Amazon's Crucible Loses Two Game Modes As Developer Shifts Gears
It isn't very controversial to say that Crucible isn't performing as well as Amazon hoped it would. The game arrived a little more than two weeks ago, and that it seems in the time since then, Relentless Studios – developer of Crucible and one of the companies under the Amazon Game Studios umbrella – has been listening to fan feedback. With that feedback in mind, Relentless has announced a number of changes that are coming to Crucible.
They're big ones too, because not only does Relentless say that it will begin implementing the features that players want to see, but it'll also be shutting down two of Crucible's three game modes. The Harvester Command and Alpha Hunters modes are both being shut down for the "foreseeable future," leaving only Heart of the Hives as Crucible's sole playable mode.
"The community has rallied around Heart of the Hives in an amazing way," Relentless wrote in a blog post. "Moving forward, we'll be putting all of our efforts towards Heart of the Hives and what we can do to make that mode shine. Focusing on one mode allows us to refine the design of core systems without the compromises we needed to make to support three game modes."
Relentless also said that it will extend pre-season until a number of player-requested features have been implemented into the game. The studio plans to implement its new vision for the game in two phases, the first being where many of these features will be added. These features include "voice chat, a surrender option, a system to deal with AFK players ruining matches, an expanded ping system, and potentially some form of mini-map," though we'll also see it work on improving things like framerate and matchmaking.
The studio's plan for the second phase is a little more vague at this point, largely because it'll depend on the feedback Relentless receives in the first phase. Still, there are some features the developer already knows it wants to implement in phase 2, such as map changes to make it better suited for Heart of the Hives and adding support for custom games. We'll see what happens from here, but it looks like Relentless is aiming to change gears on Crucible very quickly.