Lesson for Turtle Rock from Open Beta

Evolve, by Turtle Rock Studios is an upcoming multiplayer game that pits one monster against four hunters.

However, after four hours of development, one delay, a closed alpha, and an open beta, Turtle Rock went deep into finding a balance.

The "Big Alpha" and open beta played an important part in forming the game Evolve. Apart from allowing players feedback and extensive playtesting on a large scale, they also provided Turtle Rock with an expansive statistics, check out the infographic below.

," Chris Ashton, Evolve design director and Turtle Rock co-founder, told said "These numbers allowed us to recognize all these trends. And when we turned certain knobs, it showed us a reaction. We had four years to turn knobs the wrong way, only to come back and normalize things."

Take Evolve's closed alpha and flying Cthulu wizard, as an example as it was the first big playtest for the Kraken.

Now although Evolve's monsters are wide in range there can only be one per match. There will be 12 hunters, on the other hand, form teams of four, creating more possible combinations from game to game.

Ashton says "It's usually easier to make adjustments to the monsters. In order to balance a new hunter team, we pit people in the office up against the Goliath. He's kind of our control variable. And then we'll introduce the new hunter against Wraith and Kraken. It's all about having a control group, and we spend weeks and weeks with each tier of hunters."

And as stated by Turtle Rock, the statistics showed a balance in each character. There are three Assault characters designed to do the most damage, and secure the top three spots in total damage, Parnell, Markov and Hyde.

And on top of this, Turtle Rocks telemetry data even took the game's popularity from social media. And, Evolve has also accumulated more than 3.7 million views on YouTube in just a 5-day beta. There are about, 980,000 hours of Evolvethat was watched on Twitch, by more than 1.7 million people. When all is said and done, Evolve is four years in the making, and on Feb. 10, Turtle Rock will release it in full.

"At the end of the day, we're going to make it all work out," Ashton says. "If we had tried to do this game in two years, maybe it would have been a problem. But fortunately, we had four years to sort it out. People are starting to relax a little bit, but we're still a little nervous.

"Nobody knows how it's going to go with sales numbers, but we've focused on making a fun game, and we're excited for our baby to get out there."