Having played JPOG, I'd say this is similar but better in many ways. JPOG didn't really allow for much - short of creating Dinosaurs and releasing them. The singular element of JPOG that we did have that JWE doesn't is the create an island feature, but that's something Frontier could add in at a later date.
Completely agree. JPOG is one of my top five games of all time, and I feel JWE is better in every way. Most of the complaints are misjudgments or nitpicks blown out of proportion. When you really sit back and watch your park just
exist, which is the end goal of all park-builders, JWE blows JPOG out of the water.
Day/night cycle is far from a dealbreaker. It'd be nice to watch the turning of the hours cast varying shadows on our dinosaurs, but it's not as though the feature was ever make-or-break.
The "lack of room" everyone is complaining about is kind of ridiculous, considering each island more or less gives us about the amount of building space JPOG did. It's just stretched and shaped differently, which poses creative challenges that I find make the game more interesting to actually play.
The dull dinosaur AI is absurd. I've seen a trike roar and grunt as it runs up to a feeder surrounded by feeding struthiomimus, causing the struthis to scatter so she can have a meal. I've seen my ceratosaurus, on several occasions, walk right up to the fence and sniff in the direction of my guests before roaring, giving them something to cheer. I've seen a velociraptor with 100% comfort stand by the fence and call out across the enclosure, then after her packmate arrives, deal the finishing blow to a section of fence I'd failed to notice was ailing, springing them both to split off in different directions and cause all kinds of chaos. The dinosaur AI is lacking a couple things that many people just kind of assumed would be there for some reason... but it's anything but dull. The dinosaurs in JWE are more intelligent than the JPOG dinos ever were, PARTICULARLY the raptors. JPOG's raptor AI was one of my biggest disappointments back in the day.
Lack of depth and preventing creative play. These are complaints I hear often, but I never see any hard descriptions as to what this means. I spent the first 20 hours of gameplay on the first two islands, tweaking and refining my ideas, making them work with the space I had, and it's been a blast.
"Attendees at your park lack any character remember the people walking around the park in -Genesis. They had personalities!" They had archetypes. You had about six "types" of guest who were essentially faces and clothing styles, along with a word onscreen to inform you as to what kind of person they were. They didn't actually
do anything that showed personality. Taken from a Reddit post I made, this is a list of the things I've observed my guests doing in this game that I'd never have witnessed in JPOG:
- Wearing Jurassic World t-shirts after I started selling Dino Shirts.
- Holding hands with one another, but not constantly; they release hands to point at things and such, and will resume holding hands afterwards.
- Walk hunched over in the rain.
- Occasionally feel the rain and look to the sky in annoyance during a rain.
- Jog.
- Walk in persistent pairs or groups.
- Physically turn to face dinosaurs with high ratings in the viewing gallery, and watch them.
- Big groups will stop, face the fence, then take photos, point, nudge eachother, and generally ooh and ahh when my ceratosaurus stops by the fence that one of my paths runs near and gives a roar. They even make literal "Ooh!" "Ahh!" "Oh-hoho!" and similar sounds when they do this.
- This happens inside the viewing gallery as well.
- Scientists will take out notepads and jot down notes while looking at dinosaurs, particularly when they're exhibiting noteworthy behaviors like eating, drinking or roaring.
- Stop and point at/take pictures of my jeep as I'm driving by.
- Lean forward, arm raised in front of their face, as they slowly trudge through a driving storm, but only when facing the oncoming wind.
"Slow research and fossil/DNA system. Felt like a free to play game with wait times. I at times looked for the speed up button thinking no one would force you to wait around like this." I've seen someone else compare this to a mobile game as well, but it's ridiculous. Waiting for research and "away team loot" is something that's existed as early as the original Warcraft days. A "free to play" system among these lines would look like "Your dig team will return in 4 hours. Pay 100 JW Bucks ($0.99) to finish immediately!"
"Dull voice acting it’s as if they played the game." No one, and I mean no one, plays park builders for the voice acting. To be honest, this game has some of the best voice acting I've ever experienced in a game of its type. You can feel personality from the three department heads even though a game like this doesn't need you to in any way whatsoever. Don't tell me you thought JPOG's voice acting was better... Come on, people, this is the definition of nitpicking.
"Slow research tree that prevents you from constructing the fences you want or buildings." I'm getting into the stuff I want just fine. This is part of the management layer. It's deciding to make do with what you have, or hold off until you've got what you want. It's risk/reward; the kind of thing you see in real world business all the time. In the tech industry, it's deciding if you want to sell a video card with a hyper-advanced GPU that puts off excessive heat before you've developed the cooling system to match. In JWE, it's deciding if you want to showcase a t-rex for the big bucks before you've developed electrified concrete fencing.
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I just want to make a final note. I understand that you don't like the game, OP, and that's completely within your rights, but your last statement irked me a bit because it's something I've been seeing in a lot of the negative reviews, in some form or another. I address it here because it's topical, not because I have some personal issue with you or your opinion specifically, so please try not to take this as being directed towards you individually.
"I understand people that defend this game for we all waited aloooooong time for this but...... It is not the game we asked for just a rushed cash grab."
We didn't
ask for this game. Frontier didn't crowdfund, setting stretch goals to be delivered at certain intervals of funding. Frontier didn't respond to a signed petition of JPOG players looking for a very specific experience. They had a vision for a game that for all intents and purposes would be the
spiritual successor (and this is key) to JPOG, and that's exactly what they made. Frontier doesn't owe us this game any more than a restaurant owes us steak that isn't seasoned with pepper, or a pillow manufacturer owes us memory foam over duck feathers. They made a product, with their own resources, of their own design. The fact that it isn't JPOG 2018 with all the hyper-realistic dynamic AI, dinosaurs that remember every single encounter and form bonds with one another, guests who have names and dates of birth and consistently simulated moods and opinions on every single individual dinosaur in the park... None of that makes it a "rushed cash grab".
All that happened here is the same thing that happens with any privately funded game people don't enjoy. Some people wanted X and got Z, and they hate the game. Others didn't want anything in particular, or perhaps wanted Y but were fine with Z, and they enjoy it. I do wish the vocal minority would stop slandering this perfectly talented dev team, who did an objectively amazing job, because they didn't get the game they imagined as their perfect sequel to JPOG.
Hoo. I got long-winded, sorry. Again, I don't mean to make OP feel like I'm having a go at him, this was kind of a general response to all the unfair criticisms (and there are fair criticisms, mind!) I've seen floating around out there. Just happened to kind of come to a head as I was reading this specific post.
