About that Winter Sale?

[XtReMz98]

Hi guys,

I've never played JWE1, but did play Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster a lot. JWE seems to be a different kind of game, mostly focus on micromanaging rather than actually building nice buildings yourself (which with all the polygons would send even a high end computer to a FPS crawl in large parks), but it still got me curious when JWE2 got announced. The release price was too steep for what the initial reviewers/youtubers were showcasing, so it ended up on my wish list instead.

Within a month from release, that 30% off is somewhat tempting, but the reviews are a real dichotomy. On one end, you got the biased JWE1 hardcore base which loves dinosaurs so much they don't seem to notice any bugs or annoyances about the game. On the other end of the spectrum, people with lengthy reviews about how buggy, click-intensive and overpriced the game is, yet playing for 70 hours+. So overall, I'm confused about where the game really stands, especially for someone that would be new to this franchise.

Could anyone take a step back and objectively point out where the game stands, how many hours of gameplay it would provide given I play every game modes and would these hours be fun or tedious? Is it better to wait until spring for a bigger sale+bugs ironed out game?

TL;DR: Game is on sale (30%). Reviews are either "Best game ever" or "Frontier must pay for their sins". Where does it actually stand for a gamer considering buying it that never played JWE1?

Thanks!

[c_Alien]

Originally posted by XtReMz98:

Reviews are either "Best game ever" or "Frontier must pay for their sins".

This will be the answers you will get here as well, I guess.

It is different to Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo. It not that much about designing your park. In fact that is an area where this game lacks.
But it does not focus on micromanagement either, excessive micromanagement is just what you get when you manage your park wrong.
And that is what it comes down to. People who understand how this game works (and like this kind of management, which resembles more a rts game than a game like planet zoo), and those who don't.
But not gonna lie to you, it is buggy at the moment.
Yesterday the game crashed once, I was unable to delete a lagoon, and my Liopleurodon didn't find a fish feeder, although I had four of them and a shark feeder, just to be sure.
But I think they are going to fixed in the next couple of updates.

I played 72 hours so far, am nearly done finishing CT and challenge mode and unlocking everything. And I found it a lot of fun (i rarely put that many hours into a game)

Cannot really tell you if you should buy it now or wait, but if you get it, you should get some gameplay hints, as this is no really easy game (unlike jwe 1), and the tutorial hardly prepares you for the other modes.

[Triassic Time Traveler]

Originally posted by XtReMz98:

TL;DR: Game is on sale (30%). Reviews are either "Best game ever" or "Frontier must pay for their sins". Where does it actually stand for a gamer considering buying it that never played JWE1?

Thanks!

If i were you i would wait till summer sales 2022, with the third JW movie hitting the cinemas in June 2022, we will surely get a better campaign with more content.
I am a big Fan of the books, movie franchise and the games, but i also have a lot of patience.
I enjoyed Jurassic World 1 a lot and spent hundred of hours in it, and i also look forward that Frontier gonna fix their second game more until next Summer.

[Shouting at Clouds]

I'm happy to take a crack at this.

Some background first. I haven't played JWE1, Planet Zoo, or Planet Coaster. For that matter I haven't played any previous dinosaur park games, or park tycoon games in general, so JWE2 was pretty much my first experience of the genre.

However, I have played a lot of the older school city-builder games (particularly the old Impressions historical city-builders) and remain very fond of *that* genre. In particular, I used to like the puzzle aspect of those games where much of the core gameplay was building an efficient city usually within particular constraints or to achieve particular objectives. That mindset probably affects how I view JWE2.

Broadly speaking JWE2 consists of 4 gameplay modes.

There's the Campaign mode, which is pretty short and really not much more than a tutorial. However, as a newcomer to the genre, I appreciated it.

There's Chaos Theory mode, in which you play through five maps, each depicting a scenario from one the Jurassic franchise films. Two of the maps are fairly lightweight but the other three are solid 'build a park' maps of varying difficulties.

There's Challenge Mode in which you have to build a profitable park on one of five maps, each with various constraints. For example, in one map, you don't get carnivorous dinosaurs, whilst another map doesn't give you a lot of open space, making park layouts more challenging.

Edit. I should add, that although 10 maps (for Challenge and Chaos Theory modes combined) doesn't sound like a lot, they generally take quite a long time to complete and provide a decent amount of gameplay time.

