Amazon's Crucible is going back to the warehouse

Amazon’s Crucible is going back to the warehouse You probably don’t remember Crucible, the free-to-play team shooter from Amazon Game Studios, that came out on May 20th. It’s okay. Amazon wishes everyone would forget. By the few reviews available of it, the game was pretty bad. Even though it officially launched as a 1.0 release, and not as an early access title, most accounts characterized the game as a buggy, sloppy, unfinished mess that wasn’t all that interesting to play. “For the most part, your experience as a Crucible player will stay pretty much the same while we’re in beta.” Amazon is pulling the game from the public eye and putting it back into closed beta. If you’re interested in checking out what’s there, you have until tomorrow at 9AM Pacific to download the client. After that, the game will disappear from Steam‘s store and only people that played it prior to the cutoff will be able to continue playing, at least until the developers are ready to put it back in the harsh light of day. It’s all part of a previously announced plan to right a ship that came out of dry dock already listing to one side.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2020/06/30/amazons-crucible-is-going-back-to-the-warehouse/

Amazon should stick to selling books.

Ow, pretty harsh! I support them admitting they made a mistake and trying to fix it. Even though as they say “you only get one chance to make a first impression” and the impression of Crucible is pretty sour. However, retooling things Can work… it worked for the Final Fantasy MMO… Was it 14? I can never keep the names of those straight. That game came out, was pretty much universally panned, pulled back and retooled, re-released, and was really well received the second time. So it’s possible to bring a game back from the brink of death.

One review I read that made a lot of sense to me pointed out that Crucible seemed to throw in a number of game modes, seemingly trying to hit all of the popular game modes out there now (battle Royale, co-op, etc). But it didn’t implement any of them that well. So all they did was fragment the player base and give people a bunch of lackluster game modes. Theory was that if they had stuck to one game mode and made it really work well they would’ve had more of a positive impact. I thought that was a pretty good argument when I ran across it. Perhaps that’s what’s happening now?

Whatever they’re up to I wish them luck in improving it.