Crucible Developers to Remove Harvester Command and Alpha Hunters Modes

Crucible developer Relentless Studios has announced that they will be removing two of the game’s three playable modes a mere three weeks after the game’s launch.

“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,” reads a statement from Relentless Studios. “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 goes on to state that their long-term plan involves improving and refining the Heart of the Hives mode through various technical fixes and content updates. From there, they intend to “add additional systems and polish that will help elevate the Crucible experience.” The studio notes that the details of that latter phase will be based largely on player feedback.

As mentioned in that statement, this move means that Crucible‘s Harvester Command and Alpha Hunters modes will no longer be playable in the game once these changes go into effect. Harvester Command was a Battlefield-esque point capture mode that saw teams earn resources by controlling certain areas throughout the match, while Alpha Hunters was a somewhat intriguing battle royale mode that allowed you to form an alliance with other players who lost their teammates.

Heart of the Hives, meanwhile, is a combination PvP/PvE mode which sees competing teams battle an NPC monster who spawns on the map in order to expose their large glowing heart. Each of the teams then fights each other in order to be the first one to control the heart for an uninterrupted period of time.

On some level, the Crucible team’s decision to focus on that mode is hardly surprising. In our preview of the game, we noted that Heart of the Hives was the only mode that seemed like it was taking full advantage of the game’s unique concepts and characters. It always felt like the featured way to play the game, and it seems that it has been the mode that most Crucible players have gravitated towards.

On the other hand, this is all very much surprising. We imagine that the number of Crucible players who participated in Harvester Command and Alpha Hunters on a daily basis must have been shockingly low for them to remove so much content from such a new game. Truth be told, there’s still quite a lot of work to do if Crucible is going to be a hit for publisher Amazon and that company’s reinvigorated efforts to enter the gaming industry.