Developed internally by Frontier
Life finds a way to bring simulation games to Nintendo Switch. The latest port? Jurassic World Evolution: Complete Edition, a bundle of the base game and every bit of story and dino DLC including the nostalgia-stoking Return to Jurassic Park, Claire’s Sanctuary, and Secrets of Dr. Wu. It’s due out November 3, 2020.
We had a chance to chat with Frontier about the Switch version ahead of today’s announcement.
Jurassic World Evolution: Complete Edition was developed internally for Switch, and according to game director Rich Newbold, “the stars aligned for the company and the team to take on this challenge.”
“We did some initial tests to take the game that we had and simulate the hardware on the Switch with our PCs to see if we could achieve it,” he told us. “After some initial prototyping, we dived into the full process of optimizing the game for Nintendo Switch.”
As for technical constraints, there’s obviously going to be a hit to the visual fidelity coming from the PC or even Xbox One and PS4 versions of Jurassic World Evolution, but that’s not all. “We’ve had to add a limit to the number of dinosaurs that a player can have in the park. We wanted the parks to have the same size, but we’ve added a limit so you can only have a hundred dinosaurs in a park at once.”
More generally, I also asked Newbold about what it was like to create a game in the simulation space with a licensed property compared to, say, Planet Coaster or Planet Zoo.
“Universal gives us access to things that we couldn’t do if we didn’t have the license,” he said. “We get authentic dinosaur models, they provide us with source assets for the audio, they give us guidance on how these dinosaurs can move and walk around and sound, and alongside that we also get access to the depth of the franchise: the characters and talent behind that.” In other words, Jeff Goldblum!
Something tells me this won’t be the last Frontier-developed Jurassic game. Fingers crossed it runs well.
