Trivia / Evolve

• Accidental Downer Ending: Post-release updates for the game started fleshing out the setting beyond "mercenaries hunt giant alien monsters". The canonical last update had a Bolivian Army Ending, where Shear is overrun by the Monsters and the Hunters are stranded on the planet with no hope of rescue, and only a post-credits coded message vaguely teasing more developments. Further updates were meant to flesh out the story and setting beyond this point, but the developers' contract with their publisher ended, taking the game's IP with it (with the servers also permanently shutting down in 2022), and only last-second Word of God statements clarified some plot points and diverging future timelines.
• Stillborn Franchise: Prior to launch, Evolve was preemptively hyped up as one of the "Defining Games of The Eighth Generation of Console Video Games" and Publisher 2K-Games deemed it as one of their cornerstone franchises. Critical reception to the game ended up middling due to the game being a DLC vehicle, and commercial sales, while having a large opening, proved to be underwhelming over time. The player base for the game quickly dwindled and Turtle Rock's latter attempts to salvage it, by re-brandishing the game as a Free-to-Play on the PC, ultimately also fell short due to 2K pulling back support from it.
• Troubled Production: As with Stillborn Franchise, the problem was exacerbated with balancing 4 players versus 1 being extremely hard to do, especially with wildly varying playstyles, all done by developers who had no experience with player-versus-player, but plenty of artistic knowledge and co-op experience. When the game first dropped, the developers were, for whatever reason, barred from making hot patches or minor updates to the game, which helped drive away players who found the content underwhelming. The developers also seriously disagreed with one of the monster types being hidden as pre-order bonuses.
• What Could Have Been: A forum post by the developers reveals several items cut from the game for various reasons. Among those is the Host, a worm-like monster, numerous kinds of wildlife, unused hunter equipment, and volcanic maps. As of October 27th, 2016, this has happened again. The Evolve IP was withdrawn from its creators and now belongs to 2K. They announced that they consider the game complete and have no plans to continue development. Items in development or planning before this shutdown include adaptations for Wraith, Gorgon, Kala, Hyde, Bucket, an unknown trapper, and an unknown medic, reworks for all the Legacy Evolve maps, passive abilities for Kraken and Meteor Goliath, new perks, and entirely new hunters and monsters.
  • One of the initial concepts for a monster in the pitch was a burrowing creature resembling a giant velvet worm. However, in practice the programmers found the concept extremely difficult to implement because now every map needed to accommodate a huge character that could go underground. Goliath also originally had a burrowing attack that was scrapped.
  • One of the initial ideas also described the environment containing big herds of wildlife and occasionally having to avoid stampedes, which are absent in the final game because having so many interactive NPCs stomping about was way too hardware intensive.
  • Three different hostile alien wildlife ideas (the Chimera, the Titan, and the Leviathan) were scrapped late into development, all for basically the same reason: although they looked cool, they were annoying to fight when there was another monster you were supposed to be focusing on at the same time. The Titan and the Leviathan had the additional problems that they were so big they could only appear in large, flattened environments, and they insta-killed Hunters they grabbed, which play-testers understandably hated.
  • One unused monster that made it late into production and is still considered canonical was the Host, a Worm That Walks monster whose gameplay centred around sending out different types of swarming AI-controlled parasitic drones from your body. The idea ended up being dropped due to the difficulty in programming the parasitic drones and the fact that, gameplay-wise, this made the monster gameplay quite dull, since you were mostly letting the drones do the work.
  • One map that was dropped during play-testing was a Lethal Lava Land level, partly because the rivers of lava cutting through the arena were extremely annoying for Hunters. Giant walking aliens called Striders were supposed to act as moving platforms for players to jump on to cross the rivers, but programming them to be solid was difficult, and depicting the viscous flowing lava was also hardware intensive. Desert and snowy-themed maps (including a glacier cave level) were also scrapped for unknown reasons.
  • An early idea of Hunter heal replenishing was to have alien fruits scattered across the landscape, which in turn provided additional dangers as many varieties of man-eating plants would use these fruit as bait. Ultimately, the idea proved too complicated and wasn't that fun in practice, so only one carnivorous flora got added in the end.
  • A Hunter tool called the Sound Amplifier that would allow the player to hear the sounds of wildlife or the monster from far away in a certain direction was scrapped during play-testing because players were not able to differentiate the sounds of wildlife from the monster and it was completely useless to deaf players. The programmers attempted to fix this by adding subtitles to identify the sounds, but then it just killed the purpose (because now you were just pointing it around until the monster's name came up), and players still weren't sure how it worked.
  • The monsters were initially conceptualized to have "cocoons" that appeared as they evolved (with unique cocoons for each monster), but this was scrapped after the models were made, possibly because the transformations only took a few seconds and it was a ton of effort for something inconsequential.
  • Initially, the Hunters had limited ammo, and the developers experimented with multiple different ways to make that gameplay viable, such as a beacon that would call a dropship over for additional supplies, one player class that could drop ammo packs for their teammates, or an AI robot drone that would follow the players around. Eventually, they seemed the realize the attempted "realism" with limited animation wasn't fun gameplay-wise and dropped the concept.
  • Hank originally had a shield generator that would drop a small protective dome over one player. However, it was not very useful because the player inside the dome could not move, and Hank could not use any weapons while holding the dome generator.
  • Caira's Acceleration Field was originally meant to be a shot of adrenaline you could apply to yourself and teammates. It was changed to a passive field because stopping to inject your teammates, who would also have to stop and stand still for Caira to inject them, negated the point of going faster for a short period.
  • Goliath and Gorgon were originally called Scorpid and Whip-Spider in development respectively, and, as their names implied, were both much more insectoid in design, before becoming much more humanoid in the final game.
  • The Phantoms were supposed to be present in the PvP maps rather than just campaign mode, but the programers ran into several problems with them during play-testing. (A) They would repeatedly phase through the landscape because it was more difficult to give flying entities hitboxes that worked in tandem with the environment (B) It was nearly impossible for either monster or Hunters to kill them since they flew up so high (C) it was extremely annoying for enemies to just fly down and smack you at random in hit-and-run attacks while you were hunting a different monster.
  • One minor fauna was the Huskback, a turtle-like desert creature that would huddle up and become invulnerable when approached. Monsters could flip them over to expose their softer underbelly by using a special attack. However, the developers found play-testers were frustrated by the Huskbacks because they were unnecessarily complicated to interact with considering their lack of importance.
  • The developers experimented with having the monsters played from a first-person perspective.
  • The Lazarus Device was originally just a normal defibrillator.