Evolve is set for a January 15 release date, and is shaping up to be one of the most anticipated multiplayer games of the coming year for the visionary devloper Tutle Rock.
Cinema Blend reports,”While many have been very excited for every little detail about this upcoming shooter/bite simulator, however, some have stifled their hype due to the game’s assumed online-only nature. According to a recent report from Destructoid, however, it looks like that will not be the case.
To be fair, we’re talking about a 4v1 game that, until this point, has only ever been shown off in multiplayer sessions. It makes perfect sense that Evolve would be an online-only game but, as it turns out, you can still dive into the fray solo if you so choose.
Turtle Rock Studios revealed this fact with the hilarious tutorial embedded above, demonstrating the proper way to play Evolve all by your lonesome. In short, you just boot up a single player mode. From there, you can go on a hunting rampage joined by AI compatriots, dishing out orders and easily changing between your crew on the fly with the press of a direction on the D-Pad. I assume that the team is putting extra special attention into making competent AI partners for a game that requires so much coordination but, if not, you will be able to set up all the strategies and combo maneuvers you want on the fly simply by switching back and forth between the hunters.”
Kotaku reports, “Evolve is finally starting to feel like a full-sized game, with a new multi-stage campaign called Evacuation, three new modes, a third monster and another four hunters.
This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK.
Evacuation is Evolve’s literal game changer. Until now things seemed light, with the only gameplay option ‘hunting’ or ‘being’ the monster, and not a lot else. This new campaign mode brings with it three extra match types – Nest, Rescue and Defend – and ties them all together with a rolling, randomised sequence of levels.
The three new modes can be played separately but the real meat of the game comes from playing them all in the Evacuation campaign. This sees you playing through a series of player voted maps and randomised victory effects that carry over to the next stage. These can be various buff or debuffs decided by who wins at each stage.
A hunter victory, for example, might see a masking agent sprayed over the next map to cancel out the monster’s X-ray vision-like smell sense. Whereas a monster victory could see it gain an armour buff from ‘feasting on the casualties.’ Other effects include things like turrets, or healing stations, to help the hunters, or teleport rifts and toxic gas clouds to help the monster. 2K is promising some potential 800,000 variations between the different game types, buffs and 16 maps (12 general maps and four specifically designed for the Defend mode).
Hunt is obviously the mode we’ve seen so far, with the core 4v1 deathmatch setup. The other option, however, mixes things up with a few different mechanics. Take Nest: this sees a series of eggs randomly placed around the map – the hunters need to destroy them to win, while the monster has to protect its spawn. The creature can also hatch one egg at a time for some back-up from a level one Goliath, adding a risk/reward spin on those mothering instincts. You can only have one Goliath active at a time, and it’s weaker than an egg, but it’s also added attack power and if all the hunters are dead, the monster wins.”
Gamerant recently revealed the game’s campaign mode, ”
Officially called Evacuation, this particular mode will feel somewhat similar to the campaigns found in the Left 4 Dead series. It takes place across five days (five maps), and while the story of the mode isn’t shoved in the faces of players, there is a still a story to tell – The planet of Shear is being overrun by Monsters, causing the colonists to evacuate. It’s up to the Hunters to rescue as many people as they can, take down as many Monsters as possible and, more importantly, make sure the evac ship takes off in one piece.
The game modes within Evacuation break down like this:
- Hunt – It’s a race for the Monster to eat enough within the environment to evolve to stage 3, and find the power relay on the map to destroy the objective. All along, the Hunters and Monster play cat-and-mouse, hoping to kill for a quick victory.
- Nest – The Monster is out to protect its brood, randomly scattered all over the map, while the Hunters are out to scramble some alien eggs. If the Monster is able to get to the eggs, it has the option to hatch one of them into a minion – a stage 1 Goliath that runs around, aggro-ing Hunters. Hunters win by destroying all the eggs and the minion, or killing the Monster.
- Rescue – Injured colonists trying to escape the Monsters are placed randomly on the map. Hunters need to locate, revive and protect them as they make their escape. Monsters need to munch on as many of these colonists as possible and keep them from getting away. Whoever saves – or kills – the majority of the colonists, wins.
- Defend – The Hunters are desperately trying to defend the Evacuation point while the ship is fueling up to escape. The Monster, meanwhile, is leading hordes of Goliath minions, attacking the Evacuation point in waves.”
The Turtle Rock producers recently did a Reddit AMA about the game and had the following to say, ”
Reddit user parkurtommo asked how Turtle Rock’s plans to support Evolve with DLC after launch (the developer recently announced that it will give maps away for free):
Co-founder Phill Robb: “Right now we’re looking at maps, monsters, characters, some community support features. We’ve tried to come up with a plan that we as gamers felt good about. As much as we’d love to give all of our DLC away for free, end of the day it costs a lot of money for us to make it.
