Many have forgotten about the kerfuffle Evolve caused when it simply wasn’t up to par with its hype. Abruptly, the massive playerbase of the Evolve at launch went down to an almost staggering insignificance, slowing down matchmaking by a ton for the very few players that decided to stick it out. Just recently, Evolve disappeared from the Steam store and was inaccessible with any Steam account that already had it, only to come back up the next day as in free-to-play format called Evolve: Stage 2. Sounds familiar to most MMO stories of F2P redemption.
There are several new modes, characters, maps, and a whole slew of other unlockables in Stage 2 and will continue the F2P trend in the months to come. Surprisingly, however, Evolve has gone back to its beta phase after it’s already been live for quite some time now. It seems that Turtle Rock is pulling a Realm Reborn with the IP albeit in a more open fashion.
The developers claim that it’s gone back to beta due to their goal of tweaking the user interface, removing certain bugs, and even overhauling some elements of the game drastically.
“When Evolve launched, the reception wasn’t what we expected,” as it is written on the developer’s website, “Sure, there were some good reviews. There were also bad reviews. Yes, there was excitement. There was also disappointment — for players and for us.”
This statement was due to the issue that Evolve put out some very expensive DLC for Steam account users despite the earlier claims of delivering new content for free.
While it was said that founders or loyal players who have paid and played the original Evolve launch would be getting rewards and their content progress to carry over. Unfortunately, some people have experienced that all their work in the previous build of the game were all but erased, leaving them dissatisfied with the transition to F2P. Those may just be anomalous errors on the developer’s part, but if this is true for all other Steam accounts, then the backlash will be monumental.
This is, however, all for the PC version, aka. on Steam. Consoles will be untouched until Turtle Rock finishes their work past the beta phase of stage 2. Until then, console players that are interested in playing the game will still have to buy the launch retail of Evolve for the time being. This certainly might take a while.