Frontier's Jurassic World Evolution will not have mod support, as Frontier has previously explained. Which seems a shame, given the vast catalogue of player-made projects the developer's Planet Coaster boasts. In conversation with Phil at E3, David Braben compared JWE to both Planet Coaster and Elite Dangerous, and said that while there's scope for it to follow a similar path, he himself is wary of mod support as "it means that we can't easily update the game."
Braben explains that while Elite doesn't explicitly support mods, it does have third-party tools and third-party plugins which act in a similar way. "With mod support, people almost assume we're doing it out of some Machiavellian [plan]," says Braben. "What we don't want, though, is the game going in multiple directions and we can't touch the code—because then you would trash all the mods."
Braben describes Elite's anti-cheating scene as "an arms race", whereby PvP players have installed illegal leg-ups like invincibility hacks. Naturally, Frontier has intervened.
"Players don't like things to be taken away but it often means we have to remove something that's visible from a mod point of view as well," Braben adds. "It's things like that and what I'm really saying is: we do understand the positivity of it, but there is a balance here. The upside is that we're continuing to support the games. That's the flip side of modding—if it's like, there you go, we're not going to touch it again, then obviously it can be modded [substantially]. That's the challenge."
With E3 and everything that entails, you may have missed Jurassic World Evolution's launch this week. It's out now, and Pip reviewed it here.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom hits cinemas next week, June 22. Braben says JWE will receive its first major update after that.
