STACK #124 Feb 2016

GAMES

FEATURE

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After a 2014 delay,Turtle Rock Studios are ready to release their 4V1 shooter, Evolve . STACK spoke with producer Mike Boccieri.

T here are games that require time to reveal quality. Initial cynicism can often be ill-judged, as the calibre of a title becomes apparent the deeper you venture within. And then there are the games that feel good from the moment you press start on the controller. What we’ve seen of the game so far, Turtle Rock Studios’ Evolve falls in the latter. From our first look at the title over a year ago – when the studio brought it down under on a press tour (for once, Antipodean journalists were among the first to play it) – we knew the studio were sitting on something special. For the uninitiated, Evolve is a four versus one co-operative shooter where four players team up to form a group collectively known as the Hunters, who hunt a monster played by another player. Set on a planet called Shear, the sci-fi-themed game took out Game of the Show at last year’s E3, and won multiple awards at Gamescom. “With Evolve, every match plays out like

these were actually ideas that Ashton had been bouncing around for a long time,” Boccieri explains, “but he never had the technology at his disposal to be able to make it a reality. “So over the years, working on games like the Counter Strike franchise and Left 4 Dead , it reignited the passion behind this idea – in particular in Left 4 Dead, the tank battles really provided a proof of concept that the 4V1 intense boss battle was a super fun idea. The tank battles are one of the really memorable moments from the game that stand out, so that actually brought the idea he had behind the concept of Evolve back to the forefront. “When we started working on it in early 2011, the core of the game back then was the mode that is now known as Hunt; the conflict between man and monster, where the hunter becomes the hunted. It’s the excitement of turning the tide when the monster starts to evolve to become stronger. That gameplay dynamic throughout the match, where running away eventually changes to become a game

an epic boss battle with the difference being, of course, that the monster is being controlled by a human,” says Mike Boccieri, producer on the title. “So unlike every other boss battle game you might have played, where you develop your team and what strategies to use to take down a specific boss, that’s really not possible when the boss is being played by a player. This obviously results in no two matches ever being the same.” It was Chris Ashton, co-founder of Turtle Rock, who originally conceived the idea for Evolve . “The game originally came about through a process of experimentation, and

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