One of the most understated things I feel Jurassic park builders have suffered from over the years has been the importance of utility features. Now with JWE3 on the horizon, I had to revisit this topic as I feel it is warranted we discuss some of these issues of the prior two games and how JWE3 can avoid their pitfalls and deliver an experience thus far lacking in the Jurassic franchise. Based on early information, the inclusion of Security Cameras and the return of the Watchtower from JWE2 leaves me feeling cautiously optimistic.
The Problem
It is just a given that breakouts will occur and emphasis is placed heavily upon the dinosaurs causing chaos, but I feel we are too often distracted by spectacle that we forget about a lot of core management features that make the game engaging. Needless to say I think the first Jurassic World Evolution helped illustrate this point decidedly. When dinosaurs are constantly escaping it not only becomes repetitive thereby boring, but actually downright obnoxious and frustrating to play. Come JWE2 I feel Frontier took this feedback to heart and tried to give us more to do for upkeep of our animals, but ultimately employed the wrong solutions to a known problem. To avoid scaring away younger players and a more general audience less accustomed to management games, it felt like Frontier had to strike a hard balance between its seasoned playerbase and these audiences in a short development window.
Ultimately, Frontier strove to achieve this via the implementation of more automation features for repetitive tasks like resupplying feeders and the ability to assign various teams to a Ranger Post to automate some of these less than thrilling functions. Then adding a number of simple features to various activities in the hopes it would be easy enough to follow, but give the player a sense of managing a dinosaur park. The end result was that JWE2 was/is often criticized for feeling like a mobile game with an overabundance of features that are ostensibly designed to serve as a time/attention sink creating the illusion of depth.
The Two Dichotomies
One of the things I have felt the games lacked is in the finer details of management. We got many sweeping systems and micromanagement features that taxed the players time and attention, but they never really did change what you were doing much or felt rewarding. Arguably it felt like JWE2's many micromanagement features existed merely to give you something to do with your downtime that had been vast with JWE. Sadly, most of these features existed simply to punish the player, forgot to rest your scientists, too bad, they are opening all the gates in the park. Alternatively, you had the fuel future which never really felt like it added anything to begin with, your Ranger Team is low on fuel, so just click on it and sink an irrelevant amount of money to top it off. In fact, one of the research items seemed to exist solely to all but negate this feature altogether.
On the one hand we had a feature absolutely critical to the game in the Scientists and on the other a feature that effectively did nothing whatsoever, the dichotomy is stark. The problem they shared though was that despite going in two opposing directions neither respected the player's time and rewarded their investment. You had to do a lot of babysitting rather than engaging with more interesting systems or building out your park. The idea was good, but the execution was not.
Returning to the Scientists, it is the fact they are required for virtually every management task from research to treatment, excavation, and incubation that's proven problematic. Further with each task assigned incurring a tick up in their unrest while simultaneously punishing you for resting them is counterproductive. Being required at every management level it is impossible to avoid frequently filling up their unrest meters. You are levied with heavy fees to hire, assign tasks, and rest them which is a great money sink, but otherwise makes them unpleasant to engage with and ignoring them will only result in them becoming disgruntled and sabotaging you.
Conversely, the fuel system is fairly hands-off, it only crops up occasionally to pester the player to toss in a couple more clicks. I highlight these two features for they are largely representative of the two approaches most of the new systems in JWE2 took to address the downtime problem in JWE. Neither is particularly good and together they contribute to a feeling of being smothered by too much to do and not a whole lot to be gained.
Glimpse into the Future
Here I must place a spotlight on JWE2's Dominion Chaos Theory level. This was the first time in the Evolution series I felt there were enough tools that afforded us unique and meaningful gameplay. We weren't just taking a handful of photos or tranquilizing and moving around some dinosaurs with a neat backdrop. For once, the game challenged you to play differently and utilized the tools you were handed to address the problem of dinosaur wranglers attacking your facilities and trying to abduct your animals. Not only that, but it was now possible for your animals to have a unique interaction with another of the game's features with dinosaurs able to attack the wranglers directly and using this knowledge the player could actively weaponize their animals against the poachers. It communicates to the player the idea simply by observing the interaction this alternative gameplay approach rewarding the player for more abstract thought.
