Jurassic World Evolution 2 just revealed some major changes
There are no lack of Jurassic Park fans out there who would love to see a proper theme park simulation based on the franchise, and while 2018's Jurassic World Evolution got us close to that point, it didn't quite get us close enough. At E3 2021 earlier this summer, Frontier revealed that it's working on Jurassic World Evolution 2, and today, we learned about some of the big changes that will be implemented in the game.
If there was one consistent complaint among the Jurassic World Evolution fanbase, it's that the first game didn't really go as deep as players were hoping. As a whole, the game definitely looked fantastic – the dinosaur models, in particular, were great – but the game's systems were a little on the shallow side, which hurt replayability.
Today, Frontier premiered the very first developer diary for Jurassic World Evolution 2, and it seems to be aimed directly at those critics of the first game (which includes myself). In it, we hear about some of the new systems that will be available in Jurassic World Evolution 2. For instance, Frontier explains that velociraptors will now hunt in groups and that while certain dinosaurs will be okay living in the same enclosure together, others will stake out territory defend it from competing dinosaurs.
We also learn that there won't be herbivore feeders in Jurassic World Evolution 2. Instead, we'll have a paleobotany system that players will have to use to feed their herbivores. Dinosaurs will have their own preferences when it comes to the plants they eat, so in enclosures with multiple herbivores, players will need to balance the types of plants that grow there so all of the dinosaurs are happy.
The dev diary also reveals that we'll be building parks in a wider array of environments, not just a collection of islands like we had in the first game. All in all, it seems that at least some of the systems that were criticized as being underdeveloped in the first game will be more fleshed out in the second, so perhaps that's reason to be optimistic about Jurassic World Evolution 2. We'll see what future dev diaries reveal, so stay tuned for more.