Making a monster
In Evolve, you can choose to either play as the hunter or the hunted. Actually, that's not entirely true--it doesn't matter if you're on the team with the four "hunters," or if you're playing as one of the game's giant monsters they're fighting against. On either team you're always the hunter, and you're always the hunted.
He was made as a cross between King Kong and Godzilla
Phil Robb, Art Director at developer Turtle Rock, said that Goliath is Evolve's most straightforward monster (which, obviously, gets me pretty excited to see what the others might be). As for this one, though, Robb explained that the team approached making him the baseline, and building his abilities around that. "He does the kind of stuff you expect a 25 foot tall monster to do," he explained. "Ultimately Goliath is a cross between King Kong and Godzilla. He's somewhat reptilian, likes a good brawl, and breathes fire like Godzilla."
You were originally going to control him in first-person
Evolve is one of the few games that the two teams not only control totally different characters, but have totally different gameplay styles. The hunters are basically just playing Left 4 Dead, with first-person controls and all the bells and whistles you expect from a modern FPS. Being the monster, on the other hand, is like playing a third-person adventure game, but it wasn't always this way.
There's no in-game explanation for the origin of Goliath
Don't go into Evolve expecting to wander around irradiated ruins, attempting to decipher the origin of the monster while Bryan Cranston cries and his son fails to emote. If you want that, you'll need to watch Breaking Bad and the next Avengers movie--Evolve won't scratch that oddly specific itch. According to Robb, no one knows where the monsters like Goliath came from, and the game won't divulge that information.
Goliath was once named Scorpid, and he was a giant crab monster
Eventually, Goliath became the lovechild of King Kong and Godzilla, but at one point he was much more crustacean. His name was Scorpid, and he was a giant enemy crab. He had the same abilities as Goliath does (fire breathing, jumping, throwing rocks) but he was, yeah, a big crab. "As time went on and the look of our monsters started to develop and solidify, old Scorpid just wasn't cutting it," Robb explained.
The transformation from crab to reptile wasn't instant
So there's a meeting at Turtle Rock and someone says "the crab isn't working" and they decide to go with an ape/lizard and the next day there's Goliath, right? Wrong. The transition was more gradual. Robb explained that it was a multi-step process to turn Scorpid into Goliath. "We started working in the brutish gorilla like stance, while still keeping some of the armor plating of Scorpid. We moved away from the multi-eyed crab-like head, to a more anthropomorphic face, with a mouth and two eyes."
He changed color several times during development
As Goliath morphed and changed on his way to the giant grey lizard he ended up as, his color pallet was swapped around as well. The original version, as you might guess, was a crab-like pinkish brown. That eventually went away in favor of an albino monster with red accents, which evolved into the Goliath that exists today.
Evolutionary
There's still plenty that we don't know about Evolve, but getting a glimpse into the making of the monster definitely provides some well-appreciated context. Now, we need to find out the same information about every single hunter, all of the other monsters, and all of the wildlife of Evolve. That should get us plenty prepared for the game when it comes out later this year.
