It’s a sad day for Crucible fans, as Amazon Studios has announced that they will no longer be continuing the development of the team shooter. For the next few weeks, there will be a final playtest and “community celebration” for Crucible.
After that, the studio will disable the game’s matchmaking mechanics. Then, on November 9 sometime at noon PT, the game’s servers will be officially shut down.
Understandably, Crucible’s final update post was somber. The team makes it clear how thankful they are for “the way that our fans have rallied around our efforts.” However, they also admit that they couldn’t see a “healthy, sustainable future” for the game.
That being said, Amazon Studios didn’t clarify why it was discontinuing Crucible. Previously, before the decision to shut it down, the developers explained why they were returning the title to a beta state. However, this final decision may indicate that the changes they’ve made in the beta state were not enough.
Here’s a bit of context about Crucible: it was released for the PC on May 20 with little to no advertising. As such, it’s not surprising that it didn’t hit off like they had probably hoped. Following the unsuccessful launch, the developers decided to return the game to a closed beta state.
During that time, the game was only seeing about 100 to 200 concurrent players and the studio said that they would focus the game’s development on feedback from the community.
Some of the features that the developers wanted to add to Crucible were voice chat, a surrender option, AFK detection, a better ping system, as well as a mini-map. They also said that they wanted to polish the game even more, although they weren’t very specific about that.
Last but not least, Relentless Studios also mentioned that they wanted to rebuild Crucible’s map to focus more on its Heart of the Hives game mode, which was notably the most popular game mode in the title.
That being said, some of these planned features were already added to the game, such as voice chat, the option to surrender, AFK detection, a mini-map, and a lot more. Even though fans will be saying goodbye to the free-to-play multiplayer shooter soon, the developers are still working hard.
In fact, the Crucible team plans to add one last thing before the servers officially get shut down, and that’s custom games. After disabling matchmaking and once the last community celebration is over, custom matches will remain until the servers get closed.
On another note, Crucible’s development team will be moved to the other ongoing projects Amazon Games may have. The published announcement specifically mentioned New World, an MMO title by Amazon that’s currently in the works and is set to release by 2021.
Amazon has other games too, such as a Lord of the Rings MMO that’s also under development, although the announcement didn’t mention that title. In any case, it’s a relief to know that the studio won’t be laying off employees.
At the moment, Crucible is still in closed beta for the PC, but more information regarding the final playtest should be released soon.