“New maps will be free, community features will be free. Characters and monsters will be paid DLC, BUT, you’ll still be able to play with people who bought them, even if you don’t purchase them yourself.
“The main idea is that we don’t split the community. We wanted to set it up so that if you don’t want to buy DLC your experience is still enhanced by its presence.”
laidtokickback asked what ideas or mechanics Turtle Rock had to cut from the game.
Writer, Designer, and Producer Matt Colville: “Man we had to cut a lot of stuff, but the core design never shifted.
“We originally had a much more ambitious plan for the wildlife, for instance. Like, the planet was almost a third team and it wasn’t unusual for one side to win because the other got destroyed by the wildlife.
“But we pretty quickly dropped that. It was very unsatisfying to be running through the world, looking for the monster, and get HEROES WIN out of nowhere. You won, but you didn’t cheer. You sat around wondering what happened? It was a huge letdown.
“So we scaled the wildlife back to make them more situational.”
Co-founder Phill Robb: “We had a lot of hunters and monsters that we had to leave on the table. More ideas than we had time and budget for!”
necroscar268 asked if Turtle Rock is worried that players will gravitate towards the same monsters or hunters.
Producer Chloe Skew: “Absolutely not. I think you may see trends from individual people, due to play style and personal preference, but as far as a player base-wide trend to only stick to the last four hunters, I would be really disappointed if we saw that – because it would mean players were really limiting themselves. Each Hunter has their own utility that completely changes the strategies you’ll use in the fight (not to mention the myriad of strategies possible in different modes).
Co-founder Phill Robb: “If we get to a point where certain hunters have a clear power discrepancy over/under other hunters, that’s a candidate for a balance tweak. The idea is that all hunters are equally valid.
“We may indeed see favorites and certain hunters showing up more than others, and in that case we’re going to be looking very close at that to figure out why, and fix it if possible.”
The title was dealyed once, the reason for the delay was to give the game more time being polished, and to not compete with an incredibly jam packed October release schedule.
Turtle Rock has released a new story trailer which you can watch below. In the trailer you can watch two new monsters being revealed, one of which was named with a public vote. The results of the vote; however, have not yet been made public, so we don’t actually know the name of the second monster yet.
It will start out as an Xbox exclusive, and the Alpha testing has just finished. IGN released a very infomrative infographic about the Alpha, which you can read by following this link.
The official description reads, “From Turtle Rock Studios, creators of Left 4 Dead, comes Evolve — the next generation of multiplayer shooters. Four Hunters face off against a single, player-controlled Monster in adrenaline-pumping 4v1 matches. Play as the Monster to use savage abilities and an animalistic sense to kill your human enemies, or choose one of four Hunter classes (Assault, Trapper, Medic and Support) and team up to take down the beast on the planet Shear, where flora and fauna act as an adversary to man and monster alike. Level up to unlock new Hunter or Monster characters as well as upgrades, skins, and perks. Earn your infamy on the leaderboards and become the apex predator.”
“Evolve” will feature a 4vs 1 formula, where 4 human soldiers controlled by 4 players try to fight one monster controlled by one player. Its essentially a never ending multiplayer boss fight, with one player playing as the boss.
The beta starts January 15, 2015 exclusively on Xbox One, Microsoft confirmed today at Gamescom. Microsoft reaffirmed downloadable content will be released first on Xbox One. No beta registration process has been announced. Some good news is that all of Evolve’s DLC maps will be free of charge because Turtle Rock doesn’t want to segment the community.
According to IGN, ” As stated on the Take-Two Interactive earnings call, 2K and Turtle Rock Studios are extending the development of Evolve by a few months to allow enough time to fully realize the vision for Evolve and meet our collective standards of creative excellence. We are encouraged by the press reaction and fan excitement coming out of a very successful E3, and we are now certain we are headed in the right direction with the game and we are confident in delivering a genre-defining product when Evolve launches on February 10, 2015.”
The Escapist Magazine got some hands on time with the game and had this to say, “Evolve was easily the best game I played at Tokyo Game Show, and you can just expect it to get better. It was so fluid, polished, and gorgeous, that I was actually shocked to hear the Turtle Rock dev I spoke to tell me that this demo build is actually quite out-dated now, and the latest build has much more features such as additional hunters and monsters.
He even said that the team was working on a co-op version of the game, and possibly even single player, for those of you who don’t play well with others (though I would highly recommend you did).”
Again the Evolve release date will be January 15, 2015. Check back for more information as we get closer to the “Evolve” release date.