Amazon's Crucible Is A "Free-to-Play Team-Based Action Shooter," Launching In May

Back in 2016, Amazon Game Studios announced that it was working on three new online games: Breakaway, New World, and Crucible. The first saw a few public beta sessions before being shuttered, the second has been talked about and showcased in trailer-video form for a while, but there's been little said about Crucible, which originally sounded like it would be battle royale.

To catch you up: It's launching next month, it's free-to-play, and it's a sci-fi shooter that "borrows elements from 'battle arena games' like League of Legends and Dota 2 to give the typical shooter formula more strategic depth." News comes at you fast these days.

The New York Times talked with Mike Frazzini, Amazon's vice president for game services and studios, and Louis Castle, who manages Relentless Games, the Seattle-based studio that's developing the game. Crucible has been "redesigned many times since its inception in 2014, coming to focus on competitive online play and live-streaming on Twitch." As Castle put it, the game has been in development for so long and been through so many changes, thanks in part to Amazon having "the resources to let this new team fully gel and get a great expression out there."

Despite the impending launch -- which was originally slated for March 31 and then pushed back to April 14, and then pushed back again due to coronavirus/COVID-19 issues -- there's scant information about the game out in the wild. When it was initially revealed in September 2016, it was described (in the video below) as a "last one standing, third-person shooter, in which 12 hunters enter an alien, hostile world but only one emerges victorious" with the option to "make or break alliances on the fly." That sounds a little like The Cycle to me, and it's undoubtedly gone through many changes since, but since there's no subsite for the game on the AGS website, we'll just have to wait and see.

One solid -- and important -- piece of new-ish info we do have, via the game's official Twitter, is that Crucible will be free-to-play. Specifically, it's described as a "free-to-play team-based action shooter." So we'll be keeping track of it from here on at MMOBomb -- provided, of course, that Amazon releases any more info about it before its launch next month.

Oh, and the NYT article said that New World is also supposed to launch next month. It's likely that one or both of these games will be early access/beta/something else other than a full launch, but in any case, it's a little bizarre to take the two big games you've been working on for about half a decade and putting them both out for the public to consume at the same time. Good luck with that strategy.