Publisher 2K Games recently announced that the free-to-play version of Evolve, as well as the dedicated servers supporting its ranked modes and leaderboards, will shut down this September, just under two years after developer Turtle Rock Studios stopped working on the game. On the heels of the announcement, Evolve writer and designer Matt Colville took to Reddit to explain why he believes Evolve struggled to get off the ground, and why it declined so rapidly after release. 

"We believed we were making an alien world you were going to explore, and we intended to make it awesome," Colville said. "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."

In order to bring Evolve to a publisher, Turtle Rock needed a unique hook to lead with, so they hedged their bets on 4v1 multiplayer, which Colville says they "100% believed in." However, while the prototype builds of what would become Evolve's killer app performed well internally, even early on members of the team thought it was unstable. 

"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,'" Colville said. "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." 

Evolve's 4v1 mode was next to impossible to balance, Colville says, because its heroes and monsters function so differently. They operate on totally different systems, so "a lot of the stuff we wanted to do had to be super watered down." Virtually every character "broke all the rules," so no matter what cool idea they wanted to implement, "there was always some hero or monster ability that borked your stuff." 

"So, we never really solved 4v1," Colville said. "It caused more problems than we ever imagined, and we didn't really have a team to make a competitive shooter. We had a team to build a world." 

It didn't help that Evolve, a game "that only really works if you're playing with your friends," was $60 when it launched. "Getting your friends to spend a total of $240 on a game is a hard fucking sell," Colville said, adding that both Turtle Rock and then-backer THQ considered making Evolve free-to-play from the beginning. "Give the game away. Charge people for cosmetic stuff, but make the game free. Maximize your user base," he said. "We knew this, and THQ knew it. Alas, THQ went tits up." 

The nail in the coffin was how limited Turtle Rock's options were following its release. According to Colville, the team was only able to update Evolve once every three months. The reasons for this are unclear, but given Colville's wording, it sounds like one of the project's backers wouldn't allow (or perhaps fund) rapid updates. Regardless of what led to it, this shoestring schedule severely bottlenecked the changes and fixes Turtle Rock wanted to make, and indeed were ready to make, leaving the game to die on the vine. 

"I sincerely believe there was nothing wrong with Evolve at launch we couldn't fix if we could update the game live," Colville said. "We had a great launch, tons of people bought the game, tons of people were playing it. They'd discover exploits and… we couldn't do anything about it. As news of these exploits propagated, the user base evaporated. We had local fixes, often in 24 hours… couldn't deploy them ... It cost too much so folks who liked it couldn't get their friends to buy it, and we couldn't update the game to make the people playing it happy."

Colville goes on to criticize the reporting and discussions of Evolve's pre-order bonuses and additional content, saying it "didn't really have anything to do with Evolve," but was instead targeted at pre-order bonuses and DLC in general, and that Evolve was just an unlucky "punching bag." As you may recall, Evolve released at a time when pre-order bonuses were treated with the heightened suspicion and disdain which loot boxes are treated with today. It also released carrying a confusing mess of pre-order bonuses and special editions, with an entire monster locked behind pre-orders, so it was the subject of many debates—including one of our own. 

"Dangling a full playable monster as a pre-order incentive seems cynical at a time when most blockbuster video games barely work at launch," our own Shaun Prescott said at the time. Playing devil's advocate for the sake of the debate column, Tyler pointed out that its community wouldn't become too heavily fragmented since, at the very least, all of Evolve's maps would be free. In the end,  Shaun wore him down, and Tyler conceded that players "shouldn’t be pressured into throwing money at something before it’s released just to get DLC they can’t possibly know yet if they want." (“This is why we don’t try to do debate columns anymore,” says Tyler today.)

We'll never know how big a role Evolve's DLC and pre-order practices played in its decline, but one thing's for sure: it's a shame it fell off the way it did. As Evan said in his review, Evolve had "elegant, simple-but-deep mechanics", and the competitive depth to go far. But as Colville explained, its balance issues, muzzled updates, and pricing hurdles held it back. 

Remember Evolve, the 4v1 multiplayer shooter about hunting down giant, human-controlled monsters? Player numbers dwindled soon after its 2015 release, and later that year developer Turtle Rock Studios ended support for the game. Now, publisher 2K Games has announced that it plans to pull the plug on a number of its key features.

