A developer who worked on Crucible – Amazon‘s earlier big hope before New World – has gone into detail about how the game should have been cancelled long before release.
Software development engineer, Jorge Rodriguez, worked for Amazon on Crucible. He used his expertise and knowledge to discuss in-depth why New World has been facing technical issues lately. He also looked at why Crucible potentially never stood a chance.
Story time about the history of New World’s networking architecture.
Some time before I joined Amazon in 2016, Amazon Games “bought” CryEngine. They then built two competing internal engines on top of it, one that would become Lumberyard, and one that the games teams used. https://t.co/anH79UuoZf
— J̴̫̻̆̽o̵͔̥̞͕͆r̷̜̪͋͆́ġ̸͇̈́̅̽͠e̷̤̼̩̓̽̾
(@cubesos) October 28, 2021
In the Twitter thread, Rodriguez explained that “Crucible should have been cancelled rather than rebuilt”. It originally used an offshoot of Crytek‘s CryEngine called GameCore for a time, with Rodriguez describing it as a “trash fire”.
Development was transferred to the better NovaNet code. However, that involved the team spending about a year and a half rebuilding the entire game. In that time, artists worked elsewhere and designers “had basically nothing to do for a year”, according to the developer.
Continuing the somewhat bleak story of development hell, Rodriguez explained that New World also faced the decision of moving to NovaNet too. He noted that New World had already rebuilt their game from scratch once. The game was originally meant to be more Rust-like than a regular MMO.
Rodriguez believes that Crucible “should have been cancelled rather than rebuilt”. When the game was launched, it was shut down a mere six months later.
Rodriguez suggests that some of the issues for Crucible and New World are down to inexperience. Amazon Game Studios originally “had no experience of the risks of choosing bad tech to build games off of”. He references Mike Frazzini, VP of games, stating that “his attitude was that we could invent our way out of the problems”. Rodriguez also calls Frazzini “clueless”.
In an interview with NME last week, Amazon vice president Christoph Hartmann admitted that the company did “exactly the wrong thing” with Crucible.
Recently, New World has lost over 500,000 players in its first month.
The post ‘Crucible’ developer talks game’s failings and why ‘New World’ is struggling appeared first on NME.
