Hunting Big Game

Before Turtle Rock co-founders Chris Ashton and Phil Robb even met, they were planting the seeds of Evolve. In a way, this big-budget action shooter owes a large part of its identity to a critically snubbed series that just baffled them both.

"I don't know what the first conversation we ever had about [Evolve] was," Ashton told Shacknews. "It's sort of one of those things where even before we knew each other, we both independently--I don't know if you remember when the Big Game Hunter series was really big, but that happened during my first job in the industry. At the studio I was at everybody was looking at that and thinking 'Why is this so successful?'"

"It wasn't even Big Game Hunter," Robb chimed in. "It was just Deer Hunter." 

"Deer Hunter, yeah. Big Game Hunter starts to get a little more interesting. At least you had something that could fight back," Ashton said. "Deer Hunter was one of those ones where, like, I don't get it. I mean, I grew up in Western Pennsylvania. My family was all hunters, I've been deer hunting and the main thing I remember about deer hunting is sitting in six inches of snow freezing my ass off. I never imagined that being a compelling experience on a computer. But the more we talked about it, being developers we sort of start trying to problem-solve, and it's like 'What would make it fun?' That's where we start talking about if the deer could fight back, if it was something dangerous it would be more interesting. And the ideas just sort of start to snowball from there, all the way to where we get to the point where we like start referencing things like King Kong and Predator, and it's this group of guys fighting against this one, super-powerful beast, and what a cool experience that would be in a game."

Concept art for the hulking bipedal brute, Goliath

Those may have been the seeds of Evolve, but it took years to germinate. It was a concept they would bring up in passing, that they would talk about as friends while working on other projects.

"Phil and I, we go back past Valve, past Turtle Rock, Electronic Arts, Westwood studios," Ashton said, "When you have  a friend like that for such a long time, there's always game ideas that come up, where you think about things that you'd like to play. And that's really the genesis of a lot of our game ideas and things that we want to do. Our experiences that we want to have as gamers, that nobody is offering right now. And, if we ever have the opportunity to create those things ourselves, then we'll jump on it. Evolve was one of those ideas."

Waiting to Strike

Certainly Evolve has a lot in common with Left 4 Dead, and that influenced their work on the zombie shooter. But their asynchronous monster game idea was a little more hardware-intensive, and would need tools that weren't in place at the time. So it sat on the shelf.

"Even when we go back to the Left 4 Dead days, Evolve existed as an idea, but you know, we really couldn't build it with the tech. Not in the way that we envisioned Evolve being. So it's one of those things where you'll have all these cool game ideas, and you'll just sit on them until the moment is right, until the timing is right. After Left 4 Dead and Valve and sort of splitting back out, and being an independent studio again, and deciding that it was time for Turtle Rock to kind of do their own thing again. What do we want to do? Well it seems like the new generation of hardware is coming, it seems like maybe this is the time that we should look at one of our old ideas."

"We had a number of ideas, and Evolve seemed the most straightforward for us," Robb added.

Between its experience with Counter-Strike and Left 4 Dead, Evolve now seemed ambitious but attainable. Not to mention, their experience helped them understand how to work together as a team, and how to ship a game. Many parts of Left 4 Dead are very direct analogs to Evolve. The Hunters are a team of four because L4D taught them that was the sweet spot for cooperative play. The Monster fights resemble Tank battles because they thought they could stretch the thrill of that moment to a much longer game.

"If you look at [Tank battles] it's kind of a very simple mini-proving ground for this idea. It's like: 'holy cow, is that four-versus-one going to be fun?' Well, fighting the Tank was fun. It was a thrill. We can expand upon that experience, and it should be a lot of fun because essentially we've already got a working prototype just in the Tank battles."

An early look at an arid environment on the planet Shear, with an emphasis on verticality

That said, some parts of the L4D experience didn't translate well at all to their new concept. Chief among them was the A.I Director, the buzz-term given to the zombie game's advanced algorithm for pacing matches. It received high praise in its time for balancing the gameplay and keeping it challenging, so Ashton and Robb thought the same principles could apply to managing the wildlife in Evolve. Not quite.

"People didn't really want to be constantly attacked by the wildlife, because they were trying to find this monster, and their goal was to kill the monster," Ashton said. "In L4D the goal is to kill zombies, so if we keep sending zombies after people they enjoy it because they keep shooting the zombies and it's a good time. But in Evolve your goal is to kill the monster, so the wildlife is just a barrier, and an irritation if we send too much of it. So what we found worked better was having the wildlife in the environment in their own sort of habitats, and having players stumble through those habitats." 

Best of all, they were able to leverage their experience with Left 4 Dead in pitch meetings. Now that the studio was independent and needed a publisher, they could use their experience to gain an advantage. Even so, they couldn't have foreseen the challenges ahead.