Jurassic World Evolution 3 Preview – When a mummy dino and a daddy dino love each other very much

While there’s a new film in the Jurassic World series full of smuggling, foolhardy families, and Scarlett Johansson, Jurassic World Evolution 3 takes a little more inspiration from its celluloid predecessor, Jurassic World Dominion, sticking with the dinosaur conservation angle. It’s this that really lends itself best to building parks and attractions around the world. The aim of the campaign is to build a more interconnected network of parks, bouncing back and forth between locations as you make new discoveries and research groundbreaking technologies.

The core experience should be immediately familiar to players of the first two games, and to fans of Frontier’s other park management games – though there’s generally less biting in Planet Coaster 2 – and managing your park will be a steady diet of placing enclosures, sending expeditions off to dig sites to find new species, breeding them, tailoring their habitats, and trying to figure out how to make money from the visitors to your park.

Chatting with Jurassic World Evolution 3 Creative Director Andy Fletcher, he told us, “Jurassic World Evolution 3, in many ways, it sort of combines a lot of the best things that we loved about the first two games. You know, there’s some things that we’ve kind of harked back to in the first game – the main campaign’s a bit a bit less linear, so there’s a bit more freedom there, but it’s really, the impetus behind TWE3 was some of the big, big new features that we wanted to add to the series. So, you know, the advent of dinosaur families and the complete overhaul of the park construction tools, those are the real drivers behind this game. ”

One of the delights for dinosaur fans is how each new film and game brings new dinosaurs into the mix. Jurassic World Evolution 3 has a selection of newcomers like the Lokiceratops and Utahraptor, but perhaps more notable is the addition of dinosaur breeding and juvenile dinos that need to mature into adults.

I put it to Andy that this is maybe a doubling of the number of dinosaurs, but he pointed out that it’s beyond that, as there’s male dinos now as well and “they’ve got like crests and they’ve got like frills, they’ve got an entirely new patterns on them… so yeah, there’s a fair bit of work put in to make sure that male and female are different too. Some have bigger body masses. There’s lots there.”

“We wanted to go sort of deeper on the dinosaurs. Rather than just add more, it was about what really takes that element of the gameplay to the next level, when it’s the introduction of family units and the dynamics that come with that. How do the parents behave around the juveniles? How many juveniles want a certain number of other juveniles want in the herd? What happens when the juvenile T. Rex grows up, and wants to be an alpha male? You’ve got to go back in and manage that potentially chaotic situation. So it was just a really fruitful area to explore.”

So how do you get a baby dino now? Well, obviously the way you get a baby dinosaur is to find a mummy dinosaur and a daddy dinosaur who love each other very much, but as you start the game, you’ve only really got the technology and the DNA strands for all the female engineered dinos that stemmed from the founding of the original Jurassic Park.

Cabot Finch’s latest start-up is the DIN (Dinosaur Integration Network), bringing in the familiar voice of Dr Ian Malcolm for some sardonic advice, alongside a cast of other scientists and researchers. “It would kind of make sense that he might sort of do a start up of this nature,” Andy quipped about Cabot’s ongoing role. “You know, he’s a well meaning character, but he’s ambitious and demanding, and he makes for a really fun kind of boss, effectively, who you are trying to satisfy and trying to please.”

One of the first missions you have in the story is to go and research some genetically engineered male dinosaurs, create them in your labs, and then introduce them into the herds, groups and enclosures. Get everything in the right sweet spot and you’ll get little reports of nests with dinosaur eggs in them that can hatch naturally to have little dinos start bounding around getting into trouble. They can also, of course, be captured from the wild and brought to your park and enclosures as a family unit.

Juvenile dinos, and their parents, can start to have some different demands and behaviours as a consequence of this. Andy explained, “The paleo needs are usually quite similar, but someone was mentioning earlier that they released a a some juvenile Sauropod and they were like, “oh, this needs food that’s lower down, when its giant parents were eating them from the tree top.” So, you know, that’s quite an obvious example compared to adults need more space and things like that.

“It’s more in the social needs. It’s more in how paternal are the parents? How much do they are they going to sort of, how many juveniles do they want in their herd? So that’s where we’ve tried to kind of change the either partly on the diet and navigation as well.”

“That’s another dimension, because we have semiaquatic dinosaurs now, but there’s an interesting example of one of the semi-aquatics that where the adult can swim across deep water, the juvenile can’t, so you’ve gotta kind of think about how do I manage that enclosure if I’ve use deep water disclosure?”

I’m really keen to see how deep this system goes in the full game, while still trying to keep things intelligible for the typical player – I have enough trouble figuring out the specifics of what my cat wants, so dealing with teenage raptor mood swings might be a bit much!

And if this style of dino breeding really isn’t your thing, then you’ll still have the ability to wave your scientific magical wand to incubate dinos at your hatcheries, and a Marketplace Facility will let you simply purchase animals. Just note that sellers have a degree of trustworthiness, and you may come across a dinosaur deal that’s a bit too good to be true.

Jurassic World Evolution 3 gives you a lot more control over the look and layout of your park, completely overhauling the terrain tools to be a bit more fluid and flexible. It’s this that Andy would highlight as his favourite new feature – surprisingly it’s not the raptor chasing a goat on the loading screen.

“I think my favourite feature is the overhaul of the environmental tools that basically your ability to form terrain so that it’s really satisfying to use. You don’t have to be super creative to do something quick and fun, that feels good, and that is really impactful on the park.”

He continued, “When you go to put down a building, it’s just the same as it ever was, it’s exactly the same number of presses it ever was – I counted. But you’ve got this new area where you can go and explore custom creations, you can you can custom create this particular building from scratch, if you like, and get involved in that section if you want to.

“It’s all about kind of nesting that complexity of the features so that you can kind of always dive down deeper, but if you just want to enjoy the fruits of it all you can stay at that top level.”

On the surface level, it does have the same immediacy and feel as previous Jurassic World Evolution games, but now there’s more types of ground manipulation brushes to give different effects. One of those is to create waterfalls, placing water at the top of a mountain and then pushing pool from a lower level to get the gravity to do its thing. You can also, as Andy pointed out to me, create natural enclosures out the terrain.

It’s a good enhancement, but, as I always find with 3D terrain manipulation tools, it still takes a bit of getting used to with fairly wide brushes to paint not always giving me the precision I wanted, and the intensity and slope metrics to handle. It’s a similar way to how you have to juggle the various terrain and foliage types in an enclosure, getting the right balance in grass for pasture taking away from the muddy swamp that they might also want some of.

It’s lovely to have Frontier continuing to grow their prehistoric park manager, and Jurassic World Evolution 3 looks to be hitting a lot of fan-pleasing notes. Revamped terrain tools, alongside blueprints and sharing, and then the impressive introduction of juvenile dinos and family units, and a broader world-spanning campaign will all go down like a live goat to a T. Rex.