Developer Turtle Rock has already made a massive change to the core of Evolve’s gameplay, and the 4v1 multiplayer game is still scheduled to release in 2014.

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The new upgrade screen for Goliath.

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When we first played Evolve, the Left 4 Dead team’s next big thing was so pristine and polished that I would have believed it were ready for launch.Now, the basis of its character progression has been uprooted — and I don’t know yet if it’s for the better.Goliath, the dino-gorilla brute you may have seen, used to work like this:Before a match, you’d select two powers. When Goliath ate enough wildlife to evolve, it would unlock a new ability. By the time you reached your final form, you’d have all four powers — pounce, fire-breath, rock-throw, and charge.It was simple, clean, and easy to understand. As a Hunter trying to track and kill Goliath, I knew I was in trouble when it evolved because it unlocked one of two skills I didn’t see it use yet. As Goliath, I was working toward completion.Now, Goliath begins each match with three skill points, which Monster players can invest in three different skills, boost a single skill to its maximum potential, or mix it up somewhere in between. Each time you evolve, you earn three more points. By the end, you’ve unlocked enough to access all four abilities or max out a couple of them — but never to max out everything. You will always come up short somewhere.Each upgrade increases an ability’s strength by 15-25%, a 2K representative told me. That’s still expected to change, but it seems this new system is the set-in-stone future for Evolve’s Monster classes.With Goliath, I prefer causing chaos from a distance before closing the gap, and then getting away. Fire breath, for me, has little purpose. Focusing on giving my rock-throw, charge, and pounce their maximum values became my new focus, at the expense of unlocking fire breath at all. It felt odd not having everything unlocked, but I enjoyed the personal struggle of sacrificing something — strength or skills — to better suit what I wanted to do.As Evolve changes between playable demos, it’s clear that Turtle Rock is still figuring out what it’s created — and it’s adapting for what appears to be the better. My fear is that empowering a smaller number of skills could lead to overpowered Monsters and a disruptive imbalance long-term, but in my limited exposure to decimating Hunter teams, Evolve is on its way to solving those problems.In a short period of time, we’ve seen the developer restrict players’ abilities to have every skill maxed-out for the Monster — thus separating it from the Hunter player team. Monsters change, grow, and have progression. Hunters don’t, forcing them to outfit their team accordingly ahead of time while the Monster improvises along the way.Hopefully, this is for the better.

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Mitch Dyer is an associate editor at IGN. He's trying to read 50 books in 2014. These are the 50 . Talk to Mitch about books and other stuff on Twitter at @MitchyD and subscribe to MitchyD on Twitch