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 thirdperson 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 firstperson 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, whose fantastical setting allows Creative Assembly to clearly distinguish each faction. Or, indeed, the roster of a Street Fighter game, where characters’ different specialisms are expressed through input styles (think of Ryu’s quarter-circles versus Guile’s charge moves) and one-off mechanics (such as SF6’s Jamie, able to power up his moves by pausing to drink from a flask). This might be thought of as a kind of second-order style of asymmetry, however – one where all players share most of the same design essentials, but given their own flavour depending on their chosen character.
Designing for monsters, however, was an entirely different kettle of fish. “You have different expectations, there are different animation requirements, movement requirements – there’s quite a bit of consideration between the two
