Evolve

» see evolvegame.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

My shooter years were the internet cafe years, 2002 to 2005, counter-strike on a machine rented by the hour in Ankara with everyone in the room playing the same map. Evolve arrived a decade after that window closed, sixty dollars with a season pass on top and a shop bolted onto the launcher. I read about it. I was never going to be the customer.

The design was good, which is the part worth saying first. Four hunters against one player controlling a monster, on a planet where the monster starts weak and gets stronger by eating things, evolving through stages while the hunters try to corner it before it reaches the last one. Turtle Rock Studios had the credibility to attempt it, since its founders had worked on Counter-Strike and then made Left 4 Dead. The concept for Evolve was finished in 2005, before Left 4 Dead existed, and then shelved because the technology of the day could not carry it.

Getting it published turned out to be harder than making it. Publishers told Turtle Rock the four-versus-one idea was too strange, and the studio spent two months preparing a pitch it eventually delivered off an iPad because somebody had forgotten the laptop battery. THQ said yes and then went bankrupt in late 2012. Take-Two picked up the rights for eleven million dollars and put the game out through 2K on 10 february 2015.

It sold. Two and a half million copies shipped by may 2015, second best seller in the United States for february and number one in the United Kingdom. It had taken best of show at both E3 2014 and Gamescom 2014 on the way there. Then it emptied out faster than almost any game of that size, and what everybody wrote about was not the monster.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

Evolve launched with forty four separate paid skin packs. Above the standard edition sat a Season Pass carrying four extra hunters. Above that came a Deluxe Edition adding a monster called Behemoth, and above that a PC-only Monster Race Edition with a fifth monster and two more hunters. A second season pass, Hunting Pass 2, went on sale on 23 june 2015, barely four months after release.

Turtle Rock argued its case fairly. Phil Robb had confirmed to IGN in november 2014 that every map would be free, and the studio said the paid content was all built after the main game was finished. None of it landed, because what a buyer sees is a menu. The Steam user score fell to overwhelmingly negative while the reviews from critics were still positive.

~ the second life ~

On 6 july 2016 Turtle Rock made the game free and renamed it Evolve Stage 2. The PC alpha started the next day and a beta followed in august. Player numbers went up by nearly sixteen thousand percent and more than a million new accounts arrived, which tells you the game itself was never the problem. Everyone who had paid got Founder status and some cosmetics for their trouble.

Three months later it was over. In october 2016 Turtle Rock announced it was ending support, said Stage 2 would not be coming to consoles at all, and stated openly that the decision had been 2K's. The servers, they added, would stay up for the foreseeable future.

~ the actual end ~

The foreseeable future ran until 3 september 2018, when the dedicated servers went dark. Peer to peer survived inside the older Legacy Evolve build, so a small group kept playing among themselves.

Then in late july 2022 the Stage 2 multiplayer servers came back on and nobody could explain why. PC Gamer wrote it up as a mystery. In october 2022 2K acknowledged the revival by turning the daily login bonus back on, then handed free Steam keys to the Discord that had kept the game alive. It was a kind gesture and it lasted nine months. 2K announced in march 2023 that the remaining online functionality was being retired. The sunset began on 5 june and on 6 july 2023 the last of Evolve went off.

~ the next chapter ~

The four-versus-one shape did not die with it. Dead by Daylight shipped in june 2016, four months before 2K stopped paying for Evolve, and it is still running a decade later on a fraction of the budget. The difference was not the design.

What Evolve proved is narrower and less flattering. A game whose first screen is a shop teaches the player to count what is missing, and once people start counting they do not stop. Making it free two years later did not undo the lesson, because by then the counting was the reputation.

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