In September, dedicated servers will stop running, which means no more ranked play, no more leaderboards, and no more in-game store. At the same time, Evolve Stage 2—the free-to-play branch of the game—will shut down entirely. Players will keep any DLC content they've paid for, such as monsters, skins, and hunters. 

You'll still be able to play it, but only through peer-to-peer matchmaking in Legacy Evolve, which is the original version of the game—Stage 2 became the main version after it launched. 

Legacy Evolve contains Quick Play, which features all game modes other than ranked play, as well as custom games and Evacuation mode, where you play a series of five games as either a monster or a hunter. You'll also be able to play solo against AI opponents.

While Evolve won't be fully dead, it'll be on its last legs. It's a shame, really: as Evan said in his review, it had bags of potential.

With support officially ending for Evolve earlier this year (despite an effort to stake some ground in the free-to-play arena) Turtle Rock Studios is moving on. Naturally enough, the studio's new game won't be an instalment in the Evolve series (it's safe to say that's dead), nor its earlier success Left 4 Dead. No, a new IP is on the way, one with a "dark fantasy" element.

Speaking to gamesindustry.biz, a studio representative said the company is colloborating with free-to-play publisher Perfect World Entertainment, which has worked on Star Trek Online and Blacklight Retribution. 

""We are developing a new franchise set in an all new universe that leverages the style of gameplay our community loves and expects from Turtle Rock Studios," according to Phil Robb, the studio's co-founder. "We're focusing on what we do best - heart-pounding moment-to-moment online co-op FPS action, and with Perfect World as our partner, we will always make sure that our players come first by listening to them and growing the game based on how they play and interact over what we hope are many years to come."

President Steve Goldstein added that the game will have a "huge" focus on cooperative FPS play. He added that it's not a zombie game, nor is it post-apocalyptic, but that it will instead have a "strong dark fantasy element" to it.

It's a shame Evolve went the way it did: I really enjoyed it, though it's understandable that players were concerned with how its post-launch content was ladled out. The new title is not expected to release until 2018 at the earliest, though there are separate VR projects in the offing, too.

In a heartfelt message on the Turtle Rock Studios forums, Phill Robb and Chris Ashton broke the news that development on Evolve, the 4v1 monster hunter, has ended. This doesn't mean that the servers are shutting down, just that further content updates, bug fixes, and balance changes are a no go. In a reply to the server query in the forum thread, Ashton stated, "That'll all be up to 2K on out, the same as anything Left 4 Dead related is in Valve's hands."

Evolve faced a quickly dwindling player base when it launched, which prompted an unsurprising relaunch as a free-to-play game in Evolve: Stage 2. Despite enjoying it the first and second time around, it's apparent that the F2P experiment wasn't quite the success needed to keep Evolve afloat. According to Steam Charts, the average active players have nearly halved in every month since the launch of Stage 2, sitting at just under 1700 as of today. The numbers dived so quickly, they won't even be able to bring Stage 2 to consoles as originally planned. Lucky us, I suppose.

Turtle Rock isn't done as a studio though. They claim to"have lots of stuff in the works," but chances are it won't involve the combination of monsters, hunters, and asymmetry.

To say goodbye to the Evolve community, Turtle Rock is hosting a final livestream Q&A event on Thursday, October 27 at 12pm PT.

Evolve Stage 2 ie, the new free-to-play version of Turtle Rock's asymmetrical team shooter is in the middle of its first Shear Madness event. It spawned a new Medic character last week, but the newest reveal includes a new map variant, as well as a Co-op vs AI playlist.

Entitled Cataclysm, the map is a much nastier version of the original Orbital Drill. According to Turtle Rock, not only is there lots of deadly lava and meteors, but some of the latter can even heal you upon collision though beware, because that holds true for both Hunters and Monsters.

It sounds like a not very pleasant tourist destination to be honest, but for killing monsters and / or hunters it's probably the perfect spot. "The sky has been consumed with embers, soot and smoke that could engulf the whole planet. Strangely enough, alongside the hellfire the planet seems to have taken some of the Hunters healing technology through this transformation."

