Hobby-Monster Cortyn shares insights and explains why the death of the asymmetric shooter Evolve (2015) has left a mark even after years.

Anyone who has been following MeinMMO for several years knows that we have accompanied a variety of games. These are not always just the currently trending games, but also those that the authors had a particularly high interest in. For this reason, out of personal interest, I reported on Evolve for a while in 2015.

And Evolve was, in my view, nothing less than the perfect game.

For those who have no idea: Evolve was a pioneer in the field of modern asymmetric games. Four hunters had to work together against a monster, all five characters were controlled by players. At the beginning of a match, the monster was weak, had to hide and feed to mutate into new “stages.” Later, the balance of the round shifted, and the hunters were on the defensive if they didn’t take out the monster early.

I was not just good – I was damn good

I was not good at Evolve. I was damn good. So good that at one point I was ranked number 2 in Europe as Goliath the monster, only because the player in first place always quickly faked a disconnect when facing a looming defeat, and Evolve did not count that as a loss (So much for “The game was perfect” – You can probably tell, I tend toward nostalgic glorification).

I knew every rock, every bush, and every wild animal on the map.

I knew exactly which route I needed to take to get the strongest buffs and initiate the next stage’s evolution right at the hunger point. I was so efficient that on half the maps, I could initiate the mutation before the hunters had even landed.

I knew where the perfect spot for an ambush was, where I could hide in a bush so that the hunters would simply run past me. I knew exactly which slope was just a jump for me, but the hunters would nearly exhaust their entire jetpack.

When the monster breathed, I breathed too

I knew every trick. I knew which attack animation I had to time just right when a hunter went down, so that my Goliath would briefly lift him and then carry him a few meters. That could be enough to let him fall off a cliff. And I knew every single one of those places where that was possible.

I breathed the game.

No, not just in a metaphorical sense.

When my monster inhaled to “scan” the world around for hunters and other prey, I also took a deep, tense breath in front of the PC.

After 2 weeks and much closer to the “200-hour playtime limit” than I care to admit, there was simply no one who could beat me. At least not unless I imposed a handicap on myself. More and more often, I played matches only with restrictions like “I may not use creature buffs,” “I must win by stage 2,” or “I can only upgrade 2 of 4 abilities.”

I was confident, but also had an extremely high gaming level. And you know: Level only looks like arrogance from the bottom.

All jokes aside. I was really good and truly proud of it. I had an immense amount of fun.

My whole life revolved around Evolve

Was that a bit unhealthy? Well, probably. I structured almost my entire day around maximizing my playtime in Evolve simply because I had so much fun like never before in a PC game. I planned my article writing for work so that I could quickly cook something while a colleague reviewed my article. I completely wrote off any other gaming ‘obligation,’ such as my WoW raid, during that time. And I didn’t see sunlight in those two weeks either.

Still, I enjoyed every minute of it. I have never “felt” a game as thoroughly before or after as I did with Evolve. Whether it was an exciting horror game, an engaging JRPG, or more cinematic games like Heavy Rain or Detroit: Become Human. Not even my beloved RPG in World of Warcraft came close to this immersive experience of Evolve.

Terrible communication first ruined Evolve’s image – then the whole game

Unfortunately, the dream of my beautiful Evolve began to fall apart much faster than I would have liked. Even though I, even now in retrospect, found the DLC policy quite acceptable, the publisher executed it terribly poorly. Evolve felt like a “rip-off” due to poor communication, where every content had to be purchased additionally, and one would have to invest hundreds of additional euros into the game. That was not the case and it had nothing to do with Pay2Win. But Evolve never recovered from that reputation.

The player numbers crashed, but for other reasons as well.

While it was possible to play very well alone as a monster, it was not the case as a hunter. The group of 4 players had to coordinate extremely well.

A single troll in the team could completely ruin the game for everyone involved. Whether from the monster’s perspective or the other hunters’: If a hunter went on an “ego tour,” the fun was gone.

If you wanted to have fun as a hunter in Evolve, you needed a group of friends who all had similar skill levels. If that was achieved, there were the best and most exciting rounds, exactly what Evolve aimed to be in its most glorious moments. Whether as a monster or hunter – when the hunters’ group comprised a team that communicated, then Evolve was unparalleled.

It was all the worse when that was not the case. Evolve was simply not a game that you could just play a few rounds with “randoms” – at least not as a hunter.

To save it, the developers made Evolve a shadow of its former self

To counter this trend, the developers drastically restructured the game. In Evolve 2.0, many mechanics changed. The game became not only free-to-play, but also many of the core mechanics changed or disappeared. Feeding on creatures suddenly provided no or significantly weaker buffs, hunters became faster, monsters lost some cool abilities, there were significantly fewer “mind games” and everything was geared towards finding the monster much faster and engaging in longer fights.

Complexity and strategy were sacrificed to create more fast, simple action. That was fun for a while, but for me, it was only a shadow of what Evolve once wanted to be.

And then it died an ignoble death. The servers became emptier, players from both sides increasingly left the still ongoing matches, and no one played the glorious campaign mode anymore.

I miss that thrill that Evolve gave me. I even miss having a game that completely captivated me to the extent that I structured much of my life around it for a while.

It affected me more than I care to admit. Evolve was for me the personal peak of gaming. I automatically measure every other game against Evolve in my mind and almost always conclude: It is just not as good. Whether I draw on some of my current favorite games with at least a similar theme, like Dead by Daylight, or play JRPGs like Persona 5 or Tales of Arise – I always think inevitably: “As good as it is, it doesn’t draw me in the way Evolve did.”

I’m always afraid that a game could die soon

This “Evolve trauma” leads me to simultaneously lack the willingness to immerse myself unconditionally in a game. I always have the nagging thought in the back of my head that the game could be dead in a few weeks. Even though, rationally speaking, I know that I could still have a lot of fun beforehand, it’s a barrier that I find hard to overcome mentally.

I hope to experience this “Evolve phase” again someday, where a game completely blows me away to the point that I don’t want to do anything else. At least for a while. Until then, Evolve remains a painful memory that I hope will one day be overshadowed by something new and better.

Did you ever have such a connection to a game? Or can you not relate to that?

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