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Crucible, the free to play hero shooter from Amazon Games, has been taken out of release owing to a lacklustre launch (via Polygon).
I played Crucible, and it was a solidly pedestrian experience for me. The map was littered with structures and populated with beasts, but there was very little grounding for these ideas. The heroes, though they had interesting mechanics, had their backstories hidden behind menus and they didn’t interact like the characters of Apex Legends or Overwatch. Matches tapped into the standard attack/defend, capture the point, and even a battle royale mode, but they felt like a slog. Dying and returning through a respawn point meant you had a very long walk til you reached the flashpoint of the fighting. And, there were mid-match conditional changes, but these weren’t explained at any point.
Anyway… Relentless Studios has announced that players must download the game before noon ET today before it is unreleased. While the game is on ice, the team will act on and further the development goals of Crucible. These are:
- Focusing on the Heart of the Hives mode by rolling back the Harvester Command and Alpha Hunters modes
- Voice chat
- A surrender option
- How to identify AFK players and prevent them from ruining matches
- An expanded ping system
- A mini map
- Improvements to framerate
- Effective hit feedback
- Improvements to matchmaking
- Tutorials for new players
There will be a closed beta in the near future for those players who are invested in Crucible. This will let Relentless Studios see where the roadmap is rolling out without a hitch, and what areas need extra attention.
We likely won’t know what will happen with Crucible for some time, after the beta has collected the data that Relentless Studios needs. But, I hope there’s some room for the game amongst the heavyweights in the genre. It seemed like there were the seeds of some interesting story events in the world, and the character designs were off-beat and intriguing.
