Jurassic World Evolution 3 Out Now: Brings Baby Dinos And Terraforming
- Jurassic World Evolution 3 is out now on PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S, adding baby dinosaurs, terraforming, and upgraded graphics with ray tracing and DLSS.
- New features include breeding with inherited traits, more species, security cameras, and deeper park customization.
- Frontier Developments will add Evolution 2 species as free family units in future updates.
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Never Work With Children or Animals
The Jurassic Park/World movies uniformly show just how wrong things can go when someone tries to stick giant, formerly extinct animals into a public zoo/theme park. But Jurassic World Evolution 3, the latest entry into the sim series by Frontier Developments, finally lets players find out if shrinking them down makes them any easier to work with.
Out now on PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X and S, Jurassic World Evolution 3 builds on the foundations of the previous two games and adds new dinosaur species, improved park features like security cameras, and enhanced terraforming options. However, it also doesn’t abandon the thrill of unleashing dinosaurs upon the public.
“It’s not just a petting zoo,” Andy Fletcher, Game Director, said in a recent interview with Epic. “That’s what distinguishes a Jurassic game – that willingness to embrace chaos and accept that it’s part of the experience.”
“When the player’s left to their own devices, it’s on them what kind of park and what sort of experience they want to have. Particularly in Sandbox mode – if you want to have all the peril, all the dinosaur danger, you can crank those values up and see how you fare. Or you can tone that down and embrace the creative side of the game, building the enclosures of your dreams without having to worry too much about it all falling over.”
Life Finds a Way
The movies have shown young dinosaurs before, but this is the first time a video game based on the franchise allows the dinosaurs to have something close to a natural life cycle. Male and female dinos can be engineered and, should they successfully mate, their offspring can inherit not just the parents’ looks but also their traits.
The roster of available species has expanded, too, with dinos from the movies accounted for alongside brand new real-world discoveries, like the Lokiceratops. “Whenever a new dinosaur species is discovered and we get the first scientific drawings, our eyes widen and we’re like ‘That would be amazing to have in the game!’,” said Fletcher.
“It’s a balance between the familiar, what will add variety to the game’s roster, and what’s new and exciting in the world of paleontology.”
Even better news, Frontier Developments announced on X that it’s working on bringing Jurassic World Evolution 2 species into part 3 as family units, and these will all be added for free.
And as for when dinosaurs inevitably break out and start rampaging, previous Evolution games let players manually control helicopters and jeeps to go check on or neutralize dinosaurs, but part 3 adds more ways for players to control any chaos that arises. In an interview with Radio Times, Fletcher elaborated on these new features.
“You’ve got systems like the security cameras that can catch rogue dinosaurs and automatically send out your capture teams to get them. You can set up patrol routes for a maintenance team to automatically deal with fence breaks and buildings that might have had some damage.”
Build It Up, Tear It Down
Frontier Developments is also the studio behind the Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster games, and one criticism previous Evolution games have encountered is the lack of park customization options, with the first game being especially sterile in this regard. Part 2 added more building types and customization options, and part 3 has even more.
“There’s a lot going on under the hood that’s changed in terms of the modular building system that we’ve added in, and the incredible terrain tools that allow you to build parks and multiple layers.”
These include allowing buildings on different levels of terrain, which in turn lead to environmental details like park hotels in mountains surrounded by waterfalls, with trails down to enclosures created by natural rock formations in place of electric fences.
Buildings themselves now have enhanced modular options, which extends to parallax effects that give the impression that windows look into rooms. Lighting has also been modernised so surfaces – including dinosaur skin and terrain – now look more natural. Volumetric lighting and raytracing have been added, which means things like dust and dirt particles now look and move realistically, reacting to movement from things like walking dinosaurs and speeding ATVs.
The developers released a recent behind the scenes on the game, which included extra news about graphical tweaks: “On PC, Jurassic World Evolution 3 will support DLSS and FSR3, providing algorithmically driven upscaling, resulting in increased framerates while maintaining high quality visuals. PS5 Pro players will also be able to take advantage of PSSR technology.”
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