STACK Feb Issue 124

28 / 90

028 FEBRUARY 2015 JB Hi-Fi
visit FEATURE GAMES
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
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
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
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.”
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.
continued