Jurassic World Evolution vs Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis - Which one is better?

[TyrannosaurTJ]

So I'm going to bring a debate here regarding these two games, JWE and JPOG. I feel that Jurassic World Evolution has met and even surpassed Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis in terms of content and gameplay aspects. The reason for this is because of the fact JWE's DLC and less about the stock game though. Essentially you need the DLC to expand it in order to make it comparable. That doesn't mean the stock game was bad, it's just woefully incomplete without it. Now the advantages with JPOG are pretty evident because you get a full island to work with, but the problem with JPOG is the sense of scale. These islands aren't nearly as big as the film advertises and the fact you're in a position where you have to terraform if you want the island to carry a shape like Sorna or Nublar. JWE sort of rectifies this by expanding the scale of the island, but the disadvantage is that you're only building on a small portion of the island. Sometimes that portion of the island is extremely limited in what you can include or build in it. I admit I do prefer JWE's island maps as it is a bit more realistic over JPOG's island and maps. It feels more real to me in that way, but the complaint is we don't have the whole island to build on and that I feel is a major problem that I hope Frontier is able to improve on this in the future "JWE2" whenever that is released. All in all, JWE to me is a great successor to JPOG and I think it has met and surpassed the expectations and bar set by JPOG whenever you include the features and DLC in conjunction with one another.

Where do you sit on this? Do you believe JWE is a great successor to JPOG?

[The Geeky Zoologist]

While I played to JPOG when I was younger, I don't own JWE but I've watched a few playthroughts.

While it has some nice-looking graphics (except for the human characters which are pretty bland) along with some features that weren't in JPOG (like the genetic editing) and whose inclusion was not devoid of interest, it has notable shortcomings in the management and personalisation aspects, and when it comes to strategy and management games, it's two things that I tend to be looking for and when one can't personalise his/her park much in a theme park building game, then something is wrong.
In addition to that, the violence is pretty tame compared to JPOG and whenever a dangerous dinosaur escaped, you really were stressed while the same situation doesn't seem to be a big deal in JWE, a feeling which is reinforced by the fact that the guests don't have any personality whatsoever (in JPOG, each of them had his/her own little sheet with preferences and thoughts).
As a result, JWE might be good-looking but it feels empty for me and thus, I don't think it's better than JPOG. It's a bit disappointing since JWE had the chance to be a far better game than the latter, which isn't that great per se and suffered from some issues during its development if I recall correctly. I mean, JWE probably had more budget along with a developers team with experience in the world of strategy and simulation games. I think that it suffered from being a licensed game with Universal breathing down on the developer's neck and pushing them to meet some deadlines (i.e releasing the base game at the same time as Fallen Kingdom with a rather limited amount of time to make it).

[TyrannosaurTJ]

About the customization options, I know JPOG you can't really specifically name anything in the game. The only way to customize is through the .ini files by modifying the associated text string. JWE you can actually rename things in-game, I feel this customization is great because you can name animals and buildings whatever you want. The one thing I feel that could be improved though is the addition of street lights, various decorations in terms of dinosaur skeletons, benches, and trash bins. I do wish JWE had the option to retire dinosaurs if they become too dangerous. It makes sense to have carried that option, but I think they did this because Universal has taken up the philosophy that there shouldn't be any kind of dinosaur death in games unless the animals are battling each other to the death. The stock game was lacking, definitely, but the game's updates have definitely pushed it to be comparable to JPOG or even a marginal improvement over what Blue Tongue did. The other factor here is JPOG's age as it is at least a 20-year-old game so there are definite limitations that JPOG I feel had that JWE has made up for in some ways. Though I don't think it is as far as comparing something like the first Mario Bros game released for NES with something more recently released for like Nintendo Switch. The JWE does have its own set of limitations as well so it will be nice when Frontier releases the sequel version to this when Dominion is released.