Remember the multiplayer shooter Evolve? The one with hunters versus monsters? After four years, there are now surprisingly dedicated servers again.
You can expect some comebacks. For example, that Slayer”s “farewell tour” will probably not be the last. Or that Star Wars: Kotor will be reissued again, at some point. But that the shooter Evolve, of all things, would return from the eternal game hunting grounds is something no one would have thought. Except for a small, loyal community of fans who never gave up.
What was Evolve again?
The memory of the internet age is short, so let”s take a little trip down memory lane: Evolve was an asymmetrical multiplayer shooter with a very cool idea. A four-man squad competes together against a giant monster, all characters are controlled by players. The hunters have weapons and gadgets with them, the monster goes through development stages and becomes stronger and stronger.
But despite the actually exciting concept, Evolve, released in 2014, went under pretty quickly. The developers Turtle Rock Studios (Left 4 Dead) later cited balancing problems and too slow updates as reasons for the failure. Tester Sebastian Stange explains succinctly in the video what was going on:
But even the Free-2-Play Stage 2 conversion couldn”t save the project, and in September 2018 the lights went out for good. Well – or not as final as we thought after all.
An unexpected comeback
Until a few months ago, it was still possible to play together with friends via the “Evolve Legacy” version. But then suddenly that didn”t work either, presumably because of a Steam update – and fans joined forces to negotiate with publisher 2K. Via Discord servers with 10,000 members, they exchanged ideas and loudly demanded a revival of Evolve – with success! A few thousand emails later, the green light was given.
As of July 22, 2022, official dedicated peer-to-peer servers are once again available for Evolve Legacy as well as the free-to-play version Evolve Stage 2, which was discontinued in 2018; content such as Drop Crates (which contain skins) is also working again, according to the community. The word spread quickly, even giving Evolve a brief Twitch breakout with nearly 30,000 viewers.
In the meantime, this flash in the pan has already gone out again, but at least several hundred players are currently active on Steam, where there are usually only around 50. So if you want to take a look again, you should probably do it in the next few days while the small boom lasts. Of course, the fans also hope that enough people will now start playing Evolve again so that the game will be listed again on Steam and the like:
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Evolve is not the only shooter to drop low and eventually be abandoned. Just recently, for example, Titanfall disappeared from all shops, much to the regret of fans. But maybe it”s worth persisting?
