14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Turtle Rock working on the new Evolve shooter says that it is trying to make sure that all the core mechanics of the title give gamers as much choice as possible when it comes to their character and their style of play, in order to make sure that the game appeals to a wide array of players.
The studio has re-evaluated the way characters were evolving in order to make sure that gamers always have a clear choice rather than being pushed down a clear path that they are unable to affect in any way.
Denby Grace, an executive producer on the shooter, tells Polygon that, “You can choose to spread your skill points across three abilities or max one of those abilities up. It’s really made your choices much broader. It has made for some really, really interesting strategies.”
The game offers an asymmetrical experience in which four human characters try to track and kill one monster in a series of hostile environments.
The creature needs to kill wildlife and hide while he gathers experience and develops new abilities that can disrupt and take out the hunter team.
At the same time, the human characters need to work together to use their own skills to trap the beast.
Grace says that the game will include corpses and carrion birds as signs that the hunters can track in order to find the monster. There are also moments when smaller animals will run from it and will offer more clues for the humans.
The developer adds, “It goes really deep. A lot deeper than you initially think.”
The hunter team also has a chance of unlocking buffs for their own characters by using the vegetation in some unspecified ways.
Turtle Rock wants to make sure that Evolve is easy to understand for all those who try it out and that means that all the core abilities of the monsters and the classes are intuitive and linked to their overall design.
So far, the company has only shown the Goliath to fans, who can charge, leap, breathe fire and throw rocks, and the studio says the other monsters have other types of abilities.
The human classes will also have variations of their own, which are designed as a bonus for those gamers who master one of the versions and are looking for a new challenge.
Evolve will be launched on the PC, the PlayStation 4 from Sony and the Xbox One from Microsoft at some point in the third quarter of this year.