Finally, the new Co-op vs AI queue is designed to be a less stressful experience compared to the competitive modes. Shear Madness still has three reveals to go, with the last scheduled to arrive on August 30.

Here's some footage of the new Cataclysm map:

Turtle Rock and 2K have announced the beginning of a month-long Evolve Stage 2 event called Shear Madness, which will bring five new updates to the game over the next five weeks. The new content will include three Character Adaptations, three Map Variants, a new game mode, and a veritable 3-meat feast of community requested features and quality of life improvements. That's right, three meats.

The first update will include a new Medic character named Caira Diaz, AKA Quantum Caira, who may or may not have been killed by an energy surge at an EbonStar black site holding a captive Wraith known as The Phantom. Whatever happened, her apparent demise was quickly followed by the appearance of someone who looks an awful lot like her, but with the ability to wield regeneration fields as a healing tool. She can also use amplified Proton energy to set up zones that damage enemies over time, and deploy a Neutron Barrier that applies a short damage resistance buff to any fellow Hunters nearby. Turtle Rock said Quantum Caira is one of our most daring Medic designs yet.

The update also fixes a few bugs and makes some balance changes, introduces a new Advanced Hunter Tutorial designed to help players understand more than just the basic mechanics of being a Hunter, and this is nice unlocks all in-game content in Solo Mode. We ve heard from all over our Community that players wanted some way to try out content before investing the time and Silver Keys towards an unlock, so we introduced the 'Try before you buy' feature, Turtle Rock wrote. With Update 2.04, all content is unlocked in Solo mode so anyone can give anything a test run before unlocking it.

In other happy news, Turtle Rock said the Evolve Stage 2 experiment is going well. From fewer than 200 PC players just days before the re-launch on July 7, Evolve Stage 2 now has more than 2-million players worldwide in less than one month. In that time, we ve released weekly patches and hot fixes and we will continue to tune the Stage 2 experience every week, the studio wrote. It s been an absolutely incredible journey so far one that has surpassed our wildest expectations but we re not done yet. We plan to continue adding new and exciting content to the game, and intend to continue to work on addressing issues with the game that are important to you.

What it didn't explain, at least as far as I can see, is why the update is called Shear Madness. It sounds a bit like a faux-edgy hairdressing shop, doesn't it? I'm sure all will be revealed at some point over the course of the next month, which you can stay on top of at evolveupdates.com.

Evolve has been revived as Evolve: Stage 2, a radical reconfiguration of Turtle Rock's asymmetrical shooter. The action is still fast and unpredictable, with a human opponent helming the monster s brutality against a team of hunters. Best of all, it s free open season for new and returning players alike to revisit the old hunting grounds or step into the jungle for the first time.

Whether you re brushing up on the basics of hunting or tightening up your monster play, the tips in this guide should help.

Hunters

Role callDuring a face-off, stick to your job. Your equipment and chosen hunter type Assault, Support, Trapper, or Medic defines your playstyle and interaction between comrades and hulking monster. Don t prioritize dealing damage if you re the Support; that s the Assault s job. As a Medic, healing is your universe. If your arsenal slows or debilitates the monster in some way, use it you re likely the only member of your hunting party with the capability to do so. That doesn t mean you shouldn t send some punishment in the monster s direction, but your attacks should be smartly timed during cooldown intervals of your utility abilities. With the exception of the tanky Assault, randomly attacking the monster is almost always less effective than using your tools to help your team.

Power positioningUnderlined, bolded, and circled in red ink in the hunter s playbook is never get caught in the open. Engaging the monster in flat terrain, though obstacle free for crucial jetpack boosts, is an invitation for the exposed hunters to suffer a maneuverable foe who ll capitalize on superior speed and splash-damage attacks. Grab as much vertical space as you can for valuable protection. Posting non-Assault hunters on outcroppings, cliff faces, rooftops, or any other sort of raised object forces the monster to tilt their view and climb to other targets when they shifts their focus. The added height provides extra oomph to your jetpack drifts when getting out of the monster s trajectory, and it s easier to pick out a similarly elevated landing zone while at a higher hover. If you re the Assault, get into the monster s face and be a stinging nuisance for as long as you can. Otherwise, jet away and jet up.

