It’s fair to say that some fans weren’t entirely impressed when developer Turtle Rock revealed the entirety of co-op monster hunter Evolve’s pre-launch DLC.
With the most expensive editions heading north of $90, fans were rather unhappy to see a huge amount of content gated off behind exclusive retailer deals and limited edition exclusives.
Studio co-founder Phil Robb popped up on the Turtle Rock forums yesterday to explain and justify the decision. He says it’s not true that access to already on-disc content will be restricted.
“A lot of folks seem to be under the impression that we’ve got all this content done and we shave off a hunk to sell separately,” he writes. “That just isn’t the case. When Evolve hits the shelves, none of the DLC will be done. Behemoth won’t be done. None of the planned DLC hunters or monsters will be done. The only exception to this might be some skins that were working on now while we wait for all the final stages of packaging, manufacturing etc. to finish.”
“As we got closer to finishing Evolve we ended up with designs for a bunch of monster and hunters that we just didn’t have the time and money to make. Instead of throw them all out, why not put together a budget to make them as DLC?”
Robb says that even fans who don’t fork out for the new content will benefit – although they won’t be able to play as DLC monsters and characters, they will be able to join games with those creatures in. This will avoid splitting the community.
“Ultimately,” Robb writes, “TRS makes the games, we don’t sell them…and as the developers we’ve done our best to make a game that people want to play. We then have to trust our publisher to make the best decision on how to sell that game.”
You can find a full rundown of the various bits of DLC available for pre-ordering Evolve here. It’s a bit of mess, isn’t it? I’ve no idea how you even go about deciding what version is right for you there. Evolve is set for release on February 10, 2015.
