CRUCIBLE? more like Anvil...

CRUCIBLE? more like Anvil…

    You’re supposed to get crushed into tiny pieces, mixed with your environment, and spit out as something entirely different. This is the idea behind a crucible but the game falls short in living up to its name. Instead of a wild world of the volatile we got repetitiveness and predictability. It’s more like banging on iron to make a sword than smelting elements to form something altogether new; something more than the sum of the parts. Maybe not what the game promised, but what it insinuated, was randomness (or chaos) and a sense of surprise in a deadly atmosphere. It fell short. Here are some examples and alternatives that could add to the innovation the game purports to be about.

    (Not-so) Random Generation: When I first played Heart of the Hives I was confused. I got that creatures dropped essence, you level up and get stronger, and capture 3 hive hearts before your enemy does. The confusion came in the form of, “Wait, what just hit me?” Usually it was a spitter or lurker but who doesn’t remember their first time shooting a prickly purple blob wondering what it would do? This was great! There was “danger everywhere” as Anjonah would say.

        But after a good number of games I started to notice something. That spitter will always spawn at that location. It started to feel like I knew what “danger” was lurking around each corner. And here I was promised randomness and chaos, damnit! What I was expecting and what they potentially still could do was for each game to be entirely different, from the ground up, literally. Sometimes the spitter would pop up, sometimes there would be no spitter, and sometimes you’d see seven spitter pods and have to check if you had a med kit on you.

The same goes for other parts of the “macro” game. Add Harvesters F, G, and H but only have five harvesters spawn per match. What if stomper herds weren’t shown on the map or they wandered off in different directions at different speeds? Add more spawn points for the green, yellow, and pink goo-blobs but make their probability of spawning random. Same for med kits. This functionality already exists since amplifiers and objectives drop randomly.

That is where Amazon nailed it. I have to make a choice. If I go for that damage amp will I get there before they do, I mean I did just see three of them on the other side of the map, but where is their fourth? Will I have time to grab it and still go help my team at the hive? Or should I just swoop up this harvester along the way to make it a 3v4? These are the questions and deadly decisions that make Crucible fun; that make it altogether new.

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