If you’re planning on grabbing Evolve when it launches tomorrow, you’ll pretty much be getting a multiplayer experience similar in concept to Left 4 Dead where you can take on one of three monsters as one of 12 hunters (or vice versa). But it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Single Versus Multiplayer
Evolve is mostly a multiplayer experience. AI enemies and companions exist, but only if there aren’t enough human players to fill their roles. But for those more solitary players, you can actually play those same multiplayer maps and modes in a single-player experience, with no one to call a friend IRL.
When you load up Evolve‘s menu screen, you’ll notice an option for ‘Multiplayer.’ You can play simple rounds of Skirmish, which are one-round Hunt-the-monster challenges on cycling maps. Or you can play Evacuation mode, which stands in as the campaign, taking you through 5 missions on different modes where the environment of each new map is affected by the wins and losses of each previous round. You can choose to play PvP — humans against a human-controlled monster — or co-op — humans against an AI-controlled monster.
But you can play most of these experiences in Solo play, too. There’s Quick Play, which is essentially Skirmish with either 3 AI hunters at your side against one AI monster or you against four AI hunters. And then there’s Evacuation, which lets you play through a combination of 5 missions, under different modes, but your opposing team or teammates, should you choose to be a hunter, are all AI players.
Launch Versus Pre-Purchase Versus DLC
As interested gamers have learned over the last the last month, though, DLC seems to be a big contributing factor to the entire scope of the game. What I’ve so far played through, and shared my experiences on, is the base $US60 game: four hunter classes, three options per class, and three monster options. The first tier of each class — including the monster — is unlocked and ready to play but, for myself and for all other players who have not ‘pre-purchased’ the game, I have had to unlock the other tiers of each class by playing through. I happen to have the ‘Digital Deluxe Edition,’ which means that, once spring hits, I’ll have access to a set of four new hunters and I currently, at launch, have access to three exclusive monster skins, all for free. Now, if I pre-purchased the Digital Deluxe Edition, which I did not, I’d also get a new monster type — the Behemoth — and another skin for the Goliath, also in the spring.
Confused yet? Well, I hope not, because there’s more to this.
Here are your options as a potential Evolve player. You can…
- Buy the $US60 game, on the day it launches, for access to 12 hunters and three monsters.
- Buy the $US80 Digital Deluxe Edition, on the day the game launches, for access to 12 hunters, three monsters, three exclusive monster skins, and four extra hunters in the spring. Total of 16 hunters, three monsters, three monster skins.
- Buy the $US60 game at launch for access to 12 hunters and three monsters and, later in the spring, buy the Hunting Season Pass in the spring for $US25 to get four new hunters and three exclusive monster skins for a total of $US85. Total of 16 hunters, three monsters, three monster skins.
- Buy the $US60 game at launch for access to 12 hunters and three monsters and, later in the spring, buy new hunters individually for $US7.50 each, up to $US30 total for a grand total of $US90. Total of 16 hunters, three monsters.
- Pre-purchase the $US60 game for access to 12 hunters and three monsters — all unlocked instantly instead of through play — and, later in the spring, the fourth Behemoth monster and a Goliath skin. Total of 12 hunters, four monsters and one extra skin.
- Pre-purchase the $US80 Digital Deluxe Edition for access to 12 hunters, three monsters, four exclusive monster skins, and four extra hunters and one extra monster in the spring. Total of 16 hunters, four monsters, four extra skins.
- Buy the $US100 PC Monster Race Edition for access to 18 hunters, four monsters, four monster skins. The extra PC content will be available to console players for purchase after 30 days.
- Pre-purchase the $US100 PC Monster Race Edition for access to 18 hunters, five monsters, four monster skins. The extra PC content will be available to console players for purchase after 30 days.
Phew! That’s a lot of buying options to wrap your head around. So far I’ve been playing with the standard, base game of 12 hunters and three monsters and feel like there’s been enough to play while still retaining some variety in the match-ups and giving me room to try different approaches to each round. But this should give you a good idea of what you’re buying, and what you’ll have access to, based on when and how much you pay.
Comments
40 responses to “What Buying Evolve Gets You”
Or just don’t
That’s my thinking. It’s like they’ve gone out of their way to make it as confusing as possible for anybody who might dare to consider purchasing their product.
How about putting out a single box with a single complete game inside it and a single price tag on the outside? Anybody ever considered that? Holy shit I think I just revolutionized video game marketing.
Burn the heretic!
Well except there is a single box with everything in it, it’s just more expensive. It’s not confusing, if you want certain skins or extra stuff, buy them. This is how all content works. Get over it. I can’t believe people still complain about this crap. What’s the last piece of launch dlc that was so necessary it was worth complaining about if you didn’t get it.
Here’s how it works. If you want the game, buy the 60 dollar version. If you want the game and other junk, buy that version. If you think it’s too expensive, then don’t get it. Welcome to purchasing products in life.