Finally there's sandbox mode. This is different (or so I understand from these forums) to previous Frontier park-builders, in that you only have access to dinosaurs and buildings which you've unlocked in other modes. There are various difficulty settings which you can apply if you wish but the fossil digging and dinosaur research aspects of the other modes have not been carried through to sandbox. In other words, no starting with a blank map and building and researching your way up the tech tree to unlock bigger and better dinosaurs. Personally, I don't mind this but it seems I'm in a minority. C'est la vie.

I personally find the game very stable, polished and largely bug free. In something around 150 hours of game time I've had no crashes to desktop, and can only think of a handful (literally - I think I could count them on the fingers of one hand) of bugs that I've noticed. That's not to say that there haven't been more but they didn't impact my game time enough to be noticeable or memorable.

It's fair to say that other folks have had very different experiences though.

Gameplay-wise, I find JWE2 to be fairly straightforward. It's true that the tutorials don't cover the key game mechanics you'll need to build an efficient park but all the information you need to figure those mechanics out is readily discoverable in-game. The UI is pretty good in that regard.

It's true that the game can involve quite a bit of micromanagement but it's also true that it almost always gives you a way to significantly *reduce* that micromanagement with a suitably set up park.

For example, dinosaur injuries due to fighting can be solved by veterinary
micromanagement. It can be solved better by digging into the various dinosaur stats and using the built-in gene modding options to engineer their behaviour. Or perhaps it's simply a matter of noticing that a particular group of dinosaurs needs a bit more space to get along with each other, and expanding their paddock accordingly.

In short, if you're looking for a more freeform, customisable theme park experience (as I believe Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo are), then JWE2 may not appeal. If you're looking for something a bit more puzzle oriented and don't mind using in-game information to figure things out for yourself, then I can recommend it.

[XtReMz98]

@C @Nightcrawler and @Shouting at Clouds, thanks for providing your honest input about the game current state. I'm really puzzled at to why bugs seems to be affecting player unevenly. I've seen videos of players being unable to tranquillise dinosaurs (darts would miss every shots). Crash to desktop might be rig (GPU or RAM) related, so I guess I'll have to see if I'm affected.

I think Shouting at Clouds was very thorough with his JWE2 experience. I enjoyed building from scratch in Planet Zoo/Coaster, but I'm not going to lie that Steam Workshop always outdid any of my construction and I therefore usually stole many elements from it to build "perfect parks". I wouldn't mind a bit of that management puzzle, as long as I can also customise the park so it still looks good and feel alive. I feel this game would be enjoyable/safe to play with my kids next to me, so that's also a plus.

As it stands right now, I believe it would be possible to play over 70 hours from the average reviews I've been looking, which would mean roughly 1$/hour of entertainment. That is usually what I consider fair game, as long as entertainment is fun and not "fetch quests/grindy quests" like. Unless it's a Dark Souls game, where I know I'm paying to make myself utterly frustrated (LMAO).

If anyone else out there wants to chip in, since the sale ends on the 22nd, be my guest. I'll take all the inputs before making a decision!

Cheers

[The Former]

I think other users have handled depth quite well, so I'll just give you my take in brief:

Personally, I haven't experienced any serious bugs. I do have a friend who's experiencing the FPS hit after a couple alt+tabs, but otherwise, my little bubble has been pleasantly bug-free. The clickfest isn't near as bad as most say, so long as you don't overcrowd your enclosures and give yourself a foot and mouth nightmare to cure every five minutes. The main complaint seems to be fuel, and that's solved by simply researching proper power production.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoy this game. The one thing it's missing from Planet Zoo (apart from Planet Zoo's superior water features) is construction, which you've already said wasn't really your thing to begin with. So as a result, I think you'd be pretty happy with this.

My advice if you get it is to let yourself take your hands of the reins every now and then. Just get down close and watch your dinosaurs, preferably while driving in first person. Setting up a big safari enclosure and then driving through in my jeep and just being among the dinosaurs has been a really special experience for me, and it's one I wouldn't suggest missing out on.

Now with regards to the sale, a month ago I wouldn't have told you to expect much from the winter sale. But given that it's already seen 30% off, who knows? Still, if you bite, I'd bite while it's 30% off for sure. Maybe do so right at the end of the sale period; that way if it does end up being even cheaper for the winter sale, you can refund and re-purchase.

