Something strange is going on with Evolve Stage 2, the long-ago free-to-play 4v1 FPS from 2K Games. Four years after the servers were taken offline, effectively killing the game, they seem to be back – at least a little.
Left 4 Dead and Back 4 Blood developer Turtle Rock Studios originally released Evolve in early 2015, and unfortunately it didn’t go well. We enjoyed our time with it, but it didn’t catch fire with players, and just over a year later it went free to play as Evolve Stage 2. We also enjoyed that iteration, but it didn’t get any better, and 2K pulled the plug in June 2018. Peer-to-peer functionality remained for Legacy Evolve — 2K’s name for the original game after it released the free-to-play version — but Evolve Stage 2, which relied on dedicated servers, was shut down completely. The only thing left for players to do after the end of server support was to fight bots in training mode.
And so it remained until June of this year, when a relay server handling Legacy Evolve’s matchmaking went down, leaving the small but dedicated community on the Evolve Reunited 2.0 Discord unable to play together. They complained, 2K fixed the issue and the peer-to-peer functionality in Evolve was returned. But unexpectedly – and without explanation – Evolve Stage 2 also started working again.
“The servers are basically back on for Stage 2,” Discord admin Pinocchioh told me. “I have played it myself with several of my server members. This has not been possible since 2018.
“It’s not quite back in terms of” [in-game] store or ranked matchmaking, but we can search and host games again.”
Being thorough professionals ourselves, both Executive Editor Tyler Wilde and I launched Evolve Stage 2 on Steam in separate sessions, and sure enough, it works. It’s a bit clunky – we had to get around messages warning that the My2K service and ranked matchmaking are down – but after that we were both able to participate in matchmade games with other players against an AI-driven monster. The Evolve Stage 2 Arcade mode also seems to work.
The return of Evolve Stage 2 came without any announcement from 2K Games, and the game itself remains unlisted on Steam: it’s still there if you have a direct link, but it’s hidden from searches so no one accidentally stumbles upon it and starts playing. But the real mystery is that 2K says it hasn’t really changed anything at all: A rep confirmed that the original Evolve relay server, which allows players to find each other for peer-to-peer play, was down and fixed, but said the dedicated servers Stage 2 relies on – and which were shut down in 2018 – were not touched, remain offline, and certainly won’t come back.
So what actually happens here? Nobody seems to know. Some in the Evolve Discord theorize, perhaps not quite seriously, that a bored 2K engineer has gone rogue and flipped a switch somewhere in a server room without telling anyone. We wondered, after confirming that Evolve Stage 2 actually works, if the servers might have been there forever, but no one noticed until the Discord started talking about it.
It could also be that Evolve Stage 2 somehow piggybacks on Legacy Evolve’s relay server. Evolve Stage 2 on Steam includes a beta branch called “legacyevolve – The Original Evolve Product”. It’s completely separate and visibly different, but the local profile settings I made in Evolve Stage 2 carried over to Legacy Evolve after I installed it and started a match. I have no idea if Stage 2 could also take and use Evolve Legacy’s relay server data, but it doesn’t seem completely out of the question.
Whatever’s going on, the Evolve Discord community is trying to make the most of it. “In light of recent events, now is the best time for us to capitalize on our hopes of getting Evolve back on the Steam store,” the group said in an announcement earlier this week. “They listened to you that Legacy Evolve’s peer-to-peer feature wasn’t working, and they’ve even brought Stage 2 back online. Whether on purpose or by some freak accident, they all need this now noticed.”
It seems like a long shot, but while the raw numbers are still very small, Evolve Stage 2 is seeing an unprecedented increase in players: after literally years stuck in the double digits (presumably long-suffering fans trying to get their itch by playing with bots in training mode), the number of concurrent players rose to 1,192 earlier this week.
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