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Turtle Rock discusses Evolve and the need for DLC

• Egon Kilin
• January 16th, 2015

Turtle Rock Studios’ Evolve is shaping up to be one of the best new IPs of 2015 and that’s exactly why it’s so sad to see it afflicted by the DLC curse that already killed a lot of potentially great games. Following a couple of recent announcements, gamers who were eagerly anticipating the upcoming title are quickly starting to realize that simply purchasing the game will not grant them access to all the content as some of it sold will be separately as DLC. In fact, some of the content will only be available for those who pre-order the game, which is essentially a kick in the face to anyone who buys Evolve post-launch. Granted, this is a common practice among big publishers like EA or Ubisoft, but people expected better from Turtle Rock.

The developer recently took to the forums to explain why some of these decisions needed to be made and to assure fans that contrary to popular belief, no content has been cut on purpose with the intention of being sold separately. Turtle Rock says that, actually, none of the DLC will be finished by the time Evolve hits the shelves, which is why they are launching it at a later time. The developer also made it clear that this is not a pay-to-win type of deal as all the extra monsters and hunters will be nicely balanced so as to not give any advantage to those decide to buy them. In addition, all the upcoming maps and game modes for Evolve will come as free DLC, so players will basically only have to pay extra if they want to play as different characters. Personally, I don’t agree with some of this, but at the same time, there’s not much Turtle Rock can do about it. As the developer itself puts it on the forums:

“Ultimately, TRS makes the games, we don’t sell them…and as the developers we’ve done our best to make a game that people want to play. We then have to trust our publisher to make the best decision on how to sell that game. We’ve done everything we could to keep this stuff as open to choice as possible and despite how it may look to some, there isn’t anything here that forces people to spend more money than they are comfortable with. We feel like all of the Evolve bundles that 2K announced just offer people choices, and having choices isn’t a bad thing.”