Evolve is a game with a very strange critical history. When it was first introduced by Turtle Rock Studios, the creators of the much-loved Left 4 Dead series, everyone was impressed with its new take on the multiplayer shooter. Having four players team up and hunt another playing as a giant monster was a novel extension of the co-op multiplayer they perfected in their signature game. In the year leading up to its release, it won awards at industry events, including E3 and Gamescom. However, upon release, the reception was a bit more tepid. While there were some outlets that gave it high scores (BD gave it a 9/10 at the time), but most scores ranged between six and eight.
Now, five years later, Evolve has been shut down for over a year, but other games have picked up the 4v1 asymmetrical multiplayer concept and run with it. Dead by Daylight, Friday the 13th and the upcoming Predator: Hunting Grounds are all games where one player is a powerful evil creature while the others are trying to cooperate against them. Dead by Daylight came out only about a year and a half after Evolve, and that game is still receiving updates while Evolve’s servers have been shut down for over a year. What is it about Evolve that didn’t work out?
Right before release, Evolve showed its DLC strategy, and it made fans feel like content was being held back from them for no reason. The game was a full price $60 title with 12 hunters and three monsters, but also had a $25 Hunting Season pass that would include four more hunters and a $15 DLC that provided an additional monster. About six months later there was another Hunting Season pass with an additional four hunters and a monster for another $25.
While having this much post-launch content is always a great thing, the pricing structure of it was distinctly not. That first wave of content felt like it should have just been included in a game, so charging an additional $40 to include it all, bringing the total up to $100, seemed a bit too much. Since the game is so cooperative, it really is best played with friends, so asking four friends to each pay $100 to be able to have the full experience is a tough sell. The price of that went down by the time Hunting Season 2 rolled out, but the damage to the game’s image had already been done. Nothing kills a big multiplayer game faster than lack of community, and the initial bad publicity for Evolve did just that.
It’s a real shame that they had this pricing structure for the characters because that was one of the strongest points of the game. There were four different classes (assault, medic, support, and trapper) that all played completely differently and each had a specific role to fulfill on an effective team. Not only that, but each character within the class had abilities that made playing them a distinct experience from others. It may seem like a subtle difference, but having a medic with a medgun that can heal at a distance and a medic with a revive power that can bring back a dead hunter is significant. The same goes for the monsters, who all require different playstyles to play as and different techniques to hunt down and kill.
The visual design of the characters and monsters all did an excellent job of giving them personality without having to have extensive backstory cutscenes. Much like an Overwatch character, you can tell a lot about a hunter based on their visual design, whether you’re looking at the twitchy medic robot or the elderly lady in a big mech suit. Even the creatures that populate the levels are well designed, all conveying an untamed world ready to push back against the humans trying to make a life there.
One issue with the gameplay may have been the unconventional pacing of the game. During a standard “Hunt” match, the Monster spent time trying to sneak around and avoid the hunters while eating wildlife in order to power up to their strongest form, and the hunters were trying to use various methods to track the monster, like footprints or scared birds, in order to trap it in a deployable dome to get a chance to kill it. In a time before PUBG and Fortnite, games where the player is used to long stretches of time without running into an enemy, the pace was shockingly different from something like Call of Duty where players are in constant conflict with enemies.
Since all roles on the team have to work together in order to be effective against the monster, it was really hard to try out the game with a group of strangers. If the trapper is ineffective in using their skills to track the monster, it can be very frustrating looking while the monster just gets stronger and stronger, with nothing like PUBG‘s circle to force everyone into the same area. Even in a game like Dead by Daylight, the players have a specific goal to repair generators, giving them a goal that may spread them out so the killer has a better chance of finding one of them. While Evolve‘s design decision pay off when everyone is playing their role well, it’s easy to become irritated with a bad team.
Evolve was rebranded and relaunched as a free-to-play “Stage 2” version of the game mid-2016, but by then it was too late to save the game, which shut down its servers in September 2018.
What would happen if Evolve was launched today? Given the success of so many free-to-play titles through many genres, that likely would have been the structure of the game from the jump, giving away a basic version at no charge and asking players to purchase either more characters or new skins for existing ones. The content roadmap could have been spread out a little bit more, with big “events” surrounding updates to make them feel important. Free-to-play also makes it easy for you to get a group of people together so it can be played the way it was intended to be played, something that really made Fortnite an accessible game to start, allowing people to try out the unique characters and the cleverly designed gameplay.