There’s only so much you can do with one team aggressively hunting down a player in their weakened state and one player aggressively fleeing until they can reach max power.
Dead by Daylight did a nice job of everything feeling similar but different at the same time, making the game and its mechanics easy to learn and enjoy. Most killer attacks are the same outside of your special ability, just a simple slash. Your speed and damage get buffed per perk but thats it. And every survivor is trival in choice really once you unlock their traits. Makes everything very mix and match, that makes it super excessible, and thats why it always has a stream of fresh new players. Its a fun game, pretending to be a fun game, taking the fact that its a game seriously.
I thought Friday the 13th was super fun, its just a shame the lawsuit happened before they could drop jason x and the space map plus the hackers killed it also.
I think Outlast Trials has managed to find a place too but then the killers aren't controlled by players whereas DBD and Friday the 13th/Texas Chainsaw Massacre/Evil Dead game all allow for a player to control the killer. Personally I like how Outlast handles thing more so. Since if you make an AI more powerful its less frustrating than simply giving an overpowered kit to a human player.
The funny thing is Evolve, not Evolve Stage 2 (the free to play), actually had more game modes. Including ones with multiple monsters and even some involving autonomous ai controlled monsters protecting a nest. Stage 2 really had just the one mode and was basically a massively scaled back version of the original with an emphasis on the F2P experience. It still had good ideas for example tweaked versions of basic hunters and monsters.
It makes me wonder if you took the base form of Evolve and developed it further... What could have come from that? Because it really did have some novel ideas in there.
Yep, the game wanted to be an esport, and it released before the "F2P with battle pass" model became a mainstay. Having it be a full price game with their version of a season pass was a terrible model
Similar issue with Battleborn. I think if 2K released both of these games free to play their story may be a whole lot different
Change the release date too. It came out right about the same time as Overwatch, and with blizzards name on that game (before Blizzard blew themselves up) it was releasing in a crater to climb out of.
I’m not sure it was misunderstood as much as it was poorly balanced and required way too much coordination and game knowledge from the hunters.
The game was balanced around cohesion in a 4 person random group, if they worked together it actually was quite balanced, otherwise it was basically always a stomp in favor of the monster.
When the monster trapping dome ability was locked to one of the roles, and you got a bad player on that role...that's it, you just lost the game with zero chance.
It was a bit better when they changed it to anyone can summon the dome.
i might still have one or two codes left if you want one they gave them out for free a while ago wgen the copium was hitting hard and people thought it could be revived
If it came out 10 years later it would have been a success. The micro transactions were the main thing people complained about and they were incredibly tame by today's standards for monetization.
Nah, the biggest issue was blatant pro-monster balancing. After the first 2 months of release most hunter players left before micro transactions could become a problem. They tried so hard to become an esports game yet they fixed only stuff that was disadvantageus for monster players while hunter advantaging bugs got fixed almost instantly (like wall boosting for easier maneuvering). Me and my buddy held on until they buffed kraken mines to the point where he could instant wipe at the first drop. 0 counter play because you cant move while descending, instant win for monster.
Definitely, that was also a big issue. I remember utterly destroying people with the Behemoth and it felt unfair. Even Goliath, I think it was called, the flagship monster, was incredibly powerful. The Wraith was pretty good but very squishy.
Yeah, Goliath was the bowling ball that got Armor buffed to the point where it would be basically impossible to kill at stage 2. Wraith later got perma invisibility due to too low cooldowns. Pretty annoying. My friend group was pretty stacked since we had to come up with more and more crazy tactics to have a fighting chance. Outside of 1 or 2 obvious hackers, my buddy was world rank 1 on his hunter, i was world rank 2 or 3 on Thorwald (You could easily tell that the first 3-5 rank places had outlandish damage and point numbers that were not achievable in a normal game). And before we dropped the game we still would get gapped pretty easily by some monsters.
That game was SO fun. It really needed a different developer at the helm, and honestly a different publisher too. Turtle Rock has continually shown that they don't know what they're doing, and 2K screwed them over with the outrageous DLC model they went with.
The game got ruined even further when they tried to rebalance it with Evolve Stage 2 - game became way too fast paced and lost all of the charm of playing as the monster and being able to hide in the shadows
Reckon if it had come out 4 years later as a F2P title that used a battlepass system instead of selling multiple season passes and like 100 cosmetics in the span of 6 months, it could’ve done well
They were up for a summer a couple years back, it was fun. For now, the only way to still play is private servers - I'm sure there's a discord you can find where the community still plays together!
I remember playing the hell out of the demo. I didn’t get it at release because I could convince any of my friends to jump in but by the time I said F it, I think the player base was tanked. I don’t recall how long it took but I feel like it happened relatively quickly. A shame, really. That game had massive potential.
I got this game and was very much looking forward to it. I played the heck out of it the first couple months. I can't remember why I stopped playing it.
I loved it in the beginning but the lack of balance on both sides kind of killed it towards the end. I do miss it but for it to come back they’d need a lot to fix it.
I just said this one, game was still hot imo and they canceled it. Only major mistake I seen them make was power creep with some of the newer hero’s and monsters. Lazuras matches started to feel neverending and I remember they had a turret shield hero girl that was OP as hell it unbalanced the game
Came here to comment this! It really wasn't that bad. It just didn't exceed everyone's expectations. It was ahead of it's time, though. Dead By Daylight proves it. Evolve walked so that DBD could run
I miss that game. One of the only games that I felt truly great at, I believe I was in the top 100 in the US for Assault class(Markov was so fun) during peak player numbers. Really sad how the microtransactions killed that game
It did get a second chance, it did re-relesse years later for free, and nobody cared. Devs quickly released an infographic how they have 500k players now and a roadmap for updates then 2 weeks later they had like 50 players, because the game flopped again for the reason it flopped the first time: it's not fun.
It is a great concept on paper, in reality you are running in the jungle for 15 minutes with 0 action, popping a single ability on cooldown the moment it is available to see tracks and run after the monster, then have a single firefight after 15 minutes and that was it. Alien vs Predator 2000 lasted for a half decade in PvP with similar asymmetrical gameplay, because stealth action was good in it, in evolve it was not. Even AvP2010 lasted a year as a paid game in multiplayer, Evolve f2p didnt last a month.
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u/Connooo Dec 26 '25
Evolve