Post Script
How Crucible was forged, and what it tells us about the final game
When Amazon barged its way into game development in 2014 with the $970 million acquisition of Twitch, the stated plan was to produce medium-sized games, with medium-sized teams, in 18 months or less. It’s a claim that over five years later, as Crucible becomes the first proper Amazon Game Studios title to see the light of day (sorry, The Grand Tour Game, but you simply don’t count) falls somewhere between ‘slightly naïve’ and ‘outright hilarious’. It probably contributed, however, to Amazon showing off Crucible earlier than it otherwise might have. And looking back makes for a fascinating – and illuminating – comparison.
Crucible was first announced at TwitchCon 2016, alongside MOBA-ish sports game Breakaway (since deceased) and New World, an MMO due this August. Watching the reveal footage now, taken from a point when the game existed mostly as concept art, you can see flashes of the Crucible that exists today, but it’s selling a very different proposition: a 12-player shooter where the aim was to be the last person standing. The MOBA elements were there from the beginning, with promises of a dangerous alien world, but what this early draft most resembles is a proto-battle royale, a few months before PUBG came along and reinvented the online shooter in its image.
This version of the game survives more or less intact in the form of Alpha Hunters, complete with one of the big gimmicks promised in those early days: the ability to partner with another player, then break that alliance to take the win for yourself. The feature’s inclusion in the final game seems odd if you don’t know this history – it’s poorly-explained, doesn’t really fit with the pace of Crucible’s combat, and we never once see it used – but as a vestigial remnant of the game’s origins, it suddenly makes more sense.
The second gimmick, however, is absent: a 13th player who would have gamemaster-style control over events, and act as a conduit to the presumed audience. There’s no equivalent in the final game, but again, if you know what you’re looking for, keen eyes will spot traces of the original concept poking through. The events that would have presumably been triggered by this 13th player are still present, shuffled and deployed onto the map at random. You might suddenly face a pocket of hostile alien creatures, or an extra control point that boosts damage or turns all the harvesters on the map to your colour.
Given Amazon’s ownership of Twitch, the thinking behind this gamemaster feature was always fairly transparent. It’s a concept that was picked up pretty much wholesale by The Darwin Project, another odd evolutionary offshoot of the battle royale. It hasn’t worked for that game in terms of buying it a place in the streaming conversation, but perhaps throwing the weight of the actual streaming platform behind the game might have improved its chances.
In lieu of any streamer-specific features, Amazon claims to have worked with the community throughout development to help guide its decisions and ensure the final product was honed to its wants and needs. And indeed, the game’s credits list around 300 screen names of streamers, pro gamers, content creators and, for whatever reason, Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield.
But whether this approach has curried Crucible any favour with streamers remains to be seen. A week from release, we struggle to find a Twitch channel streaming the game, and total viewer numbers lag somewhere behind Eve: Online and Detroit: Become Human. It’s a sad thing to have to report: in an ideal world, Crucible would attract a player base that would let it survive long enough to keep evolving, and give its best ideas a chance to blossom from the layers of the games it could have been along the way. Unfortunately, as Crucible should well know, out here it’s hunt or be hunted.