Turtle Rock has a great pedigree when it comes to co-op games. This is the studio that gave us Left 4 Dead, and now its set its sights on something even bigger. Evolve is the developer's sci-fi hunting game, in which four players work together to trap and kill a fifth player, who is controlling a giant monster.
We only learned about the game last year, but the Turtle Rock team has been playing Evolve for over three years, and has been planning it for even longer than that. In a new interview with Shack News, creative director Phil Robb even explains that the concept predates Left 4 Dead. What's taken them so long is working out how to handle that switch between playing as a human and playing as a gigantic beast.
"Initially the monsters were all first-person, but we were running into a lot of weird problems with that," Robb explained. "One, when you're in a first-person perspective of a 30-foot monster, the world moves very slowly because you're high up. It's like you're in a plane, you're moving 600 miles per hour but everything looks like it's moving in molasses. It sucked.
"Not only that, but we've got Hunters who can put a harpoon in your back and stuff like that. In first person, it became very difficult for the monster to orient himself and so players would feel like: why can't I move? It's because he's got a harpoon in his back and he doesn't know it. So we were struggling with that problem, and a couple of guys on the team took it on themselves to do an experiment and try it in third-person. Almost immediately we were like wow, this works a lot better."
But while the monster player gets a third-person view of the world, humans on the ground get a traditional FPS view because a limited view makes it scarier. "That's what we want for the Hunters," Robb says. "We want them to rely on each other."
Evolve launches for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on October 21st.