This was only achievable thanks to a handful of new utility/security tools implemented into this scenario:
Each had nuance and tried to serve as a counter, deterrent, or tool to combat the rustlers. Flashbang Traps would immobilize a rustler that strayed into its small area of effect for a short period of time giving you time to prepare a counter. Watchtowers, Heat Detectors, Camera Posts, and Floodlights to varying degrees would monitor, detect, and mark rustlers on the map. This was important as information was a critical goal of this scenario's objective, so the more ways you could attain it and earlier on gave you more options to plan a response. Players instantly started constructing mazes layers with traps and dead ends to stall out rustlers, or employing dinosaurs against their would-be-poachers, or otherwise going first-person and ramming their Ranger Teams into the Rustler vehicles to shoo them away.
I could honestly say this was the most fun and useful gameplay reason for being able to drive the Ranger Team around in either JWE game. It achieved more with 5 meager tools and a scripted Rustler attack than the Scientist and MVU systems had in their entirety. It didn't radically reinvent JWE by any means, but merely took advantage of what was already achievable within its scope. At the heart of it all, you can create, care for your dinosaurs, and decorate your parks; but if that is all there is, what do you really have?
The Evolution series isn't a paleo simulator, it isn't realistic to expect Frontier will be able to ever make all the species feel completely filled with life, there will always be limitations that players will pick apart eventually. And while some players can get lost building/decorating Sandbox parks and never touch any other mode, that isn't necessarily a park builder game either. Its these small utility tools that have often served as the backbone to these games from the start. These tools open up gameplay opportunities to fill the time and space in between and they can be integrated in a variety of different ways.
Dinosaur-Dinosaur interactions and Dinosaur-Guest interactions lack meaning if there is nothing to be done about them. Whether you want to look at JPOG's individualized guests or JWE2's dinosaur wellness systems if the player lacks agency to act upon the information they are receiving it is without purpose. You have to influence Guest opinion in JPOG and conform the environments of your species in JWE2 using tool at your disposal. They don't need to be super complicated, but they have to feel satisfying and require some thoughtful input as just using a terrain brush over an environment to make the problem go away feels like busywork.
Concerning Automation
While it does look like Frontier has acknowledged these strength areas to a degree given the addition of Security Cameras and the return of the Watchtowers from JWE2, it is not without its own cautionary woes. I cannot help but recognize that there is a small but burgeoning problem that seems to be expanding rather than shrinking with each entry. New Operation buildings and structures get added with each game in the series often accompanied with new vehicles, and yet while thematically unique, functionally they are homogenizing.
As pleasant as it is the Security Camera is a functional tool being implemented in JWE3 with horror park enthusiasts and JP novelist fans taking it in stride, I cannot help but struggle to see how much of a difference the addition of this tool is from the new Maintenance Team and how that may compare to the preexisting Capture, Ranger, and MVU teams? I fear the Watchtowers, Ranger Posts, and other similar structure are simply turning into beacons to which various functionally similar park teams can be assigned to automatically conduct miscellaneous laborious tasks.
Some take this new automation as a sign that the map sizes are on the rise and require more automation so as not to burden the player, but I remain skeptical this is a good thing even if proven true. Criticism over the MVU's similarity to the Ranger/Capture Teams was overshadowed by launch window imbalance and automation was welcomed as a solution. However, the system never saw any meaningful improvements to better distinguish the gameplay between the various teams. More than ever I worry we are leaning even heavier into the game playing itself with every problem being a click away. Just splitting the functionality of the original ACU team into new buildings/teams didn't make Ranger/Capture teams better and adding in a new team in the MVU to cover medical concerns didn't address the overall redundancy either.
If Security Cameras just wind up being a way to separate Capture Teams from being assigned to Ranger Posts, we are just back to the problem of making redundant structures just to say we added something new. You could even say the old Storm Defense Station in JWE were a prelude of what was to come when Advanced Storm Defense Stations were added which made very little difference other than to create a redundant building that was theoretically superior with a smaller radius.
