STACK #124 Feb 2016

GAMES

FEATURE

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the play testing to ensure that the game is indeed super fun to play and balanced, too.” Boccieri admits he’s a lone wolf gamer, favouring the role of the monster in Evolve . But if he had to choose a hunter, where would his allegiance lie? “I do like playing as the trapper – to me that seems like the most unique class,” he says. “There’s a lot of other games that do co-op that will have something like a medic, a support tech class, and assault is obviously a familiar role to play in a shooter. “But the trapper is very unique and has a lot of unique gameplay and some pretty cool weapons and items that you won’t find in any other type of game. I really like how different and fresh it is.” • Evolve lands in-store

where you are then equipped to take the fight back to the hunters, and the hunters then have to switch tactics from being the trackers to out and out combat – those are kind of the core elements that have been there all the time.” So how much experimentation was undertaken to arrive at the 4V1 configuration? “I think we have experimented with just about every part of the game,” notes Boccieri. “We took a bunch of different ideas, configurations and concepts, and the 4V1 turned out to be the sweet spot that we eventually arrived at. We tried many different things and for some reason or other, they just didn’t work.” There are four hunter classes in the game, designed to offer specific skill sets for an effective team-based combat unit. When one of the components is missing – i.e, when you’re dead – the battle against the monster becomes harder for the remaining team members. It’s an additional pressure that becomes real when you’re in the heat of battle: losing the tracker medic can be as catastrophic as losing the medic. Playing as the monster throws up its own set of challenges. In the early stages of a match, the monster’s vulnerability requires players to adapt a specific strategy to the situation at hand; players will concentrate more on evade. The idea is to consume as much wandering wildlife as possible to ‘trigger’ the three-part evolution process. Each stage increases the monster’s strength and abilities until you become a veritable powerhouse, and consequently, more than capable of taking on the hunters. “I think that one of the things that has been very much the intention from the beginning is variety, and making sure that each match plays out differently,” says Boccieri. “Giving players different tools is definitely where we wanted

the game to be, and as part of that process, because you’re giving so much variety, you wind up finding that there are so many different playstyles and opportunities. “You’ve got the person who wants to play alone, the people that multiplay as the team, and even within that team there’s a variety of different roles you can play, and even within those roles there’s different strategies and tactics you can use to fill those roles and help the team with the overall goal.” According to Boccieri, Turtle Rock Studios has a strict policy of play testing that, he believes, allowed good ideas to be recognised and developed and bad suggestions swiftly identified and binned. “One of the things that has been part of the Turtle Rock culture from the beginning is play testing and rapid prototyping,” he says. “What I mean by that is we would have an idea on paper or in our heads and then have the ability to rapidly build a prototype of it, get

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it in the game, and test it. It isn’t necessarily particularly pretty – it’s purely for functionality, but we would be able to see if it was fun and that is the most important thing to us. “The game has to be fun and balanced and we have a number of things in place to make sure that’s the case. It’s a requirement that we play test everyday; this isn’t anything we have to enforce because everyone

With Evolve , every match plays out like an epic boss battle with the difference being, of course, that the monster is being controlled by a human.

wants to do this anyway. We also have a pretty robust telemetry system that analyses the data that happened in each match and then we can use that data paired with the feedback from

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