Video Games

Halfway through my hands-on time with Evolve, I could feel the disappointment of the 2K representative next to me. I was still getting the hang of the game, and my gigantic, flying Kraken had taken lots of damage from the four players trying to bring it down. Reading the rep’s face, a comeback seemed like a long shot.

But then, something clicked. I started using the Kraken’s powers more effectively, pinpointing my lightning blasts at exposed monster hunters, while keeping them on the defensive with a barrage of energy blasts from high in the air. I got better at dividing and conquering the hunters, and when one went down, he became bait as the other players tried to revive their fallen comrade. When the last monster hunter fell, I had only a sliver of health left, and my hands were shaking.

Evolve is strictly a multiplayer game, coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC this fall. Four players team up and control the hunters, each with their own special abilities, while a fifth player controls an oversized monster with a handful of super powers. Over the course of a match, the monster can feed on creatures and “evolve” into a more powerful form, so there’s an element of hide-and-seek as the monster tries to become better equipped for fighting the hunters.

It was hard to believe my outcome wasn’t scripted, or at least pushed toward a thrilling conclusion through unseen handicaps. But speaking to Chris Ashton, the game’s design director, he assured me that Evolve’s mechanics are pure, with no extra assistance for ailing players.

“In a racing game, sometimes they’ll make the guy in the back go faster,” Ashton said. “But when you’re a seriously competitive game, you don’t want to artificially give the losing team an advantage or Nerf the winning team at all.”

There are, however, some subtle forces at work. The trapper, for instance, needs lots of time to recharge its containment field, so every few minutes, the monster has a chance to get away and get back to feeding. Meanwhile, the Kraken’s flying ability takes longer to recharge when it’s not in combat, so it’s much easier for the hunters to eventually catch up. Ashton said this creates a roller coaster effect, similar to the Turtle Rock’s use of safe rooms in its previous series, Left 4 Dead.

“We ratchet everything up, and then we ratchet everything back down so you have time to recover,” he said.

Evolve’s sense of balance comes from more than three years of prototyping and testing. The game was bare bones at first, with just a melee attack for the monster and assault rifles for the hunters. As the developers layered on new abilities–such as healing powers for the medic, a containment field for the trapper class, and a slew of special powers for the monsters–they constantly had to rebalance.

The entire studio would play the game for an hour every day, and their matches fed into a telemetry system to help the developers figure out which characters were too weak, or too strong. So by the time 2K started showing Evolve at public and industry events, Ashton expected plenty of close matches.

“We’ve played the game so much that there aren’t really any surprises,” he said.

Still, he thinks this will change when Evolve launches on October 21, and players start learning all the game’s tricks. One of the advantages of the latest game consoles is that it’s much easier to push out updates, so Turtle Rock plans to keep tuning the mechanics long after the game comes out.

“We know that once we release, if we sell millions of copies in the first day, there’s going to be millions of man-hours played,” Ashton said, “And that’s more than we’ve put into the game.”

Batman’s rogue gallery is host to some of the most famous comic book villains of all time – Two-Face, Catwoman, The Joker – but video game developer Rocksteady’s final installment in the wildly successful Arkham trilogy is introducing a new villain: The Arkham Knight.

While prequels Arkham Asylum and Arkham City confined Batman to just parts of Gotham, Arkham Knight will allow players to explore all of the city. That much space calls for an extra villain — and a new set of wheels.

Bat-fans can now drive the Batmobile (as well as drones and tanks) in order to stop the Scarecrow and mysterious Arkham Knight from turning Gotham into rubble.

It feels like Halo.

I’d heard this even before laying hands on Destiny for the first time, and wondered if it was a lazy comparison.

But with Destiny’s competitive multiplayer (known as “Crucible”), the similarities to Halo are easy to notice. You’re still an armor-clad soldier with regenerating health that can absorb more than just a shot or two to the gut. The pace is slower compared to twitchy shooters like Call of Duty, allowing cat-and-mouse games to emerge as players chase each other around corners and into hidey holes. You’ve got a couple guns, some grenades and a mêlée attack, and you may need to use some combination of them to bring another player down.

I could use the same description for Halo, which Bungie worked on for over a decade before moving on to build Destiny under publisher Activision. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as Halo is one of the most revered first-person shooters of all time. But clearly, Bungie isn’t reinventing any basic mechanics. Instead, it’s offering a slightly different take on the style of shooter it created in 2000.

In a demo at E3, I played a couple rounds of Control, in which two teams tussle to maintain command of three zones. It’s the kind of mode you’ll find in lots of shooters, and the flow wasn’t much different here. The winning strategy, as always, is to pick a base and stick with it, finding a good vantage point to fend off foes as they approach. I would’ve happily played more if Activision let me.

While there are differences from Halo, they’re subtle. You can see how much health your opponents have, which takes some guesswork out of deciding your next move. In larger maps, you can summon a personal hovercraft, called a “Sparrow,” to help you zip to your objective. And instead of picking up weapons scattered around the map, you bring your own preset arsenal to the fight. (The occasional “heavy ammo” drop allows you to use your most powerful weapon, so the mad scramble for rocket launchers or chainguns is essentially intact.)

I may be understating what could be Destiny’s biggest distinguishing trait: In Halo, everyone has the same abilities and the same choices in weaponry, but in Destiny, every character is different, based entirely on the weapons, armor and special abilities they’ve unlocked in the main game. Halo was almost religious in making sure everyone fought on a level playing field–the ability to customize your loadout didn’t happen until Halo 4, which Bungie didn’t work on–but Destiny appears to take the opposite approach. Having the story mode influence the competitive multiplayer is something few games have attempted, and it’ll be interesting to see if Destiny can pull it off.

Still, I couldn’t get a sense of how this actually affected the game just from a short, standalone demo. In my brief experience, Destiny’s competitive multiplayer was easy to fall into, as if it was something I’d already spent hundreds of hours of my life playing. If Destiny’s character-building hook makes a meaningful difference, I think I’ll be okay with that.