During IGN’s first hands-on with Turtle Rock’s Evolve , I couldn’t help but draw parallels to Dota 2, League of Legends, and other MOBA influences. Characters have unique skills, complex gameplay relationships with each other that breed different strategies, and distinct roles within pre-defined classes.

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“ If you can lose before the game starts, we’ve made a mistake.

This is, of course, by design.“We realized from Dota, when you see this character, you understand what that character is capable of,” said Chris Ashton, design director and co-founder at Turtle Rock. “There’s still a whole s**t-ton of player skill involved, but that’s a huge understanding.”In the instance of the Medic class , there are numerous variants of the same general role. Some are assault, some are stealthy, but they’re always healing. “If you pick the one that’s stealthy, I know what you’re going to do, to some degree, and I know as a teammate how to play off of that,” Ashton explained. “That became huge in the characters. It meant, too, later on, if we want to add more characters, it’s a very nice package.”This is the direct result of early design problems in the inventory, which caused players to become overwhelmed by the amount of equippable weapons and gear.The development team needed to build an innate sense of cooperative play into its characters to combat Evolve’s potentially problematic variety. “If you take a medgun then I need to know that, because I don’t want to take a medgun, I want to do something else,” Ashton said. “Players can’t back themselves into a corner.”League of Legends and Dota 2 both present similar options. Each player's particular character has something that makes them vital to success. Evolve, more so than most MOBAs, makes it easier to guarantee everyone has the right tools, regardless of skill, that will benefit their team.“If you can make a bad decision in our game, if you can lose before the game starts, we’ve made a mistake. That’s where the characters came from.”

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