Track attackThe monster s footprints are glowing breadcrumbs to your prize, but resist the urge to mindlessly chase after track trails around the map. You won t catch up to the faster monster by just following animal carcasses and meandering prints. Instead, head off the monster s predicted pathway. Spread out (but don t isolate yourself!) to try and intersect with the monster s travel direction. Use the minimap as a visual aid for smartly steering your group; if, for example, the only way a monster can go is straight back into your awaiting guns or turn, assume he will turn. Watch out for moments of misdirection: the monster can mask its movements by sneaking or traveling through water to eliminate footprints. The Trapper s planet scanner ability is a great boon for directing the hunter pack in the general direction of the monster, but be prepared for clever monster players to mentally countdown the scanner s duration and resume stalking as soon as the scan ends.

Dome diligenceThe Mobile Arena is the dome-shaped gauntlet hunters throw down to coerce the monster into an unavoidable duel and prevent escape for a precious few minutes. Any hunter can trigger the arena after getting close enough to the monster, but don t dome until the moment is advantageous. You ll want to dome when the monster is on the backfoot, ideally after taking some initial chip damage or has little to no armor to shrug off hits. Good dome fights are dictated by the surrounding terrain it encircles avoid dangerously close-range map sections such as caves or tunnels and go for rocky crags or ledge-filled overlooks for extra movement space and natural cover. Make sure your team is close before engaging the dome; though fellow hunters can enter the dome from the outside, you don t want to initiate a challenge with no one at your side for the first vital seconds.

The Medic makes a teamA successful hunting expedition needs a successful Medic. Choosing to be the Medic requires mastery of dodging and positioning, as you ll need to constantly evade the monster s onslaught which will certainly be focused on you above all others while monitoring jetpack juice, tracking ability cooldowns, and healing wounded teammates. As a different hunter role, you ll sometimes need to double as snap bodyguard for your Medic and absorb as much incoming damage as you can withstand. If the Medic falls, your posse will likely topple soon afterwards.

Val is a good starter choice for a traditionally kitted doc; her medgun offers no-frills single-target healing while her scoped tranquilizer rifle emphasizes distance to land effective shots. For something more offbeat, give Lazarus a try. Beyond a decently restorative healing burst, he lacks direct healing. His true speciality lies with his Lazarus device and personal cloak, the latter a defensive bonus for using the latter to quickly revive dead teammates.

On the next page, essential tips for Monsters.

Monsters

Smells swellA tap of the right mouse button engages the monster s mega-nostrils, granting an olfactory burst of intel. It highlights nearby animals, hunters, and briefly displays your footprint trail to help discern where your foolish pursuers will close in from. Sniffed organics will also show through walls and structures, handy for clever-girl ambushes and keeping tabs on pesky hunters. Smelling is free, low cooldown, and a vital tool for a master monster. Spam it.

The need to feedAlways be on the move to seek out herds of animals to fill your belly and your armor bar. Chomping on prey also adds progress toward evolving to the monster s second or third stage which, as subtly urged by the game s name, is kind of a big deal. Evolving bulks up your armor and health pools while bestowing three additional points to enhance your abilities. If you re not bringing down nature s wrath on the hunters, you should be stuffing your face with animals. Some creatures carry helpful temporary buffs such as bonus poison damage for attacks or faster climbing speed; look for an animal with a shaft of light above it to spot one. Stay mobile and stop sparingly you move much faster than the hunters, so use that to your advantage as you comb the map for food.

Bot up to skill upThe foundation of a good monster player is a sturdy grasp of the monster s lumbering movement.

Using your slowly recharging traversal jumps a mighty spacebar leap that covers significant ground and knowing when to withhold them for juking out of a dome or rocketing to the next animal pack is just as important as chaining well-aimed attacks. Fire up a bot round or two as a warmup before queuing for a live match. The bots are uncannily adept at tracking and zeroing in on your position, and their dodgy behavior during combat is enough of an approximation of human players to help touch up climbing paths, feeding circuits, and evading fire.

The Goliath is a superb starting monster. Their straightforward moveset emphasizes huge leaps and bullish charges, so they boast an excellently forgiving beginner s experience. The Kraken is a fun, but more fragile alternative the attack helicopter of Evolve, their traversals keep them hovering to rain down lightning strikes and bomb blasts on ground targets.

