Update – November 1, 2021: Jorge Rodríguez has offered additional clarification around his comments on Twitter here. Original story follows.
Crucible was Amazon Game Studios’ big online hope before New World, but it ended up being cancelled less than six months after it was released. According to a developer behind the free-to-play third-person shooter, however, it should have been canned long before release.
Amazon’s F2P hero shooter Crucible was released in May 2020 to a less than impressive start, with our own review commenting on the removal of most of the game modes prior to release and how it’s more of a MOBA than a hero shooter – which wasn’t conveyed very well. Regardless, it was eventually pulled back to closed beta and finally shut down in November 2020.
Amazon said that it shut the game down so quickly because it “didn’t see a healthy, sustainable future ahead of Crucible”, but one developer on the project has claimed that its problems ran deeper than that – and that “Crucible should have been cancelled rather than rebuilt”, as it was during its extended development time.
Software development engineer Jorge Rodríguez worked for Amazon on Crucible and has recently gone into detail on Twitter about the various technical problems facing New World – while also providing insight into Crucible’s development. Apparently Crucible had been using an offshoot of Crytek’s CryEngine called GameCore for a time, which Rodríguez describes as a “trash fire”. The team was forced to move Crucible over to the better NovaNet code, which involved the developers spending “about a year and a half rebuilding the entire game” – and in Rodríguez’s opinion, it should’ve been canned there and then.
New World had already rebuilt their game from scratch once (it was originally less an MMO and more Rust-like) and by all rights Crucible should have been canceled rather than rebuilt. I mean, before it was actually canceled lol
— J̴̫̻̆̽o̵͔̥̞͕͆r̷̜̪͋͆́ġ̸͇̈́̅̽͠e̷̤̼̩̓̽̾ 🇨🇺 (@cubesos) October 28, 2021
Rodríguez goes on to detail a few possible reasons why Amazon’s current game New World – which he also worked on – is having so many software and networking problems right now. As for Crucible, its real problem was really that there were always plenty of great multiplayer games on PC already.