You have vast powers over your beasts as their creator, and for the humans on the island, you're the only thing standing between them and teeth the size of railroad spikes. It's rather like playing God, if God micromanaged creation and compressed 300 million years of biological history into contemporaneity. [Insert joke about Kansas's educational standards.]
After you get the hang of the game, the divine balancing act is generally pretty simple – the biggest challenge is keeping the animals comfortable. Dinosaurs are, evidently, pretty easy-going. So long as they are “comfortable” they will generally stay in their enclosures and just wander around eating whatever you hand them. You can even drive up to them in a jeep and take pictures. They are surprisingly chill for warm blooded death machines.
Their "comfort" level is determined by a variety of factors specific to each species. Food and water are easily satisfied, of course - a small pool and a live goat satisfies most of the carnivores. More difficult is accommodating their very specific needs for grassland vs. forest – a Tyrannosaurus Rex can have a total meltdown because there is one tree too many or one tree too few in her sprawling enclosure. More difficult than that is managing their needs for ‘population’ – most of the animals don’t mind being pinned up with other species, but they have limits; some are okay with upwards of two dozen dinosaurs in their enclosure, while others can tolerate no more than a handful. Most difficult, however, is managing the dinosaurs’ social lives – some of the dinosaurs are okay being one-of-a-kind, while others are uncomfortable if there are less than four or five other dinosaurs like them in their immediate surroundings. And when I say ‘they are uncomfortable’, I mean, ‘they run at the nearest electrified concrete wall and bash their head into it trying to get out’.
So, part of the balance is making sure that each dinosaur has enough of the right dinosaurs around her so as not to be lonely, but not so many dinosaurs overall that she feels overcrowded. The game is basically a giant optimization problem similar to coordinating seating at a wedding reception, and once you learn which numbers to keep track of, it seems like it will be much easier than that. Unfortunately, as Jeff Goldblum (yes, the actual Jeff Goldblum) will repeatedly remind you, life is defined by unpredictability, by ‘uh… chaos,’ as he would say.
In the original Jurassic Park, the velociraptors were the reapers of chaos. When everything went wrong on the island, they took advantage of the situation and turned the tables on their captors – they proved chaotic, unpredictable, because everyone underestimated their intelligence. It’s a cautionary tale that you’re reminded of repeatedly by almost everyone in the game – most often by animal behavior expert, Owen Grady, who frequently warns you that dinosaurs are far smarter than you think they are, and by Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm, who frequently warns you that you are far dumber than you think you are. And, indeed, Jurassic World: Evolution, throws a major curveball at you with the dinosaurs’ intellects.
After decades of video game designers trying to make smart, challenging A.I. for video game NPCs, JW:E achieves something nearly as impressive – it challenges the player by making them responsible for what are possibly the stupidest animals to ever walk the earth.
The notoriously treacherous velociraptors are actually fine. So long as they get fed on time and have a friend, they’re okay. The T-Rex is even lower maintenance – she doesn’t require or want another tyrannosaurus for company, but if you fill her enclosure with velociraptors she’ll coexist peacefully with them. In fact, the tyrannosaurus is so chill, if the raptors break down a wall and escape, odds are the Rex will sleep through the whole ordeal. The perennial prehistoric pains are, surprisingly, the stegosaurus and the pentaceratops.
A stegosaurus requires at least four other stegosauruses nearby, and if she doesn’t have that, she’ll get “lonely” and attempt to resolve that emotional state through violence. You’d think that, if being close to your peeps were that critical to your happiness you’d be compelled to stay close to them – to move with the herd – but that’s where ‘chaos’ comes in. Logic is an arcane exercise for the stegosaurus; it abhors reason as heresy, and so, rather than pay attention to where the rest of its herd is, the stegosaurus is inclined to wander off into the jungle, suddenly realize its alone, and then decide (for no clear reason) that its missing mates must be inside the gift shop just over the electrified fence. At that point, the only thing that will stand between that angry meat tank and the small business it believes to be concealing its compatriots is an asset containment specialist drunkenly firing his Nerf gun from a circling helicopter. (Remember in the first book when Muldoon and Genarro dropped the T-Rex with a shoulder-fired rocket launcher from the back of the Jeep? Yeah, not in this game.)
Of course, this situation is made worse by the fact that all five of the stegosauruses in the herd are roughly equal in their stupidity, so the group quickly loses cohesion; they all become lonely, and they all smash their way out of their enclosures. But, it wasn’t an insolvable problem – I just stuffed them all in an enclosure too small for them to get out of sight of one another and voila! I finally had happy, comfortable stegosauruses NOT trying to escape every three minutes.