Total dome-inationAs the monster, getting domed is inevitable. You ll be committed to combat, but that shouldn t panic. The sheer power of the monster holds sway over the battle s momentum and flow, and your control of the monster tips the opening gambit in your favor. When domed, avoid barging into the hunters and flailing mindlessly. While catching multiple hunters in an area-of-effect attack is always a bonus, you ll want to constantly take stock of where each hunter type sits in relation to your movements and shift priorities accordingly.

Always try going for the Medic first; KOing them removes the ability to heal your incoming damage and greatly helps your odds. The Support should be your secondary target for their ability to shield and provide buffs to other hunters you might need to make their your top priority if they re focusing the Medic, as the latter will simply outlast your damage if a Support wingmans them. Of less importance is the Assault, but don t shrug them off entirely their substantial damage output will continually chew through your armor and health. The Trapper is more of an annoyance than an immediate threat, as they ll harpoon you and slow your momentum but deal little direct damage. Make sure to turn and attack the harpoon cables whenever they sting into your hide.

Plan for the scan A popular hunter tactic at the start of a round is to immediately fire off a planet scan to draw a bead on your location. Since the monster moves quite fast, you shouldn t feel discouraged when the scan notice pops up on your screen as long as you keep moving. The scanner may have somewhat dimmed the effectiveness of stealthily creeping around the map, but you can still misdirect the hunters with some clever footwork. Try timing your bluff near the end of a scan s duration: stomp off in one direction to create a footprint trail, then crouch and double back right when the scan ceases. The hunters will soon catch on to your shenanigans as they follow your trail, but with luck, you can set up an ambush from behind or the side for a strong alpha strike.

A new hunter is available for Evolve: Stage 2, the free-to-play rebirth of the asymmetrical man versus nature multiplayer game from Turtle Rock Studios. Electro Griffin is a neon-dipped Robocop ready version of Griffin, outfitted with a dopey new look, some altered abilities and weapons. Chief among them are The Laser Storm, an electric SMG that can be fired while running at full speed that slows the monster, and The Final Lockdown, a short range harpoon that does damage over time.I played a few rounds with him last night, and while Electro Griffin doesn t fundamentally shake up the trapper playstyle, his wild electric SMG and neon stylings are enough to make him stand out from the pack. And it's nice to see Turtle Rock get playful and bright with Evolve's otherwise grim aesthetic.Hopefully, Electro Griffin s quick release represents the pace at which we ll get drip fed content updates for Evolve. I may not play it everyday, but if Turtle Rock throws in a new map, hunter, or monster at a steady pace, I ll hop back in every time to give it a peek Evolve needs regularity in order to maintain a healthy player base this time around.

Evolve is back, free, and easier to get into than ever. There are a ton of changes in Evolve: Stage 2 s free-to-play beta, and many of them encourage faster, more aggressive matches thanks to more powerful monsters and helpful new abilities for the hunters. Match times have also dropped from 20 minutes to 12 and the available maps have been redesigned to accommodate Evolve s new priorities.

The changes are big, but aren t necessarily permanent or complete Turtle Rock Studios is reworking Evolve from the ground up. But one change is more transformative than the others: the Orbital Arena, essentially the mousetrap in Evolve s game of cats-and-giant-mouse, is no longer the sole responsibility of the Trapper class.

Now the dome is a shared ability, meaning anyone on the team can deploy it at any time, so long as it s not on cooldown. The dome also automatically centers on the monster, making it a much harder ability to botch. This tweak has fundamentally changed Evolve, gutting most of the hunting phase in favor of more frequent and focused combat encounters.

The hunting nerf

The thrill of the hunt isn t completely gone in Evolve: Stage 2, it s just far less involved. For hunters, there s less focus on individual roles while searching for the monster. Health regenerates, the HP of wildlife has been halved, and the Trapper has a new ability called Planet Scanner that points out the general direction of the monster no matter where they re at. With a 30 second cooldown, it can t be abused, but it also boosts the Trapper s speed for a short time. It turns the Trapper from a methodical hunter into an eager hound, forcing the monster to stay mobile.

