14 DAY TRIAL // Turtle Rock Studios, the developer behind the upcoming Evolve multiplayer-only shooter, has confirmed that story details will be offered during the online matches but more as banter between the characters instead of transmissions, like in Titanfall, for example.
Turtle Rock was formed by the same team that worked at Valve on Left 4 Dead and it's a safe bet that they know how to blend a barebone story with a cooperative multiplayer experience.
Now, after seeing the likes of Titanfall trying the same thing but with a competitive focus, Turtle Rock has talked a bit about its story plans for the upcoming Evolve.
Instead of resorting to radio and video broadcasts to players before, during, and after matches, like Respawn Entertainment did with Titanfall, Evolve will rely on the banter between the characters to share some story details.
"We’ve got a couple of different ways to play the game with more or less narrative woven into it. What we’ve shown people so far was ‘let’s just play rounds on this one map,’ but at the end of the day there’s a reason why you’re there and an objective the monster’s trying to destroy," the studio's Chris Ashton told VG247.
"The characters will banter about that objective while they’re in the world, so you’ll learn some fiction through them, and that’s very much the way our Left 4 Dead story was told. You get to hear them talk about the world while they’re in it."
Ashton also confirmed that Turtle Rock is keeping a few things a secret for now, so expect to hear about the story in different ways depending on what modes, objectives, and experiences are chosen by players when they go online.
"That stuff’s there to tell it through the characters, and there’s some little-longer experiences that we haven’t really talked much about yet, where we have the opportunity to do a little bit more. Hopefully we’ll be able to dive in soon, but at a minimum no matter what more – if you’re just playing a skirmish or Hunt all day on different maps – you’re going to still learn about the characters, the setting, why you’re there, why the monsters are trying to destroy objectives. That sort of thing."
Left 4 Dead also relied on short banter between characters to tell a story and on the succession between the different environments players went through.
Evolve seems to follow the same core mechanic, although it will focus on a group of hunters who are tracking giant beasts on alien worlds.