Monsters and MOBAs
It seems more than a coincidence that Evolve's development came up alongside the rise of the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. Games like League of Legends and Dota 2 have become the latest popular genre, and games like Titanfall and Evolve that appear to borrow ideas are seen as a hybrid of concepts. Still, Ashton and Robb say it wasn't intentional, and those ideas grew out of other gameplay considerations.
"I think a lot of it came out of it naturally," Ashton said. "Like, Elite Wildlife that you can get buffs off of, we weren’t looking at MOBAs and thinking oh they have creatures you can kill and get buffed. The only thing we were addressing there was that the monster was interacting with wildlife just fine, but the Hunter players never had a reason to interact with wildlife. If you were a successful Hunter team that meant you never interacted with wildlife, you were avoiding everything. And so there was always pressure from the playtesters to sort of give us a reason to interact with the wildlife, give us a reason to kill a mammoth bird or a tyrant because we think it would be fun."
"And we saw people just doing it anyway," Robb said. "Walk through and slaughter everything."
"Yeah, because they had guns," Ashton said. "It’s a first-person shooter, they want to shoot. We talked about the predators and elites, to give people with itchy trigger fingers something to go shoot. That was less about balance of the game as it was just about fun for one hunter team. We didn’t even think about the relationship or similarities with MOBAs."
The MOBA genre did have one big impact on Evolve, though it was much more about business than the functional realities of game development. Changing the Hunter model meant adding a lot more characters, each with their own styles. That meant a significant art investment, so they had to go hat-in-hand to the publisher. MOBAs gave them something to point to.
"We had to convince the publisher, THQ at the time, they actually had to pay more money because it was going to be a lot more time and effort," Ashton said. "So we had to pitch the idea to THQ and get approval for it and so we could point to MOBAs to say look, we know this is going to work because it works in these other games. We could look to MOBAs and thought, well, that works really well for League. Just looking at the characters you know you can tell what they can and can’t do, their strengths and weaknesses. We could look at that as very successful, because it was a very big risk for us."
Hunting for Sport
MOBAs have also gained notoriety because of their place as an eSport, a business that has exploded into the public consciousness over the last few years. As opposed to traditional games, the ones that hit as eSports don't tend to taper off in popularity. If anything, they grow in popularity as they gain a bigger audience. Evolve has already gotten some attention from 2K, which is shout-casting matches and hosting tournaments. The studio is working on an Observer Mode to help make it more viable. However, Ashton and Robb say they want to let the game follow the community and not force the issue.
"The game is fun to watch, and we think that’s one of the things it does really well," Ashton said. "For the past four years, to be honest, the only thing we’ve been worried about is: is it a fun game? Does this make it more or less fun? Those were the questions we were answering, and that’s honestly all we’ve been concerned about. It’s only now that the game’s gold and 2K has been shout-casting matches and there’s been tournaments going on and stuff. It’s only now that we’re realizing what potential is there for the game. And maybe it’s because now we have the time to look and see. I think in the future we want to try to do more with it, but we weren’t setting out for that from the get-go."
"That said, it’s going to depend largely on what the community does with it, what they want," Robb added. "We’ve got some ideas we’re working on, to get things started and see where people take it. We see potential, we’re certainly up for supporting it if that’s where people want to take it."