But, as dumb as the stegosauruses were, they were still not such a pain as the Pentaceratopses (hereafter referred to as Pences, because the full name is almost as painful to write repeatedly as it is to read). The Pences are, technically, easier to placate than the stegosauruses, as a Pence only requires two others of its kind close at hand. Unfortunately, the Pence features heavily in an end-game mission where you have to simulate a natural ecosystem by putting multiple individuals from half-a-dozen different species together in one large enclosure and keeping them there – and one of the individuals is a predatory Metriacanthosaurus (hereafter, "Metty"). This mission requires that two of those animals be Pences.
Unfortunately, two is less than three, so if you want to have any chance of keeping them manageable, you have to fudge the mission guidelines and over-produce Pences for the pseudo ecosystem. If you arrange things right, you can have your lab churn out all three of them in one go, so that they’re together from the get go – however, if you do your timetables wrong, or if Metty gets to one of them five feet out of the hatchery, then you’ll have to deal with two freaked out Pences while you slowly grow the third for their trio.
Those are pretty fair and predictable problems to have, of course. The curve-ball, again, comes with how dumb the Pence is. For one thing, I decided that in order to have a big enough ‘enclosure’ to make the animals happy, I’d actually reverse things, enclosing the human buildings behind walls like little medieval towns, and allowing the dinosaurs to roam free outside. That way, I thought, the dinosaurs wouldn’t really be motivated to ‘escape’, since they would already be free.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case. A freaked out Pence will knock down the walls of your town, slamming itself headfirst into the electrified concrete until the barrier collapses, all to escape INTO a space that has no dinosaurs, food, or water. Of course, the first thing you do after pulling the go-to-the-shelters-alarm, is repair the wall so that nothing else gets in. On one occasion, my rangers were so slow in doing this, ALL THREE Pences managed to make it into town areas before I raised the damaged walls – unfortunately, they smashed their way into different town areas, separating them even further, and panicking them even more when they discovered they were trapped. So, I took control of the asset containment helicopter (because the alternative was watching the computer fly in idiotic circles around the hotel playing ring-around-the-rosy with the panicking Pences) and tranqed them myself. I arranged heavy lift helicopters to carry them all far from the town and dump them in one spot together
UNFORTUNATELY, in the time it took me to get the walls repaired, Metty – who by this point has acquired a taste for Pence meat – somehow slipped into one of the enclosed areas and hid, then waited for me to dose the Pences with tranquilizer, and proceeded to chow down on one of the dosed animals while I was arranging the lifts out. I drugged Metty and dumped him out back (on the opposite side of town from where I was sending his favorite food) and proceeded to clone a replacement for the one he’d eaten.
UNFORTUNATELY, by the time the replacement was finished, the two remaining Pences had recovered from their drugged stupor, rushed back to the town, and smashed their way back through the walls – because of course they did. So I tranqed them again, flew them out to the boonies, and dropped them there along with their freshly cloned third.
UNFORTUNATELY, even recovering from the sedatives, the Pences were so angry about being ‘lonely’ that they rushed back to my town and knocked the walls down again. Abandoned by her fellows, Pence #3, of course, panicked and did the same thing. I tranqed all three, dumped them in one spot together, and – again – they did the same thing. They were so distraught at being alone, they failed completely to notice they were ALL TOGETHER IN THE SAME PLACE AT THE SAME TIME.
This turned into an endless loop until I finally just dropped them in a spot together, re-sedated them all before they could separate, and let them ‘sleep it off’ in a little pile. Unfortunately, they woke up about the time Metty found her way back over, and soon I was back to two panicked Pences. Fortunately, by that time the clock had run out on the mission, and keeping the dumbest animals in Earth’s history was no longer mandatory, so I relocated them once more – into the T-Rex enclosure – and allowed natural selection to scrub them from the island’s genepool.
The reason I felt compelled to write about this experience is that I feel like there’s some deep insight into human nature here. Three would-be-soul-mates were so distraught over their perceived abandonment that – rather than calm down and talk to each other – they would choose to beat their heads against reinforced concrete in a desperate attempt to escape freedom. All that while a higher power does its best to prevent their frantic stupidity from trampling the random people in their way, and attempts, repeatedly, to reunite them, before finally tiring of their persistent idiocy and feeding them to his forty foot long, 7-ton executioner.
I’m absolutely certain that has to be a metaphor for SOMETHING.
I find myself asking, really, are any of us any smarter than one of these idiotic, five-horned scaly cows? But then I also have to ask myself, would an idiot delegate his problems to a dangerously overweight Tyrannosaurus?
Don’t answer that.
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