The Art of Evolve is the perfect companion for fans of the game. Reading this beautiful book, put together through a collaboration between Turtle Rock Studios and Insight Edition, you get a much deeper look into the design process than you might expect. It's not just art here- interviews with developers and artists reveal many of the thoughtsbehind each and every character and environment.
The first thing that’s obvious is that the world of Evolve was designed first to look cool and different, with the reasoning behind the world provided later. Gaming truly is different than any other medium, because a game that isn’t fun to play isn’t worth all of the worldbuilding. See Destiny’s popularity for a backwards example of that.
So Turtle Rock designed the concept of the game first- a team of four hunters facing down one huge monster- and then tried to figure out just what was going on here.
The world Shear was originally supposed to be many different worlds with different climates but it was eventually condensed into one that contains different environments, much like our own.
There's actually a reason for that, though. Add in the bipedal, most familiar monstrosity first, and then you can get players to dive into the more unconventional alien life forms, as they’ve tried with the Kraken and Wraith.
This book is full of great stories and info like this, not to mention the incredible designs. If you’re a fan of Evolve and really want to dive more into the four-year long process of making it, as well as learn more about each of these fascinating characters that the actual game sadly doesn’t get into, The Art of Evolve is well worth purchasing.
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Note: This review was written by a PDF provided by the publisher, and thus we cannot talk about the quality of the pages of the book itself. The Art of Evolve is 192 pages and will run you $39.99 for a hardcover copy, although you can find it discounted on Amazon.
