Remember Titanfall? EA and Respawn Studio’s precious blockbuster baby that came out last year? Many may scratch the side of their head and recall a time when Titanfall was set to change the face of first-person shooters as we knew it. You may have even bought into the hype, letting a copy of the game sit on your dusty counter, or even more dusty, the halls of your Origin library.
Titanfall was meant to redefine shooters, and in a way, it did. Despite the game being a commercial success, the servers are modestly populated. Sure, one can hop on and find a game fairly quickly, but less than a year has passed since the release, and the game isn’t doing server numbers the way any major shooter has in the past. But why?
Content and price-point – the same issues that seem to plague Turtle Rock Studio’s Evolve even before its release.
Let’s take a look at the reasons why Evolve may be a commercial success but a virtual ghost town in less than a year, though this writer eagerly hopes that’s not the case.
High-Concept Game With Lack of Single-Player
Evolve is about as high-concept as it gets: an online multiplayer game between four hunters and one giant monster that evolves as it consumes prey. What’s not to love? Coming from the developers who brought Left 4 Dead, another game responsible for changing first-person shooters with its excellent cooperative experiences, this is a match made in heaven.
But like Titanfall, Evolve lacks a real campaign/solo experience. Sure, you’ll be able to play matches against bots, but there isn’t much more to it than that. The single player campaigns in Left 4 Dead typically featured five different acts, each with their own high-tension moments that kept players coming back for more.
This is frustrating, because like Titanfall, Evolve is an inherently good game. It’s fun, exciting, and an absolute blast to play online with friends. Yet, even this grows stale when Take-Two Interactive and Turtle Rock Studios make playing the game difficult with the next point:
Bizarre Pre-Order Incentive
Pre-order incentives have always been strange in concept, but overall pretty harmless. Drop a few bucks on a game, guarantee yourself a copy, and get some cool little incentive from time to time. Over time however, this “incentive” has turned into something more akin to an advantage.
For those who pre-order Evolve, players will be rewarded with a code that unlocks all unlockables in the game, thus bypassing the ability to earn the new characters, monsters, and upgrades altogether.
This is utterly ridiculous. What makes the pre-order advantage even more frustrating is that the only way of earning said unlockables is through grinding each and every character class. Normally, unlocking things the slow and steady way isn’t an issue, but in Evolve, the progress of completing the various challenges just isn’t fun. It feels as though the grind to earn the unlockables through the legit method is purposefully frustrating and tedious in the hopes of pushing players to pre-order the game. In essence, players are being bullied into pre-ordering the game with monotony and tedium.
Oh, players who pre-order will also receive an additional monster, pushing the total amount of playable monsters in the game to four.
Price and DLC
Evolve is a labor of love. It’s the culmination of good ideas and fun gameplay, yet it’s tough to stomach the $60 price of the game. Something lacking a single-player component feels lacking to begin with, and charging full-price for a game with no real progression feels wrong. By giving players the ability to unlock everything from the start through pre-orders, what reason is there to continue playing the game? For fun? Of course, but high-concept games with awesome premises can only capture gamers’ attention for so long. The game will undoubtedly sell loads, but will there be anyone left to play with two to three months after launch?
Those who decide not to pre-order the game will be given the base four playable characters to begin with, and through monotonous progression, earn and unlock eight more playable characters. As for monster, the base game comes with three, but only one will be unlocked. The pre-order bonus monster pushes the monster count to four, but that’s only assuming the player pre-ordered the game. For those who do not drop a pre-order, the additional monster will cost at least another $10-$15. So roughly a quarter of the total cost of the game.
In an interview with IGN, Turtle Rock co-founder Phil Robb promises players that the pre-order monsters are not yet complete and will only be made free for pre-order players when they’re ready.
However, Turtle Rock Studios does have some saving grace, in that they’ve promised players that DLC will never split the game community. All map DLC for the game will be free to all, and those players missing the DLC monsters and characters will still be able to play with those who have them, ensuring that players will be able to play the game without issue.
So will Evolve live up to the Titantfall-esque hype, or will it be forgotten in game libraries and hard drives everywhere?
Evolve is set for release February 10, 2015. Will you be pre-ordering the game?
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