Crucible Makes Serious Changes To Heart Of The Hives, But It's Just As Pretty As You Rememeber

It's update day for Crucible. Today's update is a pretty big one -- apparently the dev team has been busy working on all that stuff they told players about in June. The big item this go-round is a whole set of changes made to the Heart of the Hives. A good portion of the developer's efforts went into improving HotH with the team adjusting modes that were intended to work across all the original modes of the game and making versions specific to Heart of the Hives.

The map itself remains mostly unchanged, barring a few adjustments such as moving the center harvester to create a ring of harvesters, placing amplifier objectives in the center of the map, and removing the death fog from the outside of the map. This last item is more of aesthetic move than anything to do with gameplay.

Farming in Heart of the Hives has been adjusted to make things less random and confusing. Now creatures spawn in dedicated camps across the map with each camp being called out on the map and mini-map. When camps are defeated the camp icon disappears from the map, only reappearing when the camp has spawned again.

In addition, a new "Healing Stomper" creature has been added to the Stomper camps. This creature drops 600 Essence on death, double the normal amount.

Hives have also been made less random. Now, potential spawn points ring the map. They no longer remove nearby respawn points and respawn points now have shield bubbles that can only be penetrated by the team that owns them. These bubbles heal the owning team.

There are honestly a lot more details about these changes than what's listed above. And, that's only one portion of the patch notes. In addition to the Heart of the Hives rework, the notes also address floating in-game damage numbers -- because everyone loves seeing that, new player matchmaking, the game guide and tutorial, and more (a lot more).