You should not be expected to pay for a product before it’s been released just to get parts of said product (i.e. pre-order DLC).
Don’t give me that “Welcome to purchasing products in life.” shit, name one single other industry in the world that expects you to pay for a product that doesn’t technically exist yet (in it’s released/final launch form) just to get everything that is advertised as available?
An industry that expects you to pay for something that hasn’t been finished? The Defence industry. And we get massively screwed over by them too.
The difference with those sort of things is the same difference with Kickstarter though, they are investments rather than pre-purchases.
In those cases you are investing money early so that a company will be able to produce a product, as opposed to pre-order DLC where the content will be made regardless (some is already made) but if you don’t pre-purchase, you’ll miss out or be charged more for it.
The automotive industry. you order your car they build it and send it out to you later, same with custom PC’s.
I agree with the mentality of as long as you have everything you need to play the game then fine but in some cases you can get an unfair advantage from spending large amounts of cash to get more powerful weapson skills etc
“name one single other industry in the world that expects you to pay for a product that doesn’t technically exist yet (in it’s released/final launch form) just to get everything that is advertised as available?”
It’s extremely rare but there was one case I can think of. Music.
One of my favourite bands The New Pornographers released a box set of CDs for their album “Challengers” where one CD was titled “Live from the Future”. It was a blank CD with similar CD artwork on it to the others in the box set. In the months after the release of the box set, the web site that sold the CD automatically emailed download codes to get the MP3s/FLAC files to burn onto the blank CD.
Anyway, it’s a rare case.
With the exception of the above case, I agree with your point that people shouldn’t be expected to pay for a product before it’s been released.
Sorry prohass, that attitude’s just harmful to the consumer and the industry.
I have been playing Final Fantasy VIII recently and have been reminded of how things used to be. In that game, you have 4 discs worth of content (over 100 hours of story / gameplay), you have an entirely separate game in Triple Triad, a deep and complex card game with its own evolving rules and economies that occur in conjunction with your exploration and trading. That alone would be an entire game now, as well as giving you “booster packs” for a nominal real world fee. There are dozens of side quests, secrets, weapons, monsters, etc, all on disc.
I’ve played almost 40 hours on this playthrough and fought nothing but bosses, no random encounters at all. I have ignored a major filler section of the game and still racked up that many hours, only at the start of disc 2. And don’t even get me started on how many hours I racked up on Blitzball on FFX.
Granted that was a long time ago, but it seems only this generation this attitude of needing to pay more, and in advance, to receive content that could and should have been on disc has really come to a head.
The industry is run by executives from other industries now, not the people who understand and respect the medium. These people aren’t interested in long term results, they want to come in, make their money, and leave the cash cow milked so dry the franchise has to be retired from greed attrition (see Guitar Hero).
It’s not that people don’t want to pay money for content, it’s that their money earns them less and less respect as consumers each year.
I gotta agree with you regardless of how many downvotes you get.
Separating the game and sell DLC individually, complaints incomplete product.
Bundling all DLC into one package on launch, complaints expensive complete product.
People are funny sometimes.
Except pre-launch =/= on launch. Even if you spend over $170AU right now on the ultimate super extreme mega edition (PC only) then you will still be missing out on 1 monster, simply for waiting until the game was actually released before dropping your cash.
If they want to bundle all the DLC up that’s fine, actually bundle all the DLC.
Then we’d just be talking about whether it’s all actually worth $173 – I personally think it’s insane, even in this age of DLC, a standard AAA game costs around $80, with season passes going for around $30-40 at most.
Yes you are right, we all can be very sure the preorder bonus will end up being a DLC in the future, probably just launch window exclusive for a while, like most preorder bonuses from greedy companies.
Even with recent AAA games with $80 + Season Pass, they actually do not include all DLC. Lately all the games can easily hit $200 if bought game + season pass + the rest of the DLC.
Even worst with what Turtle Rock do now is, you purchase everything before launch/at launch without getting any content. We will call it full access pass just to make it simple.
Instead of just Season Pass, they are literally selling the Full Access Pass (still missing future paid content not included in season pass). It is a big crime, crime of microtransaction going overboard.
That is precisely the reason why I’m not buying evolve until Steam sale for at least 60%. I never buy season pass from launch, usually after it is discounted.
Nooooo…That’d be intelligent. Don’t so crazy youuuuuuuuu
I’m assuming buying additional hunters/monsters is going to upset people who rightly fear a pay-created skill gap.
Don’t be ridiculous. That way you’d only get money from a customer once. We must bleed them. Bleeeeeed them.
Not this time 2K, not this time.
I sense another Titanfall. Fun for a few weeks but will quickly lose the player base making late comers feel very unwelcome.
This is everything wrong with the games industry.
