Evolve: Free to Play

Evolve was one of the most popular games before it was ever released. It was the recipient of over 65 nominations and awards at several different trade shows and was even the first game in development to win 'Game of Show' at both E3 and Gamescom. So what went wrong?

The game launched to a less than impressed audience. It was an online only game that was plagued with issues from the get go. The biggest and by far most infuriating issue was the matter of DLC. There was so much extra content provided that it became almost useless to own the base game. Evolve seemed to fall victim to the "Pay to Win" theme which left a lot of people either too fearful to buy the game, or so angry that they did buy it, which resulted in the player base begining mass exodus and sales plummeted.

From my experiences, Evolve is a good game and it's pretty impressive how they managed to make such a well working asymmetric adversarial multiplayer game. It's disappointing that it was met with the aforementioned issues. Now this is where this news comes into it. The dev's, Turtle Rock Studios aren't ready to give up on their game just yet. So to try and inject some new life into it, they're going to make the following changes to the current formula:

"Just to give you some examples:

• We’re reworking the hunter classes to make the team less reliant on having experienced trappers and medics.
• We’re making improvements to the maps and UI.
• We’re improving load times, overall performance, and getting you into the game faster.
• We’re focusing on improving stability and fixing bugs.
• We’re completely reworking our progression system and tutorials.
• We’re adding more customization options.
• Most importantly, we just want to put the game in your hands. Try Evolve out. See what you think. We hope you like it and we're not going to charge you to give it a try.

“Wait! What?! What does that mean?”

It means we’ve been listening and now we’re taking Evolve in the direction that a lot of you have suggested since the beginning. We’re making Evolve free on PC. No buy-in or box required"


Evolve will become free to play on the 7th of July for PC and with this, there will likely be an influx of new players willing to give it a go now that it's free and relatively risk free. The dev's have stated the obvious that there will be a good chance that the servers will struggle for a little while and things might go wrong. This is to be expected with big traffic.

If you're already an owner of the game and some of it's DLC, then you will be given "Founder" status and all of your purchased DLC will come along with you. As time goes on, those who have paid their way will continue to be thanked with special gifts from the developers.

Source: TRS Forums
Play Now: Steam Link

Lucas Aurelius
Aussie Gamers Express