Evolve was one of those games that everyone was excited about when it was first unveiled at E3 a few years ago. It won multiple awards, including Game of Show at both E3 and Gamescon. Unfortunately, after it launched, the 4 versus 1 game didn’t seem to really live up to the hype. Chris Ashton & Phil Robb, the co-founders of Turtle Rock Studios, took to the internet to address some of the concerns with the game as well as make a major announcement: Evolve is getting the free-to-play treatment.
First, some of the changes coming to the game will include:
- We’re reworking the hunter classes to make the team less reliant on having experienced trappers and medics.
- We’re making improvements to the maps and UI.
- We’re improving load times, overall performance, and getting you into the game faster.
- We’re focusing on improving stability and fixing bugs.
- We’re completely reworking our progression system and tutorials.
- We’re adding more customization options.
Now for the free-to-play news. The studio is making Evolve free on PC first, and after testing — which is expected to take at least a few months — with the intent to bring the model to consoles “should it prove successful.”
Here’s how it’s going to work: We’re going to make Evolve free on PC as a Beta starting on July 7. This is going to allow us to hit our new server infrastructure really hard and we need your help testing. Stuff could break, and that’s our hope, because that will give us time to improve things as we go. We’ll parse out major Beta revisions, updates and features over a period of weeks and months — a plan we’re going to continually communicate here. This allows us to test new features and major changes to make our game more accessible and ever closer to the joy we saw when we first showed our baby to the world. Just as importantly, this Beta plan gives us the flexibility and time we need to keep fixing bugs and making Evolve more stable.
So what does that mean for those who have previously purchased the game and extra DLC content? Fear not, Turtle Rock Studios has you covered.
Anyone who owns classic Evolve will be given “Founder” status in the new free version, and all the content you already own comes with you to the new version. As long as we work on Evolve, we will show our appreciation for our committed fans and early adopters with gifts, rewards, and special access. Why? Because you believed like we did, and we will never forget that.
Time will tell to see if the free-to-play model can re-spark interest in Evolve. Have you been playing faithfully? Will you be checking it out again with the new model? Let us know what you think about this move in the comments below, or on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.
[button link=”https://talk.turtlerockstudios.com/t/a-message-to-our-community/87816″ icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Turtle Rock Studios[/button]