Oh, and make sure you turn vsync on. The one issue I did have was with overheats and crashes to desktop, both of which were solved by turning vsync on in the options.

[Shouting at Clouds]

You've already waded through my verbiage, so I'll try and keep this short. :)

About park customisation, this is not an area I've paid a great deal of attention to but you do get the following that I've noticed:

- Terrain sculpting tools (raise, lower, smooth, flatten)
- A small palette of terrain paints (sandy, grassy, dirt, couple of others)
- Three sets of buildings corresponding to Campaign map buildings, Jurassic Park era buildings and Jurassic World era buildings. For Challenge and Chaos Mode maps, you get assigned a set to play with. I presume you can choose a set for Sandbox but I'm not sure what scope you have (if any) for mixing and matching.
- Some of the buildings (shops mostly) have a colour wheel and a decent selection of presets for various design features (door placement, roof styles, materials etc.) which can be mixed and matched.
- You do get a selection of park decorations but it's not huge.

Park guests are really just there as a visual indicator of how well your park is doing. The graphics for them are quite nice but they're not very interactive and there's no individual level guest modelling, if that matters to you.

TL:DR - I would look at a couple of Lets Play videos or something and get a feel for what the stock graphics look like, since the scope for radical departures from those stock graphics to prettify your park, is fairly limited.

[Shouting at Clouds]

Last post (for now :) ) - I do wholeheartedly echo Lockfågel's comment about taking your hands off the reins.

I was just watching one of my paddocks the other night. Picture the scene - three Apatosaurus browsing from the treetops in the afternoon sun, whilst a small herd of Polecanthus are drinking by the lakeside. A little further back from the water, a flock of Struthiomimus are just hanging out, apart from one or two who have decided to go for a paddle.

You remember the Brachiosaurus scene from the original Jurassic
Park film? The bit at the end:

"Dr Grant. My dear Dr Sattler. Welcome... to Jurassic Park"

Then the camera switches to a view over the park, you see two more Brachiosaurs emerging from a lake and a herd of Parasaurolophus by the water, and you *really* get a sense of what Jurassic Park is and the majesty of the creatures that have been brought back.

JWE2 captures that moment so damn well.

I don't know how old your kids are but if they're at all into dinosaurs, then I'd say you've got some good times ahead of you. A couple of the Campaign missions involve driving around the landscape just photographing different dinosaurs doing their thing, so that could be a good map for letting everyone have a go at driving the Jeep. :) Alternatively, it shouldn't take you long to play through the whole Campaign, at which point you'll have a decent set of dinosaurs to play with on Sandbox. Nowhere near complete but a good selection of carnivores, at least one sauropod (Brachiosaurus I think) and some other fairly recognisable ones such as Triceratops. If I'm wrong about Triceratops, half an hour or less, playing the Jurassic Park (Chaos Theory) map will fix that!

Oh - and in case it wasn't obvious, I'm very much enjoying the game too. :) Mind you, if Jurassic World (the film version) was a real life thing, they'd have to extract me from the petting zoo with a tranquilizer gun and helicopter support.

[SLG]

You have to understand that reviews are mostly options. There are some factual information, but you need to do some research on that information.

[XtReMz98]

I took the day to watch a lot of reviews. Most of them dates from shortly after release, which sadly seemed to be hampered by bugs and also by the game being full price at that stage. The most vocals commentators seemed irritated that it wasn't a new game, rather a JWE1 2.0. Ironically, they were also mostly triggered by what actually changed from JWE1, making them hard to follow at times. In short, they often go along the line "They fixed most of the issue that JWE1 had, yet introduced new mechanics that are tedious at best" all the while stating they were exciting about getting a new "dinosaur game based on the Jurassic Parc universe". Also, many complaints about not being able to go full sandbox with everything unlocked from day 1 was a bit complaint, which I never do personally.

In the Let's play videos I've watched, a lot of issues came from injured dinosaurs due to mishandling the whole dominance system, which leads to less dominant Alphas defending their status against more dominants underdogs.

Still, as it stands, metacritic user score is at 69/100 (nice!), which correlates what I'm seeing right now: people who can see past the bugs and enjoy their dinos and the children tantrum one rating the game at 2-4/10 because they feel it's basically a 60$ DLC to JWE1. Is my assessment accurate?

[Shouting at Clouds]

I haven't watched any reviews but from the comments on this forum, that seems about right to me.