Amazon is an absolute powerhouse, and there’s no doubt about it. An
American multinational conglomerate technology company, it focuses on
e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence.
It’s already considered to be one of the “Big Four” companies in technology today (along with Apple, Google, and Microsoft), but it’s not stopping there. In recent years, it’s been making colossal headway into numerous different industries with “Amazon Music”, “Amazon Prime Video”, and “Amazon Studios”. Now, it’s doing all it can to break into today’s competitive gaming industry with a bang!
Amazon Game Studios, which is yet another division of the parent company Amazon, is set to release its first big-budget title, “Crucible”, on May 20th. Crucible is a free-to-play online multiplayer game that will be accessible on the PC. It’s Amazon Game Studios’ first original video game, as the studio has focused mostly on tablet/mobile games released through its Android app store since the division’s launch back in 2012.
The game is a sci-fi third-person shooter that mixes together quite a few popular game designs. These include components of team shooters like Blizzard’s Overwatch, battle arena games like Valve’s Dota 2, and battle royale hits like Epic’s Fortnite and Respawn’s Apex Legends. Subsequently, the result has prospects of being an unbelievably enjoyable game, being a combination of the gaming industry’s most dominant competitive titles of the last five years! This approach could position Crucible at the forefront of the Twitch and E-Sports scene if it ends up taking off. But there’s always the possibility that it’ll end up being just a hot mess with something from everything but no recognizable identity of its own.
Crucible will feature a roster of different characters with specific abilities and three distinct game modes that each touch on competitive gaming’s biggest genres. The first mode, called “Heart Of The Hives”, will be a four-versus-four mode pitting two teams against AI-controlled enemies. The second mode, “Alpha Hunters”, will put eight teams of two against one another in a battle royale-style contest, with the last team standing declared the winner. And the last mode, “Harvester Command”, puts two teams of eight up against one another in a contest to collect “essence” and level up your characters mid-game. This mode seems to have taken some inspiration from Dota 2 and League Of Legends.
Based on what we’ve heard about it so far, Crucible seems to be quite similar to Riot Games’ new tactical shooter Valorant, which mixes Overwatch elements with the core design of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Both games are free-to-play, PC-only shooters (at least until console versions are announced) that will surely try to win over many streamers and pro players to capture a top viewership slot on Twitch, Crucible, though, may have multiple advantages over other such games. For instance, Crucible is created by the company that owns Twitch, which may offer it some marketing advantages. The current state of the world may also benefit the game at launch. People are stuck at home, social distancing, and while a game like Crucible may not receive much attention otherwise, similar online multiplayer games are currently surging in popularity due to their ability to connect people in a virtual environment (and give them the chance to have some fun)! Essentially, while we can’t make many assumptions about the game or its potential success as of now, I sure am eager to give it a spin post-launch!
