speaking of free to play have any of you played evolve recently? thing is it went free to play like a week or so ago as a well as a bunch of other changes.
also if you'd like some more detail https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6wtVQEMH9s
Evolve really deserves its own thread. It's such an amazing game and I liked it from the very start.
However, I love asymmetrical games in general just because of how unique and awesome they are in today's gaming world. Unfortunately, the nature of asymmetrical design is that the games rarely do well.
Another great one I can think of is Natural Selection 2, which by all means should be a fairly popular game. It is an amazing title with close battles, commanders, soldiers, hand-crafted maps, and all sorts of other incredible features and goodies a player could hope for. But I think the asymmetrical thing just kills it for people.
Even Skyward Collapse, the only other asymmetrical game I can think of (there aren't many) did pretty badly from everything I've heard.
So there was that, and there was also the fact that Evolve had so much freaking DLC it was ridiculous. Here's an actual quote from the developer:
"When Evolve launched, the reception wasn’t what we expected. Sure, there were some good reviews. There were also bad reviews. Yes, there was excitement. There was also disappointment – for players and for us. The DLC shitstorm hit full force and washed away people’s enthusiasm, dragging us further and further from that first magical pick-up-and-play experience.
"We want that magic back and we aim to make it happen. We’ve made a lot of changes, improvements and additions to Evolve over the past year and we’ve got a lot more coming. In short, we’re giving this game a vigorous overhaul!"
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Anyway, I hope these new changes, and the addition of F2P makes the game popular enough again. The problem before was that you had to wait for what seemed like hours just to find a game and it wasn't worth it.
It *does* kind of suck that all the people who bought the game are kind of getting shortchanged, but that's the nature of these kinds of model-changes. I like Evolve so much I'm just happy that it has a chance to survive.
Evolve honestly is an interesting beast, I personally love the idea of a game like that.... it made me think of Monster Hunter, except that someone gets to also be the monster. If something gets me thinking of the MH games at all, that's usually a good thing.
I do have Evolve, but I have played it very little. It's unfortunately one of those games that ends up requiring a lot of communication to do at all well in, and as an autistic individual, all I get out of THAT idea is a big pile of anxiety, so that kinda held me off. So I'm not sure. I find it hard to dive into things like this, even when I want to. But everything they're doing with it now does indeed look pretty good, and the original idea looked good.
I have seen a lot of the game though at least; I think one thing that might have put people off (at least in previous versions) was that there seemed to be a bit too much of the chasing and running. Not that a game like this should be ALL combat (MH wouldn't have worked that way either, for that matter). But if the monster player was really good at the hiding, well... not that exciting to watch OR play. Though I wonder how in the world they'd change that up to make that aspect better. That was the glaring thing that stood out at me though.
Overall I also do really like the idea of an asymmetrical game like this. This sort of idea needs to be done more often.
There is one other right now, that I think is worth checking out, which is Dead by Daylight. I've seen that in a few videos recently.... it really looks like a huge ton of fun, though it's very, very different from this in a lot of ways. Instead of giant monster VS hunters, this one is Jason-ish murderer VS survivors. The survivors need to work to outwit the murderer and power up generators scattered around the map (allowing them to open the gate to escape), while the murderer needs to find them, knock them down, and then stick them on these hook things to be.... sucked up by some sort of space spider or... whatever the hell that thing is. The different murderers have different powers/abilities but none are easy to use. Survivors mostly seem the same and are more based on what perks they have equipped, but the one thing the game makes sure of is that no matter what, the survivors cant overpower the evil dude. No fighting in this, just running. Which on paper doesn't sound all that interesting, but when I saw it for myself, honestly this looks fantastic. I don't normally like games with any amount of stealth in them, but then, games with stealth usually aren't anything like this.
Whole game has a lot more to it than it might sound like, there's no good way for me to easily sum it up, but I think it's worth a look. Supposedly there's a couple of issues right now on the competitive side of things (there's an exploit that can be done right now by the survivors that's next to cheating, and you know how people are about exploits, sigh....) but yeah, worth a look. And the concept makes sense to people, which I think is super important in this sort of thing. With Evolve, I think some people look at it and go "Well it's like an FPS and I have a gun so why cant I just kick butt on my own without my teammates?" and then get all baffled when it takes teamwork to defeat ONE enemy player. Despite games like Monster Hunter using the same formula. Dead by Daylight seems to make a bit more sense though, because you don't EXPECT to be able to beat the crap out of Jason Voorhees or someone like him. The horror game genre (not "survival horror", which is very different) teaches you that "survivor" type characters tend to run from things a lot, so that's what they do. Keeping those ideas making sense so that people understand WHY the asymmetry is there and why it works, I suspect, is REALLY hard with this type of game design.
I wish people would do more like this though. Not just multiplayer, but games with singleplayer aspects too. Skyward is indeed a good one and as usual didn't get the attention it deserved.
