14 DAY TRIAL // Left 4 Dead developer Turtle Rock Studios has revealed that with Evolve, its upcoming cooperative shooter, it wants to address some of the things it wasn't satisfied with when creating the previous zombie game.
Left 4 Dead delivered a new type of experience from Valve, allowing players to take control of one of four survivors and brave the zombie apocalypse in different episodic adventures. Besides this co-op experience, there was also a Versus competitive one, where players could either take control of survivors or special zombies.
With Evolve, developer Turtle Rock is blending these two things together, putting a four-player team against one big monster controlled by another individual.
According to Turtle Rock's Chris Ashton, the team really wanted to improve on the Left 4 Dead drawbacks it perceived when creating the zombie shooter.
One such problem was that the choice of characters or weapons didn't make that big of a difference, so players weren't forced to think about their decisions.
"You can only tackle so much every time that you make a game, especially if you’re trying to do new things. So there were a bunch of things, when we came out of Left 4 Dead at the end of the day we weren’t happy with, that we wanted to make sure we really addressed from the get-go with Evolve," he told VG247.
"[In Left 4 Dead] it certainly didn’t make a difference what character I chose, and it really didn’t make a difference – to a large degree – what gear I chose, whether I chose a shotgun or a rifle. In Left 4 Dead you were sort-of limited with the options that you have to really change up the game."
In Evolve, however, there are multiple characters with different skills and weapons, requiring much more thinking and strategy from players who just want to shoot other things.
"With Evolve for example, with all the different hunter characters you can be a medic, but it’s not just about one medic, Val’s not the only medic in the game. There are more medics and they all play different ways, so maybe you’re not successful this time, but try a different medic next time," he explained.
"Same thing with the monsters and with the elite wildlife, you can go different strategies there, you can eat the elite Armadon [which gives the alien a temporary armour buff] and get that early on in the game so you won’t take as much damage."
Evolve is set to debut later this year for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.