The monster game Evolve lives again – The servers are online again

Evolve Screenshot 4

The monster game Evolve is back – at least a little bit. The servers are activated again. What’s behind it?

Evolve was one of the great pioneers of the asymmetrical game genre, with a really great idea: Four hunters fight against an almost overwhelming monster and have to bring it to its knees. Both hunters and monsters are played by humans, NPCs were basically not intended. On the one hand, this fulfilled the grandiose power fantasy of an overpowering beast, on the other hand, the intoxicating feeling of being able to defeat an enemy that was far too strong as a team.

But Evolve died an inglorious death, even shutting down the servers at the end of 2018. But now the game is played again. What’s going on there?

What happened to Evolve? Evolve started out as a promising AAA title, but had to lose numerous players shortly after launch. Slow updates and a botched DLC marketing campaign by the publishers quickly caused the game to fall out of favor. Even the switch to a “Free2Play” model, which was knitted with hot needles, could not save the game and so the lights went out after a short time.

But at least Evolve owners could still play. Even though most of the servers were shut down, it was still possible to play with others thanks to the peer-to-peer connection. At least until a while ago.

Fight monsters again – or be the monster. Now it’s working.

It’s not entirely clear what caused this, but a Steam update is suspected. But for a while, not even peer-to-peer connections were possible.

The buyers and fans went on the barricades. The players agreed on a Discord server with over 10,000 members, sent emails to the publisher 2K and asked for the servers to be reactivated. Apparently that was crowned with success.

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This is how the player numbers have developed: Like the colleagues from the GameStar report, the Evolve servers are suddenly active again. The news of the reactivated servers gave Evolve a small but significant increase in players.

In the past few months, a maximum of 43 people were online in the game at the same time, this peak even rose to a proud 828 players in the night from July 27th to July 28th (via steamcharts.com). That’s an increase of over 1,800%. The news is still spreading that Evolve can be played again, so it is quite conceivable that a few more players will be added in the next few days.

Evolve screenshot 2
Plow through the hunters once more as the Wraith…

How to play? This is currently only possible if you already own Evolve, as the game has been unlisted on Steam for a while. Only those who already have it in the library can also access the monster game. Then, however, both versions work, i.e. both “Evolve Stage 2”, i.e. the Free2Play variant, and “Evolve Legacy”, i.e. the original variant of the game, which can be downloaded via “Properties” and then “Betas” in the game library .

Some fans are hoping that Evolve will now generate enough attention to make it onto Steam’s store and be relevant once again. But this hope should be treated with caution.

A generally nice sign – because some have never really recovered from the death of Evolves.

Reference-mein-mmo.de