DIVIDE AND CONQUER

Weighing up the delicate imbalance of asymmetrical multiplayer

- Niall O’DONOghue

Humans, to borrow a cliché from horror and sci-fi, are the real monsters. It was a phrase that Turtle Rock took to heart when developing Evolve, the studio’s first game after parting ways with Valve following the development of Left 4 Dead. Like that game, this 2015 creature feature had four players, in classic FPS mode, working together against a monstrous foe: a lone kaiju, piloted in third person view by a fifth player. This brought a marked change of pace for both sides – there’s no mistaking the difference between fighting an AI monster and one controlled by another human.

In some ways, Evolve was a high-water mark for asymmetrical design – an entire game built out of the principles of L4D’s Versus mode, which saw players controlling zombies in a first person perspective, coming from a major publisher, 2K. It was successful, too, shipping 2.5m copies in the first few months after release, with 2K declaring it a “key long-term franchise”.

Yet part of the reason it remains a high-water mark is that, today, asymmetry is firmly the exception rather than the rule in videogames – something that might be attributed to Evolve itself. In the end, 2K’s big plans never came to fruition, and the game abandoned its upfront cost in 2016, transitioning to a free-to-play model before being delisted in 2018.

Of course, this isn’t the only kind of asymmetry available to multiplayer designers. Take, for example, Total War: Warhammer