Jurassic World Evolution 2: An Interview with the developers at Frontier
The Jurassic Park series is now 30 years old and in that time we have had six movies, an animated tv show and of course, the books that inspired it all. However while there have been a few things to watch, there has been even more to play with dozens of games based on the series released over the years.
Most of the games have been about recreating the movies in some form, but in 2001 that all changed when Game Boy Advance players got Jurassic Park III: Park Builder, a game that let people build their own Jurassic Park. Then in 2003 PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC players were given Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis a more complete park building experience, but it would take another 15 years for the next attempt in the genre, Jurassic World Evolution.
The game launched in 2018 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC and then in 2020 for Nintendo Switch, but the team were not being idle, as less than a year later after the Complete Edition release, Jurassic World Evolution 2 was released and upped the ante in almost every area of the game. The game has been growing all the time, with plenty of fixes and improvements based on player feedback and content that delivers new dinosaurs like the Australovenator and plenty of new decorations.
In celebration of the franchise 30 years, the team at Frontier released a 30th anniversary pack and were kind enough to speak with us about the game, the series and more.
With two successful games under their belt, Frontier clearly have a love for the Jurassic series. What drives the team to invest in this world over and over again?
It really is a combination of our own love for the Jurassic franchise, and our players’ ongoing interest in what we’re doing with it. We established ourselves with the first Jurassic World Evolution as a studio who values the authenticity of the franchise and the player experience, then took this even further with the sequel.
Jurassic Park is now celebrating 30 years of dinosaurs. What are some of the memories that have stood out amongst the team, from the series as a whole, in that time?
On the release of the Dominion Biosyn Expansion, Frontier treated the whole dev team to a pre-booked cinema to watch Jurassic World Dominion just as it was made available. While I’m sure everyone has many memories of the franchise over the decades, this was a memorable experience together and one of the many unique experiences we’ve had while working on the Jurassic franchise.
Jurassic World Evolution 2 took what made the first game good and made it greater. How has the player response been to the game?
We’ve been very fortunate in the energy and excitement our community has brought to not only JWE2 but also the subsequent DLCs. We have a thriving community of players, social content sharers and committed content creators that have built a healthy culture that is the game’s own.
The original movie, which was based off the book, provided some very ‘meme’ worthy moments. Were there any that you had to include in this celebratory content update?
The recent anniversary update contains the highly sought after pile of dung decoration made famous by actor Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, as he slowly removed his glasses to appreciate the enormity of the original heap.
There were some special inclusions of characters from across the movies in JWE2, has there been a desire to bring additional characters in via DLC?
In addition to our fantastic base game cast, we’ve been lucky enough to welcome a number of beloved characters from Jurassic Park like Dr Ellie Sattler and Dr Alan Grant to the Dominion Malta Expansion. The Dominion Biosyn Expansion also saw the wonderful Barry Sembène and Soyona Santos join the Jurassic World Evolution 2 cast.
I have often spent time just watching the dinosaurs doing there own thing. Have any members of the team caught them doing things, that were not expected?
If you like watching your dinosaurs closely, then you’ll enjoy our cinematic camera mode, which was introduced earlier this year!
Earlier on in development we noticed dinosaurs grouping together when the feature for this type of herding hadn’t been implemented yet. Now some would say this is a result of the territory behaviours we introduced for the sequel, but I prefer to feign ignorance and enjoy the magic of the situation!
What does the future hold for the Jurassic World Evolution series?
We’re very much still enjoying the response to the recently released update and Jurassic Park themed content, and don’t have anything to share.
Will Jurassic Park 3 get any love in the future? Will we see a Velociraptor that speaks the word ‘Alan’ randomly?
We don’t have anything to announce regarding future content.
So there we go, while we were not able to get any confirmation of Alan showing up, hearing about how the team celebrated the latest movie or the inclusion of the big pile of… dung, was great.
When we reviewed both the first game in the series on Switch, it was marked as the Complete Edition and that came about 2 years after the release of the base game. We are now approaching 2 years since the sequel released and the developers seem to have no plans on slowing down. So here is to many more years of Jurassic World Evolution, no matter the form it takes.
