Behind The Scenes: The Technology Behind the Game

With Jurassic World Evolution 3, we were determined to create the best looking and sounding Jurassic World Evolution to date.  

In today’s Behind the Scenes, we’ll be taking a closer look at some of the new technologies and techniques that the team here at Frontier used to build the ultimate Jurassic World gaming experience.

Looking The Part

From sweeping park vistas to the up-close detail of our dinosaurs, the Jurassic World Evolution series has always delivered stunning visuals for players to enjoy as they construct their dinosaur parks.

New to the series, Jurassic World Evolution 3 features the introduction of raytraced global illumination. By calculating how light bounces around the environment, this lighting technology enables greater depth in shadows and better reflection of colours. All in all, Raytraced Global Illumination results in more realistic and natural lighting across your parks.

Support for Raytraced Shadows provides much finer details in shadows, which can be seen throughout Jurassic World Evolution 3. A great example of this is wire fences or small dinosaurs on the ground. In Jurassic World Evolution 2 these would have cast shadows with soft shapes, but now in Jurassic World Evolution 3 you can identify details in the shadows, such as individual feathers.

A skybox is a method for creating the sky, horizon and distant visual objects in levels, and in Jurassic World Evolution 3, these have been the focus of a huge amount of work. Clouds now cast shadows on the ground, creating dramatic visuals as the weather changes in your park. The clouds themselves have also been improved, with more volumetric cloud types for visual variety in the sky.

Buildings have received a massive overhaul for Jurassic World Evolution 3. Not only does modular building give you the option to build or edit every object in your parks, but you can even control the colour of many objects (including paths) with flexicolour. Modular windows and doors make use of a parallax effect, giving depth to your buildings with a peek at their interior – all customisable and controllable by you.

A wide range of brand-new lighting fixtures are also placeable with the modular building system. From towering floodlights in enclosures, to decorative lights nestled between shrubs, you can illuminate your parks any way you like. Lighting is fully linked to the power management gameplay and will serve as a strong visual indicator when your park loses power!

Particle effects and other visual effects are now volumetric, which allows light to scatter realistically through dust kicked up by dinosaurs and vehicles careering across the landscape. Visual effects are now lit and shadowed by our modular building lighting fixtures.

Of course, we haven’t neglected the stars of the show. Our dinosaurs have benefited from improvements to materials, resulting in fleshier flesh and subsurface scattering on thin skin like wing membranes.

With the addition of deep water and Semi Aquatic behaviours for some dinosaurs, we’ve expanded our animation framework to allow certain dinosaurs to wade into or swim in water. Spinosaurus, for example, will now seamlessly transition into their new swimming locomotion when deep enough, and can display behaviours such as catching fish directly from the deep water, without the use of a fish feeder.

An Evolving Sound

Jurassic World Evolution 3 has benefited from a swathe of improvements to how the game sounds, resulting in more detailed sounding dinosaurs and parks.

All the sounds in Jurassic World Evolution 3 are now sorted based on their importance, keeping the player in the centre of the mix. A full park could have thousands of sounds trying to play at the same time, so we use new technology to prioritise communicative sounds over atmospheric sounds to make sure that the player always has the right information to react to.

This includes prioritising fighting sounds or elements like dinosaurs wading in water even if they are further away. We also count the number of vehicles and sort them based on their type, so you can always hear all different vehicles active in your park as complete their maintenance or transportation duties.

When the main cast of characters talk, we reduce sounds such as vehicles, music, ambiences and creatures so that the dialogue is always clearly understandable. In fact, we constantly look at sounds in relationship to other sounds and bring them forward or push them back in the mix.

Transform driven Foley is another new technology used by our audio team, that uses data from animations to directly manipulate audio such as movement and wing flaps for more accurate synchronisation This tech calculates the movement of arms, legs, tail, flippers or wings, and sends those parameters in real-time to control volume, pitch and even filtering of sounds on the animals. This results in a more accurate representation and detail of movement and presence for the dinosaurs in the world.

In games, audio is a completely separate layer from the visuals and needs to be managed so that it appears to react to the world. Jurassic World Evolution 3 doesn’t have a fixed environment, and the player can change the terrain and building constantly, so the audio needs to react to player interaction in a dynamic way.

In Jurassic World Evolution 3, every sound in the game draws an invisible line to where the camera is located. If that line is interrupted, the audio can be filtered so that it sounds as if it is coming from behind a building. This keeps the sound feeling right even as you dramatically customise the appearance of your parks.

The new terrain manipulation tools in Jurassic World Evolution 3 offer players a wide range of control to quickly create rich and lush environments. However, whether dense forests or open plains, these need to sound correct. To support these new tools in the player’s arsenal, they need to sound correct, from dense forests to open plains - we picked biome and environmentally correct insects, wildlife and birds to bring each area alive well before the first dinosaur stomps around.

Must Go Faster

Of course, with all these improvements to how Jurassic World Evolution 3 looks and sounds, we’ve been working to improve stability and optimisation to ensure the game plays well.

Jurassic World Evolution 3 now makes use of direct storage for textures, which allows the game to use the same amount of memory to stream a greater number of higher quality textures. Essentially, this means the game features better looking textures with no additional memory costs.

On PC, Jurassic World Evolution 3 will support DLSS and FSR3, providing algorithmically driven upscaling, resulting in increased framerates while maintaining high quality visuals. PS5 Pro players will also be able to take advantage of PSSR technology.

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We’re delighted to be delivering the best looking, sounding and playing Jurassic World Evolution experience and can’t wait for you to get your hands on the game.

Jurassic World Evolution 3 is available to pre-order now and will release on 21 October 2025 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.