removal (Transport helicopter corpse removal feature disabled)
Scar Improvements
Scars in the grand scheme of things shouldn't ever really be anything more than a minor system that adds some flavor and personality to your dinosaurs. Right away, a clear improvement would be permanent and sensible scarring, the only time you see them are during dinosaur combat and they appear over the entire body. This is more of a long term improvement as its so low priority, yet a high workload that I have opted to talk about these improvements last.
Beyond that, I think it is feasible for there to be some variable when calculating injuries for there to be a scar chance. A scar chance itself is a fraction of a fraction of a chance of occurring; that is to say a Minor (lesser chance) or Major (greater chance) injury has a chance of leaving behind a scar. Each scar then adds a nice bump in dominance for the animal, meaning an animal with many scars is as its visual indicates, a seasoned combatant. This is another way of viewing a dinosaur's Infamy level at a glance and just adds a lot more flavor to the game. Right now, its basically impossible to tell what animal has a scar without checking its details.
This is truly an aspirational improvement and also one I feel is much less important, but can still be somewhat integrated into the wider dinosaur welfare system.
- Visual indication of scars
- Large dominance scaling with scar #
- % Chance Minor/Major injuries can produce a scar
I am open to hearing some more ideas. However, we really need to get away from the handholding, the game provides way too much information to the point it trivializes itself. No more click & forget gameplay, we can add things all day long, but if they never have any depth or variety in gameplay response from the player, it will age like milk. Then before we know it we will be right back here writing more forum posts scratching our heads and wondering why doesn't this game feel as compelling to revisit and play through than the feeling many people get from JPOG.
Last edited:
