Evolve's Deadly Dance with DLC

A lot has been made recently of the announcement that Evolve would have $60 worth of DLC on release. A lot more has also been made of the fact that the game had been cited by developers in the run up to release as a game “built with DLC in mind”. One only has to trawl the forums, Reddit or other gaming channels to see the plethora of angry fans spouting their discontent.

Now, I am put into a quandary. On the one hand I am a firm believer that DLC is a viable, yet thoroughly unnecessary practice in gaming. On the other, I bloody love Evolve. There seem to be two arguments rearing their heads: those decrying Evolve as everything wrong with modern gaming and those arguing that the DLC is only cosmetics.

The latter argument is not quite true. Though the majority of the DLC offered by 2K and Turtle Rock Studios are based around skins and other cosmetic items, four hunters are also purchasable DLC, along with the fourth monster. It is also known that further down the line, as more hunters and monsters are added, that they will be DLC too.

Though I have an objection to the proliferation of DLC as a feature of the gaming world, I must admit it hasn’t bothered me in the slightest in playing Evolve. I have no real interest in paying the money to make my monster slightly redder or paler, or in customising the colour of guns. Therefore the existence of the cosmetics (which you do not need to buy to see in-game) do not bother me. I spend far too much time concentrating on other things (like the 40ft monster hunting me down) to stop and have a really good look at how someone has changed to colour of their med gun.

Characters are a different matter, and I would have liked to have had the DLC hunters released with the game. Down the line the release of new hunters should be expected to be DLC, but to have content (extra content, not just cosmetics) locked away behind a paywall does irk me.

The question here is, though, should I let it spoil my enjoyment of the game? The answer is a firm no. It seems that Turtle Rock has trapped itself within a Catch-22 situation: before release people were decrying Evolve for its supposed awful replayability. “You’ll get bored” they said. “There’s not enough content”. In response to these claims Turtle Rock and 2K created a model which adds fresh content to the mix, albeit at a price, and have faced equally vehement criticism.

Perhaps this is simply the climate of the times that game studios have to face when releasing new titles. After the disappointments of other AAA releases in recent times, perhaps many gamers start up a game looking for things to hate. After all, Train Simulator has more than £1,000 worth of DLC that arrives as soon as the game launches. Total War: Rome II, which has also come under fire for its multiple DLC packs, launched with more than double the amount of factions and units that the 2004 original had, yet was lambasted for not providing enough playable content.

The bottom line is this: while playing Evolve’s “hunt” mode with random other players, at the end of another tense match, someone piped up over the voice chat:

“Wow that was amazing,” he said. “I almost didn’t buy this game but I’m so glad I did.”