“#4v1”
The very phrase Turtle Rock Studios actively uses to market Evolve’s revolutionary style of competitive multiplayer. Evolve pits a team of four players against one mighty creature. The on-foot humans that make up the four-man squad must squeeze every drop of teamwork they can muster to take down the lone abomination. It’s a new kind of multiplayer that 2K has strong eSports ambitions for and based on what I’ve seen at E3, I’m interested.
See, great eSports games have something for everyone; not only for the players but for the spectators as well. You have to be able to provide everyone from all walks of life (and gaming skill) something they can appreciate and because Evolve’s core mechanics are fairly diverse, I feel they have succeeded in this aspect.
Players looking to play as four to take down the monster have a slew of classes and customization options to choose from. The rules of the game dictate that every team has a medic, a trapper, a support, and an assault player (and perhaps some varying combination of unreleased classes). Each character is custom tailored to their own specialties–assault only does damage–and no single individual can carry a game on their back by themselves. The humans are powerful as one unit but don’t scale as well into the endgame as the monster.
On the other hand, the monster is a lone ranger–a single gigantic beast with powerful attacks and skills designed to be strong enough to take down four systematically weaker players of equivalent skill. Beasts scale well into the endgame by feeding off monsters and evolving. The longer the game goes on, the stronger they become. While turtling seems like an option, the humans have all the tools to hunt the monster down and can easily take advantage of your weak early game phase.
What makes or breaks an eSports title is your ability to provide not only a high enough skill cap to determine the ‘them’ (pros) from the ‘us’ but you must have a casual enough gameplay style that makes it easily accessible to all types of gamers. It only takes a ball and a basket to start practicing basketball, no?
I feel Evolve accomplishes this since every class type–hunter or monster–will be familiar to avid gamers and each of their abilities give them enough uniqueness to provide different players with some sort of enjoyment. Maybe you’re not the shooter-type, you can go trapper and use wits to subdue the monster or be the medic and evade the opposition with stealth and heal your allies.
If you’re accustomed to third person RPGs, you will likely take a liking to playing as the monster, which gets an over the shoulder third person view as well as a slew of AoE abilities. The longer the game progresses, the more powerful he becomes as he begins to feast on the bodies of native animals (creatures?). One vs four turns the game into a much more extreme version of Pac-man.
The ultimate question comes down to how well Turtle Studios has tuned their playable characters — down from the team of four’s weaponry and customization options to monster selection and its skill order. The hunters tend to be much stronger than the monster during the early phases of the game while the monster must buy time for the late game. All in all, the game is set-up so that the hunters must take advantage of all their available skills while the monster must make methodical plays to accomplish his goals. This issue I see with this is the high skill-cap side of the game seems to favor the monster, since a good monster must know how to properly move through the map and effectively push to the late game.
eSports, despite its growing popularity, still relies on passionate fans of whatever game to fuel its community. Fighting games may not have as big of a scene when compared to League of Legends but their deceptively large audience is still a force; a force that Evolve looks to create for itself. There’s money in eSports, which I am sure is what the publishers sniff, but you have to get there first. I’ll give props to Turtle for giving their game a good start though. Not everyone has a team, or wants to be on one for that matter, or not everyone wants to play by themselves. Evolve solves that problem. #4v1.
Evolve is looking to be the game that creates a new sort of eSports meta. Whether or not it will succeed depends on what players think of the game once it’s released. If gamers feel there’s a need to improve their skill beyond the average, then maybe Turtle can get something going.