Evolve is due out next month and has been hailed as one of the most anticipated games of the year. With so many good tidings surrounding the game, no one would have guessed that Evolve developer Turtle Rock Studios would be facing so much controversy. Recently, pre-order offers and such have been made available for the game. Some of these incentives offer exclusive content that affects gameplay in other versions of the title in some pretty big ways. For instance, if you pre-order one version of the game, you'll get exclusive access to a specific alien; that alien won't be available in another iteration of Evolve.
Many gamers are making the argument that this detracts from the overarching experience, and they might be right. If Turtle Rock Studios wants to make pre-order incentives on such a grand scale, maybe they should have planned for them. At any rate, the studio has come out and addressed the situation:
“If we thought we could have finished all those monsters and hunters for ship we would have put them in the box … Hunters and monsters are a pretty big undertaking, they cost a lot of money and time to make. We’re hoping that once people see how much new hunters and monsters bring to the game that they’ll feel like they got their money’s worth.”
"Our number one rule for DLC is never split the community. Never. So we worked it out so that any DLC maps are free, any new game modes are free. Then, recognizing that not everyone wants to buy DLC, we made sure that even if you didn't purchase any of the paid content, you could still play with people who did!
"We then have to trust our publisher to make the best decision on how to sell that game," Robb says. "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."
"So if I buy a new monster or hunter, and you don't, we can still play together. You may not want to buy it, but your original purchase of the game will be enhanced by it anyway because you can still get into games with people who wanted to buy them. Hell, you can even set the DLC characters and monsters up as opponents in solo games."
You can read the statement at its original location, written by developer Phil Robb, here.
