After a rather lackluster marketing campaign, Amazon’s free-to-play team-based shooter Crucible released late last month to similarly disappointing reviews, with many panning the game’s lack of communication features and questionable core design choices. The team behind the title appear to agree with most of the feedback, as Amazon has announced that it will be removing two of Crucible’s game modes in order to better focus on its core systems.

In a recent statement made on the Crucible website, it is revealed that the team is dropping two of its three game modes to focus more on the third, Heart of the Hives. “The community has rallied around Heart of the Hives in an amazing way,” the post reads. “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.”

This does mean that we’ll be retiring Harvester Command and Alpha Hunters for the foreseeable future. We’ll be removing Alpha Hunters from the list of game modes soon, and Harvester Command once our new player experience has been improved.”

The Crucible team further state that their updated game direction will be split into two phases, with the first focusing squarely on re-iterating the game’s core systems in order to better support the newfound love for the Heart of the Hives mode. This will include implementing key features such as voice chat, a surrender option, a better ping system, and possible a mini-map.

The second phase of the rework will focus more on adding additional systems “that will help elevate the Crucible experience,” with the team specifically looking to “include custom tailoring the map for Heart of the Hives, improving the creatures in the world, adding support for custom games, and enhanced social system functionality.”

It’s nice to see the dev team working to implement some of what can be considered crucial elements for an online multiplayer shooter, though it begs wondering if it’s already too little, too late. Crucible is now available on PC.

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