Matthew Colville, who works for Turtle Rock Studios<\/strong><\/em> as lead writer, provided an insight why he thinks Evolve<\/strong><\/em> has failed via a lengthy Reddit<\/a><\/span> post, pointing out where he believes Evolve<\/strong><\/em> slipped up.<\/p>\n

\u201eWe built a team to make a world. When I came onboard, the artists outnumbered the programmers. And I think this was true for a long time. When I toured the office for the first time and saw the team, all the artists were watching David Attenborough documentaries and reading books about biology and anatomy and evolution. We believed we were making an alien world you were going to explore, and we intended to make it awesome. I can\u2019t even express the number of amazing creatures and behaviors we designed and implemented and then threw out because they were all a distraction. 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.<\/p>\n

But there was no way to get that game greenlit. No one would pay us to make that game. The hook we pitched\u2013and which we 100% believed in by the way\u2013was 4v1. You see, when you pitch a game to a publisher, they think the most important thing is \u201cwhat is unique about this game that no one can get anywhere else?\u201d So \u201cit will be awesome, and people will love it, and it will sell 10 million copies\u201d is not an answer, even if it\u2019s true. It has to have something they can put on the back of the box that separates your game from every other game. Now, they don\u2019t hold their own games to this standard. They are perfectly happy spending $60m on the fifth sequel to something they already own developed internally that is indistinguishable from every other iteration of the same game. It\u2019s only YOUR game they hold to this somewhat absurd standard.<\/p>\n

Well, 4v1 was awesome. It sounded awesome, everyone loved it, we prototyped it, and it worked. Sort of. A friend of mine said very early, and I think he was right, \u201cthe reason it works is because we are all roleplaying playing Evolve<\/strong><\/em>.\u201d In other words, we all knew how we WISHED the game would work, and so that\u2019s how we played it. 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.<\/p>\n

The fact that all the heroes were A: all different from each other, mechanically, and B: all the monsters were each different from each other, mechanically, AND neither Heroes nor Monsters used any of the same mechanics! Made it very very hard to balance new heroes and monsters. Like, the existence of Lazarus meant a lot of stuff we wanted to do, had to be super watered down because Lazarus broke all the rules. Maggies\u2019 pet trapjaw broke all the rules. Heroes didn\u2019t have to feed. Heroes didn\u2019t level up. Heroes didn\u2019t pick abilities. It wasn\u2019t just asymmetrical; the two sides were playing fundamentally different games. That was a problem we never solved; it was always a problem. It meant all new content was a colossal pain to implement, forget balance, just implement. Just take this cool idea for a hero or a monster, and implement it. Super hard. Because there was always some other hero or monster ability that borked your stuff.<\/p>\n

None of this would matter if the monster wasn\u2019t playable. If the monster were purely AI controlled, we could have made a much different, more fun, more engaging game with a much much wider appeal. A 4 player co-op game where you explore an alien world and fight giant monsters, the giant monsters just aren\u2019t controlled by a player.<\/p>\n

If you could hold all the game\u2019s unique features in your head if you could play the game on its terms, rather than either A: yours or B: the genre\u2019s then it was often really fun. There was a very insightful review that said: \u201cwe always complain we want something new, well Evolve<\/strong><\/em> is actually new.\u201d Nothing in Evolve<\/strong><\/em> worked the way the same items in other games worked. The sniper rifle didn\u2019t one-shot anything; it just put \u201cweak spots\u201d on things, so your allies did more damage. Now, this is perfectly in line with the co-operative nature of the game. A dude who can one-shot a monster has no place in Evolve<\/strong><\/em>. But it\u2019s not how anyone expects a sniper rifle to work. So, we never really solved 4v1, it causes more problems than we ever imagined, and we didn\u2019t really have a team to make a competitive shooter. We had a team to build a world.<\/p>\n

B: If your customer needs to find four friends to enjoy your game, maybe don\u2019t charge $60 for it. Because getting your friends to spend a total of $240 on a game (and you already spent $60 remember) is a hard fucking sell. Any other shooter, you can play by yourself and be an asshole even on a team and have fun. But Evolve<\/strong><\/em>, you have to co-operate. You can\u2019t jungle for 20 minutes by yourself, ganking every once in a while, or mid and ignore everyone, you have to actually cooperate, from the moment your boots hit the ground, and you never get to STOP cooperating and that only really works if you\u2019re playing with your friends. So give the game away. Charge people for cosmetic stuff, but make the game free. Maximize your user-base. We were already thinking about this. We knew this, and THQ<\/strong><\/em> knew it. Alas, THQ<\/strong><\/em> went tits up.<\/p>\n

C: If you release a game that lives and dies on an online competitive play, maybe let the DevTeam update the game more often than once every three months. In spite of EVERYTHING I said above, I sincerely believe there was nothing wrong with Evolve<\/strong><\/em> at launch we couldn\u2019t fix if we could update the game live. We had a great launch, tons of people bought the game, tons of people were playing it. They\u2019d discovered exploits and\u2026we couldn\u2019t do anything about it. As news of these exploits propagated, the user base evaporated. We had local fixes, often in 24 hours\u2026couldnot deploy them.<\/p>\n

The reportage surrounding the release didn\u2019t really have anything to do with Evolve<\/strong><\/em>, as far as I could tell. It had to do with the zeitgeist of gamers at the time, and Evolve<\/strong><\/em> was the punching bag they chose. Websites were reporting on the cost of our DLC, and what it did, and were demonstrably wrong. Just\u2026not true. Writers imagined nightmare scenarios, posted them, got clicks, and moved on without checking to see what was actually happening. That was depressing, but a lot of people bought the game and played it. That cheered us up. Tons of fans and fan art and fan sites and even cosplay, but it cost too much so folks who liked it couldn\u2019t get their friends to buy it and we couldn\u2019t update the game to make the people playing it happy,\u201d his post says.<\/p>\n

In short, the game was way too different in his opinion from the rest, and it was hard to balance things out when the game was expanded with other monsters. The price was also an issue, and the lack of updates didn’t help, either.<\/p>\n

Last time we heard about Turtle Rock<\/strong><\/em> in December 2016, they were working on a co-op, dark, fantasy FPS<\/strong><\/em> with a 2018 release window. It might not happen as we haven’t heard about it yet. (Same goes for the VR projects.)<\/p>\n

Source: WCCFTech<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matthew Colville, who works for Turtle Rock Studios as lead writer, provided an insight why he thinks Evolve has failed via a lengthy Reddit post, pointing out where he believes Evolve slipped up. \u201eWe built a team to make a world. When I came onboard, the artists outnumbered the programmers. And I think this was true for a long time. When I toured the office for the first time and saw the team, all the artists were watching David Attenborough documentaries and reading books about biology and anatomy and evolution. We believed we were making an alien world you were going to explore, and we intended to make it awesome. I can\u2019t even express the number of amazing creatures and behaviors we designed and implemented…<\/p>\n

Read more…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":35068,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1],"tags":[3926,28,1020,4849],"class_list":["post-35125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general-news","category-news","tag-evolve","tag-fps","tag-thq","tag-turtle-rock-studios"],"yoast_head":"\n