14 DAY TRIAL // Turtle Rock’s Evolve might be one of the biggest surprises of 2014 and the development team says that the game is being created using an entirely new process that feels in many ways like a continuous internal beta test.
Matt O'Driscoll, the executive producer working on the shooter, tells CVG that his team has known the core concept on which the experience is based for a long time, but was never sure about the details, the number of players and the way the monster would behave.
So Turtle Rock created the main infrastructure for Evolve and then started playing the game in order to refine its mechanics.
O’Driscoll says, “Once it was up and running, we were playing it every day. That's the whole studio. We need that feedback. We have a fairly flat hierarchy at Turtle Rock, and we're always eager to try different ideas. But it was also fairly easy to test new ideas and see how they played out.”
He offers an example by saying that, “The monster's rock throw, for example, came later in development. As we were playing we started realising that hunters would begin to turtle together, and set up mines around them so they were protected, and it forced a stalemate. The rock throw solved that problem.”
Turtle Rock is best known for the work it has done with Valve on the first Left 4 Dead.
The company is aiming for Evolve to deliver the same type of cooperative mechanic for the four human players who are trying to hunt down a dangerous beast.
At the same time, the studio wants the fifth gamer, who controls the monster, to be able to access abilities that can create problems for even the best trained hunter teams.
Evolve will be launched on the PC, the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One before the end of 2014.