For the hunters, Evolve is now more about damaging the monster whenever possible, even if the shared dome s five-minute cooldown is still a distant dream. Previously, shooting the monster on the run gave it a temporary speed boost with no immediate benefit for the hunters. Now, while the dome is inactive, for every 4% of damage to the monster s health, the dome cooldown decreases in 60 second increments in tandem. It s encouragement for the hunters to be aggressive and opportunistic, but also gives them more chances to screw up and separate from their team.

As a monster, you have more armor and health, your armor regenerates quicker, and your starting stamina pool is much bigger, enabling them to leap away from pursuing hunters and pop abilities more often. It s empowering to be more mobile and reactive, to feel like a super predator capable of outpacing my opponents, but the new Trapper ability and shared bullseye dome makes it harder to outwit them. Sure, the meta has yet to shake out, especially for the stealthy monster classes like the Gorgon and Wraith since they re not in the F2P rotation right now, but I worry that Evolve s quieter moments have gone the way of the dinosaurs for the sake of accessibility.

I enjoyed long periods of quiet with no clue where the monster was, only to spot a trampled patch of foliage, a fresh carcass, then deduce where they might be. Finding and trapping the monster was a significant challenge. Now, finding the monster is only a matter of using Planet Scanner a few times and making sure your team knows how to safely split up and corner the beast. I appreciate that matches have more momentum, but the core of what made Evolve special to me the hunters necessary mastery of their specific roles and senses, the monster s personality expressed through the player as a cunning predator or a stompy, chompy murder train, and the slow burn narrative of every match. It s all gone, or at least taking on a new shape. And that new shape? Asymmetrical, character-based deathmatch.

Fight, fight, fight

To compensate for all that extra fighting, monsters have a faster out-of-combat armor regeneration speed and increased armor, health, and stamina. They re much more powerful, which is great, conceptually. I want the monsters to feel like monsters furious and powerful envoys for mother nature. And combat as the monster feels great. Abilities recharge much quicker and the larger health and armor pool makes you a much greater threat right from the get-go, especially under the dome. If the hunters don t damage the monster for a few seconds while the dome is up, the monster s armor will recharge an extra rapid rate, allowing the fight to reset yet again.

Because the monster is so much more dangerous, even letting them get to stage two is a death knell for new players. In all of my 15 or so matches, I didn t see a monster get beyond stage two or last for more than 10 minutes. The dome s ease of use forces and focuses confrontation, turning matches into prolonged and chaotic battles with little downtime. Rest when you re dead, which will be quite often.

Don t get me wrong. I m having a lot of fun with Evolve: Stage 2. I ve been playing it daily, but I m not having the fun the original concept shot for. The shared dome ability means it s no longer a hunting game with quiet stretches of tension hiding as the monster or Sherlocking where they might be as the hunters. But Evolve s broader changes make for a more accessible game, one that doesn t require intense knowledge of a specific character or team composition to enjoy, and if it gets more people playing for a long time, I m happy with where we re going. Evolve: Stage 2 may not be what I originally hoped for, but it s still a fun and fairly unique asymmetrical multiplayer game with plenty of room to mature.

Going free-to-play has proven a boon for quite a number of games over the years DDO, LOTRO, STO, TESO, and numerous others, some of which don't actually end in the letter o and Evolve, at least out of the gate, is no exception. The day before it went free-to-play as Evolve Stage 2, its peak user count was 157; the day after, that number has jumped to more than 24,000.

That's far short of the big dogs in the park (although to be fair, nobody looks all that hot when compared to Dota 2 or CS:GO), and it's also a tiny frame of reference, certainly not enough to declare that Evolve is back! But it's good enough to crack the top 20 on Steam, something I never would have predicted a week ago.

Recent Steam reviews seem mostly positive, although there are complaints about the re-beta state of the game, particular with regard to server issues. And of course, existing Evolve reviews (including ours) aren't really relevant anymore because the game has undergone so many changes for the re-release. But the strong uptick in player count indicates that there's at least some degree of interest in what Turtle Rock was (and is) trying to do, and that points to the possibility of a turnaround. Convincing players to stick around will be a whole different ballgame, but at least the opportunity is there and that's good news for fans who had been stuck watching it slowly fade into oblivion.