Turtle Rock’s online first-person shooter Evolve will be made free-to-play on PC following a “vigorous” overhaul.
Studio co-founders Chris Ashton and Phil Robb broke the news to fans on the Turtle Rock forums, expressing a desire to right some creative wrongs and bring players back.
Changes to to game include reworked hunter classes that will make teams less reliant on trappers and medics, map and UI improvements, performance boosts that decrease load times, stability tweaks, bug fixes, and completely reworked progression systems.
More important than those fixes, say Ashton and Robb, was the ability to get the game into the hands of players.
With that in mind, the duo revealed the sci-fi shooter will be hitting PC for free, starting with the release of today’s beta.
“[The beta will] allow us to hit our new server infrastructure really hard and we need your help testing,” wrote the pair.
“Stuff could break, and that’s our hope, because that will give us time to improve things as we go. We’ll parse out major beta revisions, updates and features over a period of weeks and month.
“This allows us to test new features and major changes to make our game more accessible and ever closer to the joy we saw when we first showed our baby to the world.”
Players who’ve already shelled out for the game, season passes, and additional DLC will be given special “founder” status in the free version, and will be able to access all the content they already own.
Those early adopters will also be rewarded with free gifts and special access, with the team promising to communicate with players more going forward.
There’s no word on how Turtle Rock plans to monetize the free version in the long-term. As it currently stands all unlockables such as monsters, hunters, skins, and perks can be purchased using Silver Keys, which can only be earned in-game.