I'd be happy to hear people's thoughts, I've wanted to discuss this topic for a very long time now. Anyone have any suggestions or ideas how we can avoid an overabundance of automation or propose some really interesting utility structures that would improve the game?
The Problem
It is just a given that breakouts will occur and emphasis is placed heavily upon the dinosaurs causing chaos, but I feel we are too often distracted by spectacle that we forget about a lot of core management features that make the game engaging. Needless to say I think the first Jurassic World Evolution helped illustrate this point decidedly. When dinosaurs are constantly escaping it not only becomes repetitive thereby boring, but actually downright obnoxious and frustrating to play. Come JWE2 I feel Frontier took this feedback to heart and tried to give us more to do for upkeep of our animals, but ultimately employed the wrong solutions to a known problem. To avoid scaring away younger players and a more general audience less accustomed to management games, it felt like Frontier had to strike a hard balance between its seasoned playerbase and these audiences in a short development window.
Ultimately, Frontier strove to achieve this via the implementation of more automation features for repetitive tasks like resupplying feeders and the ability to assign various teams to a Ranger Post to automate some of these less than thrilling functions. Then adding a number of simple features to various activities in the hopes it would be easy enough to follow, but give the player a sense of managing a dinosaur park. The end result was that JWE2 was/is often criticized for feeling like a mobile game with an overabundance of features that are ostensibly designed to serve as a time/attention sink creating the illusion of depth.
The Two Dichotomies
One of the things I have felt the games lacked is in the finer details of management. We got many sweeping systems and micromanagement features that taxed the players time and attention, but they never really did change what you were doing much or felt rewarding. Arguably it felt like JWE2's many micromanagement features existed merely to give you something to do with your downtime that had been vast with JWE. Sadly, most of these features existed simply to punish the player, forgot to rest your scientists, too bad, they are opening all the gates in the park. Alternatively, you had the fuel future which never really felt like it added anything to begin with, your Ranger Team is low on fuel, so just click on it and sink an irrelevant amount of money to top it off. In fact, one of the research items seemed to exist solely to all but negate this feature altogether.
On the one hand we had a feature absolutely critical to the game in the Scientists and on the other a feature that effectively did nothing whatsoever, the dichotomy is stark. The problem they shared though was that despite going in two opposing directions neither respected the player's time and rewarded their investment. You had to do a lot of babysitting rather than engaging with more interesting systems or building out your park. The idea was good, but the execution was not.
Returning to the Scientists, it is the fact they are required for virtually every management task from research to treatment, excavation, and incubation that's proven problematic. Further with each task assigned incurring a tick up in their unrest while simultaneously punishing you for resting them is counterproductive. Being required at every management level it is impossible to avoid frequently filling up their unrest meters. You are levied with heavy fees to hire, assign tasks, and rest them which is a great money sink, but otherwise makes them unpleasant to engage with and ignoring them will only result in them becoming disgruntled and sabotaging you.
Conversely, the fuel system is fairly hands-off, it only crops up occasionally to pester the player to toss in a couple more clicks. I highlight these two features for they are largely representative of the two approaches most of the new systems in JWE2 took to address the downtime problem in JWE. Neither is particularly good and together they contribute to a feeling of being smothered by too much to do and not a whole lot to be gained.
Glimpse into the Future
Here I must place a spotlight on JWE2's Dominion Chaos Theory level. This was the first time in the Evolution series I felt there were enough tools that afforded us unique and meaningful gameplay. We weren't just taking a handful of photos or tranquilizing and moving around some dinosaurs with a neat backdrop. For once, the game challenged you to play differently and utilized the tools you were handed to address the problem of dinosaur wranglers attacking your facilities and trying to abduct your animals. Not only that, but it was now possible for your animals to have a unique interaction with another of the game's features with dinosaurs able to attack the wranglers directly and using this knowledge the player could actively weaponize their animals against the poachers. It communicates to the player the idea simply by observing the interaction this alternative gameplay approach rewarding the player for more abstract thought.
