Okay glad I'm not the only one who hated how fucking ugly all the scientists are. Good luck finding someone with white skin, never mind someone ethnically white. Ended up modding the game shortly after getting it to skip all the challenge mode shit
I'm glad to hear that as well. I would
love it if somebody over on someplace like basedmods.com would mod the game to make scientist selection majority White. That shit annoyed me so much and I became so stubborn about it that I would hire scientists specifically based on their skin tone even if their skills weren't the best and it potentially hindered my progress to do so. It was extra points if you could find a White
man for hire. If I was really desperate I would settle on an Asian or (even more rarely) an Arab but that was as far as I could stretch my tolerance.
The Steam page for the third game says that this time scientist portrait generation will be AI generated, so I expect to have even more ugly swarthoids attempting to apply for my parks. I don't know if the portraits for the second game were AI but that's probably the one thing right out the gate that I know I will be annoyed about the third game having.
The same thing applies for the overly brown crowd diversity within guest groups although that doesn't bother me as much as the scientists. Which reminds me, it does kind of annoy me how, during death animations for guests, visitors tend to sound like cartoon characters when they are in the middle of being eaten by carnivores. These people are being eaten alive by rampaging dinosaurs but they sound like they are accidentally tripping on a step while walking up a flight of stairs. It would be much more appropriate if their audio kind of reflected what was actually happening.
Segueing off of
that, it always really irritated me, in the first game as well as the second, how much guests are ultimately treated purely like statistics, or a walking mass of bodies. I get that this might somewhat reflect an accurate vision of how a large corporate entity might see humanity but I don't appreciate it in this game. It doesn't really make sense in-universe for most of the multiple timelines the events of these games take place in, for the parties involved to treat the guests in such a way. Ingen or Masrani or whatever overseer is maintaining the various parks would be very paranoid about potential guest fatalities and take them very seriously, specifically during events that would follow after the first
Jurassic Park event or any time afterwards. A single death or maybe even a breakout would absolutely send the park into or near the red overnight (which is reflected in the first
Jurassic World movie when Claire explains to Owen Grady that the park would never reopen if news of another breakout rampage reached the public). It also makes me nostalgic for how much more realistically Park Administration took visitor fatalities in Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis. In that game, if a visitor died, everything went to hell. An ominous, startling death bell is heard while a big red notification on the side of the screen notifies you that a fatality has occurred and you just earned yourself a $5,000 debt (a sizeable amount of money in game, especially early on). Multiple staff members including Ray Arnold and Robert Muldoon message you to tell you how badly you've fucked up, and in your next staff meeting Peter Ludlow grills you out the ass for your performance and tells you what a massive financial and PR disaster you've caused. You will probably lose at least half a star in your ratings as well.
In Evolution a carnivore or even herbivore can break out and cause a sizeable massacre, and the worse that might happen is you lose a bit of money under the euphemistically titled "Incident Prevention" tab in your finances screen.
In relation to this, the missions to make dinosaurs fight don't make any sense to me either, and I think in universe (or in the real world) actually displaying these kinds of events would certainly fall into the category of animal abuse. Again, in Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis there was a literal ASPCA for dinosaurs that would monitor your treatment of the animals, and if it looked like you were treating them poorly or abusing them (like needlessly expiring them with your chopper's gunner when they are just chilling in their enclosures minding their own business), the ASPCD would step in and tell you to knock it the fuck off or you would get shut down. In this game (at least according to what I've heard), Universal made
absolutely clear to Frontier that killing dinosaurs via gunfire was
absolutely forbidden, despite the fact that it had existed in JP
G fifteen years earlier. However, you are totally allowed to pen dinosaurs into little enclosures like insects in a jar and force them to fight for entertainment. That's totally fine. Because, according to the game's narrative, it's For Science
.
The fact that you are not allowed to lethally execute your dinosaurs when necessary, even when they are rampaging and killing guests, is absurd to me. I am always autistically adamant about never allowing guest fatalities in my games and now that I recall, it absolutely made me furious, especially in the first game, how bullshit it was to fire a dart and have to account for wind altering the aim of your shot because you weren't allowed to just blow a tyrannosaur's brains out with a .50 cal in an emergency where vistor lives were threatened. This was especially infuriating in JWE 1. It was, and still generally is, a nightmare dealing with escaped velociraptors because of how difficult their size makes them to shoot with the stupid tranq rifle.
In JP
G guests were individuals. They had names and interests that you could account for an meet their needs with and they showed emotion. You didn't want them to get killed. In this game they're literally just statistics and their wellbeing is treated like a joke in every way from how they are viewed financially down to how they screech cartoonishly when they die and I hate it.
While I'm on a roll, by the way, it also sucks that herbivores don't act as passively as they did in JP
G, and they'll rampage and scare guests while outside of their enclosures. I used to love airlifting an herbivore outside of its enclosure and close to nearby guests, and watching them marvel at seeing a dinosaur so up close without fences. I guess I could understand if that was the case with herbivore species that are generally viewed as more "aggressive", like Triceratops. But even like, ornithomimids can rampage? Really? Kind of ridiculous to me.
Anyway I am sorry for turning this post into one big autistic rant about everything I dislike about JW: Evolution on the very first page of the thread. I actually really like this game but I've never really had an opportunity to express my misgivings about it in writing (or vocally, as far as I can recall). It's good but there are many ways in which I think it could be improved on that would be easy to implement if they just took further inspiration from stuff like Operation Genesis.