Ignoring the fact I think this shouldn’t be a full price game seeing as multiplayer only games don’t last too long, why so many options? What happened to going into a shop and buying a finished game? I miss those days 🙁
This is almost, but not quite, as bad as multiple collectors editions except there’s not one CE that has everything in it so if you’re a proper collector you’re forced into buying multiple versions of the same game
That is literally why they are giving so many options, locking off so many characters and features behind these expensive editions.
As a multiplayer game, the life of the game is governed by the player base, as that drops off before release the new content, there’s going to be less chance of people paying for that DLC. By locking them in at day one, by tricking them in a fugue of hype and promises, they get their money now, and who cares if the player ever actually comes back to collect the content.
It’s short-term gains, which apparently is the only thing that matters to the Wall Street and Hollywood executives that have infested the positions of power in this industry.
Yay capitalism!
( v__v )
Yeah… I played Evolve at PAX, thought it was a fun game even though myself and the other three hunters I had never met were destroyed but all this DLC/pre-purchase crap ruined any interest I had in the game pretty quick.
I’m the kind of person who would go insane knowing I’d bought the game and missed out on a bunch of monsters and/or hunters that I could be using (especially in a ‘buy/pay-to-play’ Multiplayer game) but at the same time I’m hardly going to drop $100 before the game has even launched…. Would rather just not play it at all.
and that currency is for US prices, imagine the Australian price.
Ah you’re right. Just checked Steam then, the Monster Edition is $135US – so around $173 AU. And as it’s technically released now (I assume this article was actually from a few days ago on Kotaku US), you can’t get the pre-order monster anymore either.
The beta did not strike me as a full retail experience (much Like L4D1&2 which I purchased for dollars) let alone full price plus season pass nonsense. This will be a cheap steam xmas 2015, June 2016 sale purchase at this stage if at all.
I remember when games used to reward you with replayability by making the game challenging to unlock characters, skins and such.
now its considered extra content and you have to pay for it.
As silly as this DLC pre order thing is, you have made this article the equivalent of an infomercial by unnecessarily making the options appear more difficult than they are. You have done this by simply removing the platforms from the options. If this article included the platform details, and segmented it as such, it would look far simpler.
Next thing you will be claiming that using a quiver makes it hard to run through a forest with your arrows.
I’m going to purposefully misread platform.
If the author accounted for platform details, we’d have almost triplicate configurations with a change to the sentence of “for PS4”; “for Xbone”; “for PC”.
That doesn’t sound simpler.
Even if the author detailed retailer details, the list would still have a stupidly anti-consumer bent to it.
I’m getting sick of having to ‘weigh up my options’ when a new game that I may be interested in playing drops. It would be nice to say: “That looks pretty cool, it’s reasonably priced, I’m gonna fucking buy it”. Lately most DLC is junk as far as I can tell anyway. Just make solid games that are tested and finished and we’ll buy them.
I think its fair to say we’re just a bit over games being made then pulled to bits as a way to distribute DLC – DLC just started as free patches that were owed to the people as a way to fix their game after release (or content that just wasn’t ready but they were hit with a deadline) – now its turned into selling some of the most shallow gaming experiences to date and resolving it with their number 1 revenue maker and its disgusting.
I’m all for choice but its not the right way to go about it – put the content in the game where it’s supposed to be and let the player unlock it with in game currency and they might respect your game enough to recommend it to others..
Yeah… there seems to be a sense of “they’ve been doing this for ages, we should all be used to it by now”. And in a way that’s true, yeah, I am used to it. But that’s not the same thing as approving of it or wanting to participate in it.
It doesn’t matter how much they shit in my mouth, there’s no point at which it’s going to suddenly start tasting like ice cream if they just keep doing it for long enough.
I still think it’s too expensive lol
Well, back in previous generations, by the time I actually got the console, there would be a huge selection of games that had been released many months ago and had received a subsequent huge price cut.
If I try that with a multiplayer only game, there won’t be many people still around playing it.
Tightarses are doomed. 🙁
So much whining about a bunch of character skins, who gives a shit. If the game is fun that’s all that matters to me.
You obviously didn’t read it all very well. There are also 2 monsters and 6 hunters tied up in DLC – the different hunters and monsters have different abilities/gear to each other so it does kind of matter, especially for a multiplayer game.
Not buying until at least 60% discount. If they have good sales, other companies will follow and we will have to pay double to triple of RRP to get a complete game.
I guess I’m going against the grain here. After playing the Alpha and Beta on x1, I enjoyed myself enough to buy in. I’m playing Titanfall again after dropping it for at least 8 months and having a blast.
I almost freaking pre-ordered the damn thing too, but held my resolve and waited for release, which might have fracked me. Oh well. Still buying (X1) and will possibly pick up the season pass and just buy the extra monsters/classes when they becomes available to buy.
I didnt play the alpha or beta, but I loved Left 4 Dead. Going to pick up the standard edition tomorrow.
try to play it first… it’s a great game but there just isn’t that much content.
If you want good games it costs a lot of money. End of story , pay for it if you want it.