This was only achievable thanks to a handful of new utility/security tools implemented into this scenario:
- Watchtower
- Heat Detector
- Floodlight
- Flashbang Trap
- Camera Post
Each had nuance and tried to serve as a counter, deterrent, or tool to combat the rustlers. Flashbang Traps would immobilize a rustler that strayed into its small area of effect for a short period of time giving you time to prepare a counter. Watchtowers, Heat Detectors, Camera Posts, and Floodlights to varying degrees would monitor, detect, and mark rustlers on the map. This was important as information was a critical goal of this scenario's objective, so the more ways you could attain it and earlier on gave you more options to plan a response. Players instantly started constructing mazes layers with traps and dead ends to stall out rustlers, or employing dinosaurs against their would-be-poachers, or otherwise going first-person and ramming their Ranger Teams into the Rustler vehicles to shoo them away.
I could honestly say this was the most fun and useful gameplay reason for being able to drive the Ranger Team around in either JWE game. It achieved more with 5 meager tools and a scripted Rustler attack than the Scientist and MVU systems had in their entirety. It didn't radically reinvent JWE by any means, but merely took advantage of what was already achievable within its scope. At the heart of it all, you can create, care for your dinosaurs, and decorate your parks; but if that is all there is, what do you really have?
The Evolution series isn't a paleo simulator, it isn't realistic to expect Frontier will be able to ever make all the species feel completely filled with life, there will always be limitations that players will pick apart eventually. And while some players can get lost building/decorating Sandbox parks and never touch any other mode, that isn't necessarily a park builder game either. Its these small utility tools that have often served as the backbone to these games from the start. These tools open up gameplay opportunities to fill the time and space in between and they can be integrated in a variety of different ways.
Dinosaur-Dinosaur interactions and Dinosaur-Guest interactions lack meaning if there is nothing to be done about them. Whether you want to look at JPOG's individualized guests or JWE2's dinosaur wellness systems if the player lacks agency to act upon the information they are receiving it is without purpose. You have to influence Guest opinion in JPOG and conform the environments of your species in JWE2 using tool at your disposal. They don't need to be super complicated, but they have to feel satisfying and require some thoughtful input as just using a terrain brush over an environment to make the problem go away feels like busywork.
Concerning Automation
While it does look like Frontier has acknowledged these strength areas to a degree given the addition of Security Cameras and the return of the Watchtowers from JWE2, it is not without its own cautionary woes. I cannot help but recognize that there is a small but burgeoning problem that seems to be expanding rather than shrinking with each entry. New Operation buildings and structures get added with each game in the series often accompanied with new vehicles, and yet while thematically unique, functionally they are homogenizing.
As pleasant as it is the Security Camera is a functional tool being implemented in JWE3 with horror park enthusiasts and JP novelist fans taking it in stride, I cannot help but struggle to see how much of a difference the addition of this tool is from the new Maintenance Team and how that may compare to the preexisting Capture, Ranger, and MVU teams? I fear the Watchtowers, Ranger Posts, and other similar structure are simply turning into beacons to which various functionally similar park teams can be assigned to automatically conduct miscellaneous laborious tasks.
Some take this new automation as a sign that the map sizes are on the rise and require more automation so as not to burden the player, but I remain skeptical this is a good thing even if proven true. Criticism over the MVU's similarity to the Ranger/Capture Teams was overshadowed by launch window imbalance and automation was welcomed as a solution. However, the system never saw any meaningful improvements to better distinguish the gameplay between the various teams. More than ever I worry we are leaning even heavier into the game playing itself with every problem being a click away. Just splitting the functionality of the original ACU team into new buildings/teams didn't make Ranger/Capture teams better and adding in a new team in the MVU to cover medical concerns didn't address the overall redundancy either.
If Security Cameras just wind up being a way to separate Capture Teams from being assigned to Ranger Posts, we are just back to the problem of making redundant structures just to say we added something new. You could even say the old Storm Defense Station in JWE were a prelude of what was to come when Advanced Storm Defense Stations were added which made very little difference other than to create a redundant building that was theoretically superior with a smaller radius.
I'd be happy to hear people's thoughts, I've wanted to discuss this topic for a very long time now. Anyone have any suggestions or ideas how we can avoid an overabundance of automation or propose some really interesting utility structures that would improve the game?