As the gaming community prepares to shepherd in new upcoming shooter games like Battlefield V and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, it will also soon be saying goodbye to an oft-forgotten game that, in many ways, was ahead of its time: Turtle Rocks’ and 2K Games’ 4v1 shooter Evolve. This September, Evolve’s dedicated servers and free-to-play Stage 2 relaunch will both be shut down, and while the game will still technically be playable, it will also be a pale shadow of its former self.
Now, one of the game’s former designers has decided to speak out and shed light on the myriad of issues which would ultimately force Turtle Rock to realize that Evolve was doomed from the start.
Matt Colville, who served as both a designer and a writer on the Evolve development team, recently posted this in-depth Reddit post-mortem in which he revealed the behind-the-scenes issues Turtle Rock was forced to overcome while making Evolve. According to Colville, the idea of 4v1 asynchronous multiplayer wasn’t just a random gimmick the design team came up with, it was the unique hook they needed to even get Evolve off the ground:
“We believed we were making an alien world you were going to explore, and we intended to make it awesome. That was the team we had. That team could have made a co-op game where four players explore a savage alien world and I think it would have gone down as one of the great games of the decade. But there was no way to get that game greenlit. No one would pay us to make that game.”
During the early playtesting phase, the Evolve design team honestly thought it had a winner on its hands. The concept of 4v1 multiplayer was fun to play for the most part, but then one of Colville’s friends made a realization which would ultimately prove to be a dark prophecy of sorts for the game’s livelihood:
“A friend of mine said very early, and I think he was right, ‘The reason it works is because we’re all role-playing playing Evolve.’ When someone on the team finally got tired of this and started playing to win, it all sort of fell apart and never really recovered.”
Despite those worries, 2K and Turtle Rock released Evolve in 2015, but despite a strong pre-release marketing blitz and an earnest attempt to support the game with post-launch updates and new content, fans just didn’t stick with it. The overly aggressive DLC microtransactions scheme that 2K tried to implement with Evolve didn’t do the game any favors either, and Colville also revealed that, for undisclosed reasons, the development team was only allowed to release new game updates once every three months, a virtual death sentence for a game that relies entirely on online play.
It’s a shame that Evolve didn’t get the fair shake it was entitled to, since as a concept it had a lot of promise, and it certainly could have grown into something truly great. Sadly, if what Colville says is true, it sounds like Turtle Rock’s hands were tied right from the get-go, and thus Evolve was doomed to fail right from the start.